"Howl" Discussion Questions

"Usually during the composition, step by step, word by word and adjective by adjective, if it’s at all spontaneous, I don’t know whether it even makes sense sometimes. Sometimes I do know it makes complete sense, and I start crying. Because I realize I’m hitting some area which is absolutely true. And in that sense applicable universally, or understandable universally. In that sense able to survive through time—in that sense to be read by somebody and wept to, maybe, centuries later. In that sense prophecy, because it touches a common key . . . What prophecy actually is is not that you actually know that the bomb will fall in 1942. It’s that you know and feel something that somebody knows and feels in a hundred years. And maybe articulate it in a hint—a concrete way that they can pick up on in a hundred years." -Allen Ginsberg

According to Ginsberg and the film…

1) What is the problem with literature? In other words, what’s the major trouble that many would-be contemporary writers run into?

2) In the film, the prosecution says that the judge should take into account how the “average person” will respond to “Howl.” What’s the problem with this? 

3) During World War One, Siegfried Sassoon and John Owen were extremely celebrated war heroes who started writing gritty, straightforward poems about what life was really like on the front lines. As soon as they did so, they became controversial figures and the object of ridicule. Eventually, though, majority opinion shifted. Are there any other instances that you can think of in which the majority view on an issue changed, but only after a fight? 

4) “If you’re a foot fetishist, write about feet. If you’re a stock market freak, you can write about the rising sales curve erections of the Standard Oil chart.” What’s Ginsberg saying here? 

5) What does “Moloch,” an ancient deity associated with child sacrifices, seem to represent in “Howl”?

6) Ginsberg writes: “They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! … Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!” This seems to echo religious/philosophical views from Zen Buddhism (which states that our attachments to trivial things impedes our personal growth) and a passage from the Gospel of Thomas (one of many texts omitted from the canonized Bible) that says the following: “the Kingdom of God is inside of you, and it is outside of you… Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift a stone, and you will find me there.” How does this relate to the later, “holy holy holy” section of the poem? How does that conflict with traditional, conservative views of religion, the world, Heaven, etc?

7) The defense attorney equates parts of “Howl” to the Book of Job which (like Ecclesiastes) speaks openly of the suffering and despair of Man. According to the witness, Professor David Kirk (played in the film by Jeff Daniels), this is a bad comparison because (in Kirk’s view) Ginsberg is advocating the total destruction of society. Do you agree?

8) Did you notice any similarities among the trial witnesses who were either praising or deriding “Howl”?

9) Parallels are often drawn between “Howl” and a famous poem by 19^th century poet and abolitionist, Walt Whitman (especially Whitman's long poem, Song of Myself, which he kept expanding throughout his life). Ginsberg even addresses Whitman directly in his poem, A Supermarket in California. How are their styles similar and different? Quick aside: think of your writing as a conversation with the reader. You can also write poems or stories inspired by or even addressing other writers, other artists long gone.

Another quick aside: here's probably my favorite poem by Walt Whitman, called When I heard the learn'd astronomer (Whitman didn't title many of his poems so, for convenience, scholars later titled them by their first lines, something they also did with the poetry of Emily Dickinson).