Or has it? As the poet suggested, we still live in a vastly imperfect democracy, with impossibly lofty ideals that tend to mock reality; the flames are undoubtedly still licking the edges of the gowns. As the contributors to this half-century reassessment of Ginsberg's landmark work attest, ``Howl" has withstood the test of time in spite of its dated particulars -- the fixation on the bomb, the willful effrontery of the graphic gay imagery.
Formalists remain outraged by the manic rush of words, so many of them deliberately ugly, colloquial, ungrammatical , or all three . Moralists remain appalled by the wanton behavior of the narrator and his extended circle of cultural anarchists, ``the best minds of my generation."
The poem is as much a part of college (and high school) curricula as Freud and Malcolm X. It may well be, as Luc Sante suggests, ``the last poem to hit the world with the impact of news and grip it with the tenacity of a pop song."
Compiled by Jason Shinder, a poet, writing professor at Bennington College, and longtime assistant to Ginsberg, ``The Poem That Changed America" features essays by such noted and wide-ranging writers as Andrei Codrescu, Rick Moody, Marge Piercy , and Robert Pinsky. It covers a catalog of themes nearly as exhaustive as Ginsberg's famed, breathless litany of ``angelheaded hipsters" and their frantic quests ``for the ancient heavenly connection": from the poem's sexuality, spirituality, politics , and its many academically ``acceptable" influences to recollections of first, often life-changing, encounters with the work.
Ginsberg's extreme magnanimity is a recurring notion, from his gentle urging of a nervous young Village Voice reporter on her first assignment (at Jack Kerouac's funeral) to his affinity for people of all kinds.
