Archives - Literature: Page 22
Author: amparo enriquez (Fri Feb 03, 2006 3:01 am)
Title: Literature: Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the Negro street at dawn looking for an
angry fix,
angel headed 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…
Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”