Uno de los libros de poesía más espectaculares, me llena de emoción y no entiendo porque no había leído antes a este autor, quiero leer toda su obra.
Su conocimiento del abismo es genuina y sin pretensiones

Aullido es un poema impactante, los demás ya no tanto.

Boo hoo the plight of myself

and all my cool friends who are so brilliant here's some
literary references so you know

and disenfranchised

and we take drugs and wander about and dammit we're
iconoclasts and therefore don't have to write lines
that actually sound good or end poems before we overstate
our positions or anything because reading a poem should
feel like being stuck at bus stop with *that* dude

and so we Howl our dissatisfaction well at least as much
as you can even after you become a classic

no entendí nada, lo leí por jess mariano

Muddled, addled and overrated. In fact, any rating, even a single star or half-moon, is too much for this amateur-hour of a "poem." It might have played well when shouted out to a roomful of arrogant drunks, but on the page it droops, it teeters under the weight of all of those ungainly adjectivies and finally collapses in a fog of its own flatulance. I saw the best minds of my generation ignore this long, long limerick. Now, only nostalgists and know-naughts still cling to its pages of ill-repute. Why?

I need Jess Mariano to write in the margins for me

not a fan but jess mariano read it and so did i

Πολύ Δυνατό!! Ειδικα αν σκεφτεις οτι γράφτηκε το 55/56

Konečně dočteno. Po šesti měsících. Netuším co si myslím. Je to silné, je to syrové, je to upřímné. A je to bordel. Nebylo to naposledy co tuhle sbírku čtu, stálo to za to a vyvolalo to mnoho emocí

Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles !

This book has been sitting on my bookshelf for so long because I’ve always been afraid of diving into Ginsberg’s poetry. I had read “A Supermarket in California” in one of my university courses and I fell in love with his writing, but I feared that going into his poems without the guidance of a professor might be quite a difficult task. However, a few days ago I told myself that maybe I would find his poems accessible and easily approachable. I was slightly mistaken though. Yet, I do not regret picking up this book because every single minute I spent trying to figure out what was being said on each line was completely worth it.

I have found that if you read Ginsberg’s poems with intention and an open mind, it is very easy to connect with him even at a spiritual level. At least I resonated very deeply with most of the compositions in this collection. Besides, the spirit of his poetry is sometimes very similar to that of Whitman’s, who is one of my favourite writers of all time. Both of them celebrate the sacredness of the human soul and encourage us through their writings to seek the Divine in all things.

Still, Ginsberg’s poetry doesn’t always reflect the cheerful, flower-power mindset that he himself promoted in the 1960s. He was definitely not blind to the aspects of society that needed to be changed and he used his poetic skills to prompt us to rebellion both in the political and in the spiritual spheres. Disappointment and despair are present in many of his compositions (particularly in Howl), but he never forgets to imbue his lines with a touch of compassion, hope, and sometimes even humor.

His poetry rages against the abuses of the American government and encourages us to embrace non-conformity in the face of injustice. Many of his compositions deal with the effects of capitalism on the psyche, showing his sympathy with Marxism and his interest in the human mind. Ginsberg’s poetry also invites us to question our modern conceptions of sanity and madness in a very thought-provoking way. Other recurrent themes present in his work are heteronormativity, sexuality, and the need to break free from the constraints imposed on us by organized religion and societal standards.

Saying that Ginsberg was a visionary genius sounds utterly ignorant and I feel that any other qualifier will make me sound equally foolish because it is virtually impossible to describe him in a way that actually does justice to him and to his legacy; so I figured I should rely on the words of another poet to explain how I felt while reading this book. After doing a bit of research, I found that Richard Eberhart called “Howl” “a powerful work, cutting through to dynamic meaning…It is a howl against everything in our mechanistic civilization which kills the spirit…Its positive force and energy come from a redemptive quality of love.” Now that I have taken the time to read “Howl” (along with some of his most widely praised poems) I understand why Eberhart described it in such terms.

