From Slate, by Stephen Burt
http://www.slate.com/id/2140162/
Is there a Howl for our own time, a cultural creation that explains,
excites, antagonizes, and polarizes a wide swath of America? It could not be
a poem. Recent poets and poems have become notorious (Amiri Baraka's
"Somebody Blew Up America"), or widely popular ("When I am an old woman I
shall wear purple"), or critically acclaimed, but no poem has accomplished
all three at once, nor blew open its moment, as Howl did. Films and records
can still attain succès de scandale ‹think of Kids ,Brokeback Mountain ,or
Slim Shady ‹but a poem on a page, or a book of poems, cannot. The current
head of the National Endowment for the Arts owes his prominence in part to a
book called Can Poetry Matter? ‹as if to say that it does not matter right
now.
"The poetry world," agrees Myles, "is ever more cursed with public events
that ask is poetry political, relevant, over, commercial, popular, etc." In
Howl , though, "it was all those things at once." Young readers encounter
Ginsberg's prophetic book, not as the culmination of any tradition, but just
as they encounter On the Road , as evidence of a nascent counterculture of
half a century ago. And yet to reread Howl , or to read Howl Fifty Years
Later , is to think of a time when poetry clearly mattered, when one book
inspired by Blake and Whitman and Apollinaire and Christopher Smart could
scare, disturb, charm, and transform many readers who haven't reacted that
way to any poem since.
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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