The psalm is a form with religious and
prophetic resonances. The long line
seems to test the limits of breath. The
form is able to incorporate shorter units of thought (by using punctuation
within the line) and longer, more complex syntactical structures that give it
sometimes the feeling of accretion (meaning building through lists of evidence)
and sometimes a meandering, rambling, even unstable sense of its own
construction. Does this line approach a
point of ranting? And if it does: are
not the mad part prophet?
from
HOWL (Part I) by
Allen Ginsberg
For
Carl Solomon
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,
who passed through universities with radiant cool
eyes hallucinating Arkansas and
Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy
& publishing obscene odes on
the windows of the skull…
1955. - See more HERE
After
reading through the handouts given to you in class and googling to read the
first section of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (first
few lines above), write a 30+ line poem incorporating some or all the
strategies of the psalm form: its long lines, its anaphora (repeated beginning
words or phrases), its rolling, wave-like loose rhythm, its incorporation of
lists, its penchant for holding content that is mythic. Even Smart’s cat becomes a totemic creature
in this form.
Be big.
This form should empower you to speak of and to the world in sweeping
gestures. Step outside your smallness and
become Whitmanesque. Do not fear talking
to God, or your cat, or the universe—of pleading, ranting, or proclaiming in
grandiose language your ideas for what the world is, should, or could be—they
are part and heart of this tradition.
Let it flow, editing is for later. As Ginsberg famously insisted: First thought, best thought. This is the
place to open the floodgates of the soul.
Or, as Dear Uncle Walt said, “Do I
contradict myself? Very well, then I
contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”
Psalm on.
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