n  America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.n

I don't read materials grounded in my personally experienced locations if I can help it. Part of it is plenty of bad memories and sordid regrets. Other reasons lie in my state's even more incessant self-adulations in an already supremely egotistical country, the smaller proclaiming itself a balm in the oasis of the larger but both bought and paid for by those who love legalizing the hunting of certain sections of the population for sport. I've had my share of experiences of love and light in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and select areas up north of both and in between, but not in any way that resembles rat race hoards that both those cities attract as a headlight will freeze a deer, so any piece whose tone falls somewhere between effusively positive and glibly neutral is going to leave a sickening aftertaste that I already get enough of in contemporary politics pertaining to my rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. All of this was probably less solidified back in 2012 when I first committed to Ginsberg and his most iconoclastic composition, but I was still probably thinking more of how I'd actually been to City Lights Books than of queerhood, or anti-imperialism, or a certain breed of contemptuous rage that I recently found myself following through Invisible Man, Nausea, and this. In other words, I liked it far more than I thought I would, simply because the rhythms cooperate with my personal taste and certain sections, especially "America," resemble certain conversations I've had with my own soul when the choice swung between insomnia and alcoholism. I've likely come too late to this work for it to shift the course of my reading in any significant sense, but it was still a surprising pleasure to see a postscript of familiar locations such as San Jose and Berkeley and not be forced to wince at what came before it.

I'm not a worshipper at any altar of generational collectivism, or believe that Ginsburg became a historical figurehead out of anything but the sheer convenience of how well, when needed, his status quo could mask his humanity. However, the whole 'you'll outgrow it' I see in some reviews is more parts tedious shit than it is anything useful in the long run. So you cosplayed your community's breaking out of the stereotypical norms so long as it gave you a good time while college and its close knit experimentations made it convenient. While you went on to cash in your trust fund on a house and your parent's connections on a fulltime job with health insurance, some of us won a part of ourselves and will never be able to go back. Ginsberg's share in the matter is Jewishness across the second world war, mental illness in a parent, a more critical commitment to communism than most "adults" are willing to be capable of, and gayhood, the kind of combative combination that can either end in an early grave or some kind of breakthrough somewhere in the social fabric that we 21st century folks are still benefitting from. Still, if I hadn't read Goldman's Living My Life, Delany's The Motion of Light in Water, Whitehead's Jonny Appleseed, Siken's Crush, and a few other pieces here and there, I wouldn't have had as much patience or taken as much care as I did with these pieces. If you beg to differ, go for it. But if some erstwhile teacher of yours inculcated you with a vendetta against the "Beat Generation," you're just going to have to chill.

I'm rather interested in reading more Ginsberg, but other collections seem to fall firmly in the so-brief-you'll-miss-it and near 900 page behemoths that I doubt I'll have the motivation for anytime soon. Much of it I'm sure has been diluted through much passing through the public perception, but much of it has also likely suffered from certain types willfully turning the brains off when confronted with any kind of reading that doesn't align with their religion revolving around stock market trends and a diversified 401k. So, I'll have to add the name to the very cluttered backburner, chock full of epigraphs and allusions that will hopefully jostle whenever a promising work shows up at a cost effective venue. I wouldn't mind a biography either, especially if there's a good one out there that takes texts and realities for what they are and isn't afraid to write with post-Institut für Sexualwissenschaft realities (hearkening back all the way to 1933, by the way, never mind what the censors declaim) in view. Now that the ball is finally rolling on my moving to yet another part of California for the sake of a heretofore unrealized financial solvency, I feel somewhat ready to tackle the portion of my region's canon that seems most likely to lead to worthy breadcrumbs far from the straight and narrow. It's not the most noncontroversial field of writing to immerse oneself into, but the fact that it doesn't pretend to be otherwise makes it a whole lot easier.

n  My books piled up before me for my use
waiting in space where I placed them, they haven't disappeared, time's left its remnants and qualities for me to use—my words piled up, my texts, my manuscripts, my loves.n