“The roots of poetry are buried in proto-shamanism, which I suspect is of Upper Paleolithic antiquity. The shaman, as a novice, must rid himself of his given body, for a new and magical body, which is capable of mental travel. The main difference here between shamans, say, in 19th century Siberia, and poets in America today, is that shamans were central to their communities, they belonged in a way no American writer, even those with huge audiences, belong today. Whatever one must do to make the move from the given life to a creative one — well, that is up to each of us. The poetry scene today is flooded with young, talented, unoriginal writers who are trying to write significant poetry based on their given lives…”

From an Interview of Clayton Eshleman in Seattle Review, via Poetry Daily.

As a poet, I have been accused of OBE, by turns defined as out of body experience and overcome by events. Several people have said they don’t understand how a poet goes to the places where a poet goes; how we manage to attribute states of Being to situations, settings and states of mind that transcend their ordinary definition. I tend to think that transcendent reality is inherent in those things; it just takes someone willing to look at them sideways or through a refracted light to bring them out. And willing to transcribe the music that results.

As for the task of the poet to move from given life to a creative one, I think that’s only possible moment to moment. The spirit of the full time shaman is stone cold dead in the Western world; killed off, probably, by the television. Do you disagree?

Fifty years ago today, a San Francisco Municipal Court judge ruled that Allen Ginsberg’s Beat-era poem “Howl” was not obscene. Yet today, a New York public broadcasting station decided not to air the poem, fearing that the Federal Communications Commission will find it indecent and crush the network with crippling fines.

Free-speech advocates see tremendous irony in how Ginsberg’s epic poem – which lambastes the consumerism and conformism of the 1950s and heralds a budding American counterculture – is, half a century later, chilled by a federal government crackdown on the broadcasting of provocative language.

San Francisco Chronicle

I am not afraid. But I’m not going to post the whole thing. It’s long. Somebody may have renewed the copyright. So here’s a little, and you can Google the poem to read it all. It’s a great piece of work.

Unfortunately, Blogger can’t publish the line breaks and indents as Ginsberg intended.

HOWL

For Carl Solomon

I

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 machin-
ery 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,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
ment roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night …