Word: howling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Night, the hour of poets, on a windy street in the part of New York City where academe meets Harlem. Outside a nondescript building, a man calls to an acquaintance. The second replies, "Allen Ginsberg reading Howl? It's tempting, but . . ." He walks...
...hour late, Poet Anne Waldman rises to introduce the aging enfant terrible, now 55. She arouses the crowd to nostalgia for dissent with the code language of the antiEstablishment. She describes Ginsberg as a product of "postwar materialist paranoid doldrums." She proclaims, to the audience's laughter, that Howl was "written while Allen was living on unemployment compensation...
...last Ginsberg is ready to stand and perform, as he has at coffeehouses and on campuses since the late 1950s. Howl begins with one of the bitterest and best-known lines in American poetry: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked...
...once again marching against war. On campuses there are teach-ins about the threat of nuclear holocaust. But this night, at this Columbia campus, sartorially and spiritually the most volatile and un-Ivy of the Ivy League, Allen Ginsberg is chatting, singing, wearing a necktie and making his howl a thigh-slapping hoot. His last words are prophetic, but not in the stirring way of the years gone by. He plays a worn squeeze-box and sings: "Meditate on emptiness, 'cause that's where you're going...
...AUDIENCE FOR this movie, like the crowd that showed up at Blue Lagoon, seems about equally divided between young folks, who howl at the dialogue, and middleaged women, the sort who look as if they frequent the Gothic Books section of their local drugstore, and who sit in awed silence, except for one matron in front of me, who yelled serveral times for the hooting teens to shut up. These plain women believe in the movie, in its fantasy look at beautiful young girls. And they obviously approve of its moral message, which is the centerpiece of this movie. They...