I must admit I am not a poetry person. Now and again when I feel exceptionally nostalgic I would enjoy something from Silver Age Russian poetry.
The British modern poetry is completely unfamiliar territory for me. I don't think I have read anything more serious and more poetic than a newspaper pamphlet. The 'Howl' by Allen Ginsberg was my first dip into new English poetry. Well, I loved it! Very powerful, rich, thought provoking piece of writing.
The poem is divided into 3 parts with the 'Footnote' technically representing the fourth. The first part being one enormous sentence of endless string of vivid images, distressed feelings, hallucinogenic memories, real events disfigured by personal perception said without stop, on one desperate, perhaps last, breath certainly resembles a howl. In this depressing interlinked list of scrap metaphors Ginsberg analyses the time in its all complexity: social, political, cultural and spiritual. He paints the image of screwed lives of thinking individuals trying to find escape in alcohol, drugs and insanity:
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on
tenegement roof illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy and
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
[…]
who ate fire in paint hotels or drunk turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares,
alcohol and cock and endless balls
[…]
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding
instantaneous lobotomy
[…]
Through the prism of Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ we are presented with the paradox of 60s when modernist aspiration for technological efficiency is almost achieved. However, evolving, the concept of standardization and conformity penetrates the society, creating the rigid boundaries for thought and acts. This tragic irony of the modernistic thought, initially striving to get away from the similarity of the historical prototypes, but which has got out of the control, materializes in the character of Moloch, Philistine god to whom children are sacrificed, the men-created god of family hearth which turns against the very idea of family destroying its future, consuming children.
In the context of the ongoing ‘standardization’ of individual and attempts of many (described by Ginsberg) to resist this process Archigram, the avant-garde architectural group, selected the alternative tactic of the opposition to the system. Yet, again, past, this time the Modernist past itself, was rejected. Technology stayed one of the key aspects of their architecture: ‘You can roll out steel – any length. You can blow up a balloon – any size. You can mould plastic – any shape’ (David Green). However, flux and constant change was chosen as a method to juxtapose new architecture and its users to the standardized elements and processed of the 60s society and bureaucratic machine. Individuality was celebrated in the concept of the constructing the whole out of the parts (‘Plug in City’, ‘Walking City’, ‘ Blow-out village’, ‘Living Pod’).
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