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 “angelheaded 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.
Most stunning is the essayists’ seeming indifference to the text itself. Those few who comb Ginsberg’s verse retrieve insights strangely similar and few: