Allen Ginsberg 1995, at Georgian Court Q and A continues from here
Eric Wurmser: The class has been exposed to “Howl” but I think they’d like to hear what you have to say about it.
AG: Well, one thing I could do is read one section of “Howl”… second, which is modeled on the exaltation of the Shelley. It was a model for the Shelley, the Moloch section, which is not the best-known section, usually, it’s a sort of stereotype thing of “I saw the best minds of my generation” as a sort of stereotype, usually misunderstood, because there’s a good deal of irony in that, and I mean it isn’t “starving mystical naked” it’s “starving hysterical naked.” People don’t quite get that sometimes. So, the.. having given a catalog of people who freaked-out or were lost, or instances, specific instances, of breakdown, madness, tragedy, destruction, (comedy maybe? – there might be comedy in there). Then the question is what has caused this in America? What is the root of this? What is the condition that creates this sense of alienation and crack-up? Even to a point where nowadays we have a kind of crack-up of the entire nation…what (Jimmy) Carter got voted out of office for, naming the malaise, how the fundamentalists are taking up as…
[Allen senses audio problems at this point– “Is Somebody on top of the sound? Can somebody check the machinery? Somebody who knows anything about the machinery? Is there a sound person here? Is there a sound person here? That any better?”]
Okay, so the question is what’s the problem? It starts with naming something external, Moloch. You all know who Moloch is? The Canaanite god to whom children were sacrificed. Actually, originally this was a brass god with goat horns, sort of devilish in that way, seven furnaces in the belly, where children were sacrificed in brass. Leviticus says that “Thou shall not let thy seed pass through the black fire to Moloch”, not to sacrifice to Moloch. So it begins with an external being, divinity, Moloch, identified with hyper-technology, hyper-industrialization, but really resolves itself with escaping Moloch within the mind and then, I guess that’s the climatic statement of the entire poem, Moloch within the mind. Don’t let anybody ever tell you that … it’s outside …(but)… finally the focus is on those elements (of) consciousness as the crux, or site, of the problem…
[Beginning at approximately fifteen-and-three quarter minutes in on the tape (see – here) Allen reads Section II of Howl – (Hear an alternative reading from SFSU here ]
So I don’t know if you get…get the relationship of the vocal exuberance of the “Ode to the West Wind” or some of the Shelley poems and the structure of “Howl,” but the key again is to get enough breath, you know, to follow the breathing if you’re reading it aloud, to follow the punctuation so that you have enough breath so that you can build and build and build in terms of pitch of vowel, that builds musically, so, “What sphinx of cement and aluminum” all the way up to “monstrous bomb.” You know, whatever goes up. I guess, the most interesting line for a single breath is “Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs!” – Mo-loch whose/ sky-scrapers/ stand in the/ long streets like/ end/less Je-hov-ahs “ – da-da-da da-da-da da-da-da da-da da da-da – dactyl, dactylic lines, the line that Homer used, the reverse forms there, the rhythms are probably more like Greek, classic Greek rhythm, dithyrambic and choriambic rhythm than the simplistic rhythms that the new formalist conservatives would like to re-impose on poetry, the limited gambit of iambs and counter-scale trochees. So, it’s kind of interesting that you can build a kind of a kinetic or exuberant vocal line. I think that’s something that was suppressed or not featured in poetry. Williams exploded poetic form and, like the splitting of the atom, released a tremendous amount of energy by opening up the poetic form to the complete range of the human voice instead of a limited gambit that you might have in a sonnet or quatrain. And I think Kerouac extended it even further because his mind is so associational you know, improvisation. Kerouac is more writing the mind, Williams is writing American speech. Kerouac is writing American mind flow, so to speak, now then Cassady I think, intervened here and was the catalyst for Kerouac’s unimpeded mind flow.