"Howl'

"Suicide" dry-poiny etching

Allen Ginsberg's poem " Howl" always stayed with me. As an artist I was concerned with street imagery and how on the road, in the open, social issues seemed more true, honest, and real. The knowledge that violence, sex, drugs, and art could all coexist was an exciting tonic for a childhood spent in suburbia. The opening lines seared into my skull “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix …” I recognized in Ginsberg’s literary voice themes I was only beginning to define. In time a natural affinity for the poem grew to a collection of prints that were combined to create a box set of etchings.

The images below were constructed from thoughts and scenes realized while walking on my own. Some are from photographs I took, some from people I met, some from ideas that came to me, some were illustrations based on the lyrics in the work, and others from found photo’s that resonated the spirit of “Howl.”

"Shooting methadone" dry-point etching

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 machinery 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 were expelled from the academies for crazy &

publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

"Howl" dry-point etching

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-

ing their money in wastebaskets and listening

to the Terror through the wall, …

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in

Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their

torsos night after night

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-

cohol and cock and endless balls, …

"Angels" dry-point etching

who chained themselves to subways for the endless

ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine

until the noise of wheels and children brought

them down shuddering mouth-wracked and

battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance

in the drear light of Zoo,

who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's

floated out and sat through the stale beer after

noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack

of doom on the hydrogen jukebox, lost battalion of platonic

conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes

off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon,

yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts

and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks

and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars, …

"Reflection" dry-point etching

who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting

the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,

who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union

Square weeping and undressing while the sirens

of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed

down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,

who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked

and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,

who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight

in policecars for committing no crime but their

own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,

who howled on their knees in the subway and were

dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts, …

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose

gardens and the grass of public parks and

cemeteries scattering their semen freely to

whomever come who may,

"Three men in an Alley" dry-point etching

"Seattle" etching

who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad

stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these

poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy

to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls

in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'

rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with

gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet-

ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station

solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too, …

and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in

the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the

suffering of America's naked mind for love into

an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone

cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio

with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered

out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

Two "Untitled" drypoint etchings