'Howl' and 'The Job'

This week we were asked to read ‘Howl’ by Allen Ginsberg. For the first time, I decided to wait until after the lecture to write anything about it for my blog, purely because I wanted to have a better understanding of it before I wrote this.

Firstly, I’m glad I now know something about this poem, as it is an important classic, so I feel like I should know about it! It has lead me to find out more about Beat Poetry, and the 50’s and 60’s in general. It seems strange that I already knew quite a bit about the history of this era, but didn’t really think about why the changes happened the way they did. The 50’s / 60’s were full of new discoveries - space exploration being hugely influential. More and more people’s minds were thinking beyond the conventional and they were questioning and objecting to their previous generations’ ways of thinking. LSD was being used to experience new things and think outside the box. People were thinking and acting freely about sex, music and language, and these people were the children that came from the end of the second world war.

Times were changing dramatically, and this meant that the way people wrote needed to change with it. ‘Howl’ is an important poem as it stated a debate as to what was acceptable to write about, and gave new ideas to how it could be written about, it essentially expanded creativity. Ginsberg writes a continuous flow of thoughts, feelings and impressions of what he sees happening around him. He tells it like it is. His attitude to what he sees and how he writes about it was the starting point for a revolution in writing.

Briefly looking at William Burroughs in ‘The Job’, the main thing that I took from this was his idea of images and words being used as an instrument of control. He believed that to get to the origin we must scrutinise the instrument itself. This ‘suspicious’ attitude towards words lead him to use his ‘cut-up’ technique, which would undermine the power structures that control language. By rearranging the words he was given on a page, he believed that he could start to understand what the message that these words were being used for really meant. It’s an interesting idea, and a fascinating attempt to looking beyond what we all accept as truth in the way we communicate, but if words are not an accurate tool to understanding the truth, I don’t think that randomly rearranging them is the answer. To me, I think that a whole new method of communicating would be needed, but I have no idea what that could be!