![]() “Beat” he may have been, but he wasn’t cool. But Howl is great, and much more of him is great too, and not always for the reasons people think. He was a poet of the chuck-it-all-in-and-see-if-it-works kind, and sometimes it didn’t work. Made me cry, it did-if only because it contained James Franco reading (very well) that exhilarated and sentimental and anguished and funny and tender poem. The other night I went to see Howl, the new film dramatising Allen Ginsberg’s 1955 poem and the subsequent obscenity trial. ![]() He was too good a poet not to recognise that “negro” and “angry” were better transposed, that “hysterical” has a rhythmic spring “mystical” lacks, and that “who dragged” fouls up the whole thing. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving mystical naked/ Who dragged themselves thru the angry streets at dawn looking for a negro fix.” Sounds nearly familiar, doesn’t it? Allen Ginsberg used to repeat the dictum “first thought, best thought,” but the lines above were his actual first thought, according to the draft facsimile of Howl. ![]()
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