Jason Shinder, editor: The Poem That Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later.(Book review)

Jason Shinder, editor The Poem That Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 288 pages, $30

Why did many writers-mainstream as well as countercultural--take a shine to "Howl," Allen Ginsberg's 1956 poem, which famously begins, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked"? This new collection of appreciations strives to uphold the importance of the poem that romanticized "angel-headed hipsters," battled Moloch, "whose blood is running money!," and otherwise deprecated the Establishment. For the undergraduate Rick Moody, at least, "Howl" offered an alternative to his main bugaboo:

 
   Fuck Robert Frost. Fuck stopping in woods 
   on a snowy evening. I hated Robert Frost. I 
   hated bucolic imagery. I hated the reverence 
   for nature, because what was nature anyhow 
   but subdivisions in the suburbs and malls and 
   nuclear power plants and petrochemical 
   everything. 

Moody's colossal misreading of Frost is overshadowed only by the shallowness of his aesthetic standards, eschewing anything ostensibly bourgeois or even scientific. I emphasize "ostensible": his is a mere attitudinal stance. While the virulence of Moody's contribution is not representative of this collection's essays, there is a self-conscious hipness throughout. When the relatively level-headed Billy Collins writes that "Howl" allowed him "to try to sound in his poems like a downtown homosexual Jewish beatnik intimate in the ways of pot and Benzedrine," he is slightly aware that his vicarious rebellion was ridiculous, yet he operates in the same style-worshipping genre as Moody.