Attend poetry readings at your local bookstores, libraries, and coffee houses, or—better yet—write and share your own poetry!This lithograph by Luis Jiménez evokes a well-known work by poet Allen Ginsberg.
April Is National Poetry Month
Attend poetry readings at your local bookstores, libraries, and coffee houses, or—better yet—write and share your own poetry!This lithograph by Luis Jiménez evokes a well-known work by poet Allen Ginsberg.
Despite censorship efforts, Ginsberg published "Howl" in 1956 to great acclaim. This excerpt gives sense of the poem, wherein the narrator catalogs disturbing observations of his contemporaries and society at large.
Howl
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,
angelheaded 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, …
Listen to Ginsberg read from "Howl" and learn more about censorship of the poem at our website Posters American Style.
Pictured: Luis Jiménez, born 1940, Howl, 1977, color lithograph on paper, 36 3/16 x 26 1/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the artist.