“Expelled from the academies.”

September 11th, 2007 · 7 Comments

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;
Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection
to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.

Fastest cure to insanity? Read someone crazier than yourself.

Last night I sat down to read something to take the edge of my writer’s block, running injury, and general dissatisfaction with life. This, of course, meant I sat down and read Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. A perpetuation of my summer love for all things Beatnik, I suppose. Whatever the case, if ever there was fifteen minutes of reading in which words and sound and smell and need crashed into one other, this was, is, and will be it.

If you don’t want to pick it up, and you should, read it for yourself at here.

Warning. It’s not a Tuesday type of poem. You might want to wait until Friday and then let it tear you apart over the weekend.

Cheers to reading to save the soul…or breaking it.

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…

7 responses so far ↓

1 Travis Hayden // Sep 11, 2007 at 4:33 pm

Thank you for the kind words Sarah. Congratulations on your book and all. I’ll pick up a copy as soon as my queue lightens up a bit. Looking forward to reading more about your adventures and pangs of the published.

-Travis Hayden
2 Peter Orlovsky // Sep 11, 2007 at 4:42 pm

“Howl” was my favorite of Allen’s work.
3 M. Simon // Sep 12, 2007 at 9:09 am

I also liked “America”.

Best was A.G. reading his own poems.
4 Sarah Moffett // Sep 12, 2007 at 2:04 pm

Travis~best of luck in your own writing adventures.

Peter~Allen misses you.

M. Simon~absolutely concur. Do you know of any podcasts or other links to recordings of AG reading his poems?
5 Linda // Sep 12, 2007 at 8:50 pm

Thanks for the gift of HOWL. If I ever write a poem or paragraph as amazingly graphic and beautiful as what Ginsberg penned, I will die a satisfied woman. It made for tantalizing reading over dinner, chased with an equally tantalizing palate cleanser - the preface to GUM. Just arrived in the mail today…
6 Sarah Moffett // Sep 13, 2007 at 9:20 am

“Growing Up Moffett” and “Howl” mentioned in the same breath has 3 immediate affects:
1. I can die happy now.
2. My mother will bring me back long enough to kill me herself for that association.
3. I can die happy again.

Enjoy and let me know your thoughts.
7 A Catholic Pope, and Episcopal Harry Potter, and a Gay Dumbledore. // Oct 29, 2007 at 8:23 am

[…] on numerous banned-book lists. [As Allen Ginsberg once noted, the best thing that ever happened to Howl was that it was tried for obscenity.] Other less known believers than the Pope have also lodged […]

Sarah E. Moffett

Karma–what happens when you write a book about your family.