Readings from "Howl"

While reading the poem in class I felt somewhat ignorant. I felt that Howl was a hard poem to figure out. The man that wrote this poem was odd. He interviewed jazz musicians, psychiatric patients and drug addicts. He was expelled from Columbia University for writing profanities on a dorm room window. He was a bit crazy himself. So I suppose that this poem not only talks about a world gone to the dogs, but also about men falling into horrible habits that lead to worse and worse things.

I looked on some websites to find out how I should've read it during class and there were a few ideas of pronounciation, but I choose to do it with a jazz beat behind the words. I thought that it would be appropriate because the poem itself had to do with the 1940s and the jazz age. When I found out that this poem was a beacon in the "Beat Generation" it caught me off guard. I decided to look the entire poem up online and after reading it, I couldn't believe that "Howl" would affect so many people in either a positive or negative way.

Some of the cool aspects of the poem were his use of uncommon words/phrases to describe very common feelings among men. Words like: Mohammedan, El, angelheaded, and dynamo. I had to look up many of these words to find the meanings behind them. But the words fit the poem well.