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Showing posts with label anger. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anger. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 19, 2021
Sunday, October 20, 2013
ModPo 2013 #40 Angry Beat Oracle: On Ginsberg's "Howl"
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Image of Moloch from en.wikipedia.org. |
The link to the entire text of "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg is here.
Here's an excerpt with famous first lines:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
And here's a memorable line from the video discussion:
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head, -
Part II of "Howl" has a series of lines that begin with a brutal god's name.
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
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This poem was definitely in the Whitmanian tradition. After having gone over Whitman in Chapter 1, I've come to appreciate long tracts of poetry. Through the video discussion, I also got to distinguish the musicality and internal rhymes and alliterations of Ginsberg's poem. This was epic, a poem to define, or at least describe, a generation (and even beyond it).
This was an angry poem. The first lines are definitely angry: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness." The last lines that refer to Moloch, a god known for "demanding" child sacrifice, depicts cruel master who demands what is most precious. It's been known that Ginsberg was referring to Moloch as a metaphor for America...or at least the America/ American establishment that he was angry with. Even if this poem was written in 1956, I can see how this kind of America continues to anger its citizens (and those outside America). In the face of the government shutdown that just occurred and the huge biological footprint that America continues to make due to the unstoppable growth that is the nature of capitalism...this poem continues to be relevant. Wars and armed interventions still demand the lives of young American men even up to today. And the protests against war continue as well. You could call Ginsberg prophetic.
In the middle of this anger, there is that confessional stanza wherein the speaker/ poet addresses "you" (the reader), vulnerable and naked, incomprehensible but conforming to "the rhythm of thought of his naked and endless head." It is the voice of a poet that is encountering a different America from Whitman's, a far more cruel one and yet one that is full of beat-ific beauty.
All in all, what I take from Ginsberg is a poetry that is sprawling, unafraid in its anger, musical in its interruption of everyday discourse, a textual hemorrhage heralding the sixties of hippies, free love, drugs, protests and spiritual reawakenings. I'm glad to have read this (once-banned) poem. It gives voice to my own dissatisfactions with my country (now embroiled in corruption controversies---which we've all known about but could never pinpoint until now---and rocked by natural calamities like earthquakes in the South---and man-made ones like our city floods) and the kind of future my children will have.
Monday, April 15, 2013
NaPoWriMo#15: Yama
NaPoWriMo or National Poetry Writing Month, is an annual project in which participating poets attempt to write a poem a day for the month of April.
Yama
by Justine C. Tajonera
I'm not grim nor wrathful, contrary to popular belief.
I don't welcome ferrying you to the other side.
In your history and through your brief lives
I've relished least a massive flooding
at my door. I prefer peace and a moment-at-
a-time. I enjoy the stories on the boat.
When you come all at once, I don't quite hear
anything. And that's why I hate war just as much
as you. Walk with me. I'll take you to the other side.
Don't come running. And don't shun me, either.
I promise that I hold your children, bright with trust
and curious about my hands and hair, with care.
I love the most those who take my hands in theirs.
Walk with me. There are worse things to fear.
I am not one of them. I am not the end.
Yama
by Justine C. Tajonera
I'm not grim nor wrathful, contrary to popular belief.
I don't welcome ferrying you to the other side.
In your history and through your brief lives
I've relished least a massive flooding
at my door. I prefer peace and a moment-at-
a-time. I enjoy the stories on the boat.
When you come all at once, I don't quite hear
anything. And that's why I hate war just as much
as you. Walk with me. I'll take you to the other side.
Don't come running. And don't shun me, either.
I promise that I hold your children, bright with trust
and curious about my hands and hair, with care.
I love the most those who take my hands in theirs.
Walk with me. There are worse things to fear.
I am not one of them. I am not the end.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Delays
By Justine C. Tajonera
I am out of time,
sinking back,
blood boiling,
the lapse
expands in my mind
taking proportions
that it does not
deserve.
I face my panic,
my mounting
anger at the
injustice of
waiting
and I fill it
with the blueness
of generosity.
Compassion hardly
takes space.
It is easy and
malleable,
soft to the
touch and sweet
to the ear.
I fold myself
into a spiraled
conch shell
and wash all my noise
with the roar
of the ocean.
(Sept. 25, 2009)
I am out of time,
sinking back,
blood boiling,
the lapse
expands in my mind
taking proportions
that it does not
deserve.
I face my panic,
my mounting
anger at the
injustice of
waiting
and I fill it
with the blueness
of generosity.
Compassion hardly
takes space.
It is easy and
malleable,
soft to the
touch and sweet
to the ear.
I fold myself
into a spiraled
conch shell
and wash all my noise
with the roar
of the ocean.
(Sept. 25, 2009)
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