I sit in the mind of the oak and hide in the rose, I know if any wake up, none but my death,
come to me bodies, come to me prophecies, come all foreboding, come spirits and visions,
I receive all, I’ll die of cancer, I enter the coffin forever, I close my eye, I disappear,
I fall on myself in winter snow, I roll in a great wheel through rain, I watch fuckers in convulsion,
car screech, furies groaning their basso music, memory fading in the brain, men imitating dogs,
I delight in a woman’s belly, youth stretching his breasts and thighs to sex, the cock sprung inward
gassing its seed on the lips of Yin, the beasts dance in Siam, they sing opera in Moscow,
my boys yearn at dusk on stoops, I enter New York, I play my jazz on a Chicago Harpsichord,
Love that bore me I bear back to my Origin with no loss, I float over the vomiter
thrilled with my deathlessness, thrilled with this endlessness I dice and bury,
come Poet shut up eat my word, and taste my mouth in your ear.
New York, 1960
Frontmatter from Original Editions
Original Dedication to Howl And Other Poems:
To—
Jack Kerouac, new Buddha of American prose, who spit forth intelligence into eleven books written in half the number of years (1951–1956) – On the Road, Visions of Neal, Dr Sax, Springtime Mary, The Subterraneans, San Francisco Blues, Some of the Dharma, Book of Dreams, Wake Up, Mexico City Blues, and Visions of Gerard – creating a spontaneous bop prosody and original classic literature. Several phrases and the title of Howl are taken from him.
William Seward Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, an endless novel which will drive everybody mad.
Neal Cassady, author of The First Third, an autobiography (1949) which enlightened Buddha.
All these books are published in Heaven.
Original Dedication to Kaddish and Other Poems:
Dedicated
to Peter Orlovsky
in
Paradise
‘Taste my mouth in your ear’
Original epigraph from Howl And Other Poems:
‘Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!’
Original epigraph from Kaddish and Other Poems:
‘– Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!’
Original author notes from Kaddish and Other Poems:
‘Magic Psalm’, ‘The Reply’ and ‘The End’ record visions experienced after drinking Ayahuasca, an Amazon spiritual potion. The message is: Widen the area of consciousness. – A. G.
Acknowledged, the established literary quarterlies of my day are bankrupt poetically thru their own hatred, dull ambition or loud-mouthed obtuseness. These poems were printed in Yugen, Combustion, Liberation, Beatitude, Playboy, Big Table, Evergreen Review, Jargon 31, New Directions 17, The Outsider, New Departures, Jabberwock (Sidewalk), Poetry London-NY and strangely the London Times Literary Supplement. Most of these publications started in the last half-decade, two were begun by youths who quit editing university magazines to avoid academic censorship.
– A. G. (Dated 1961)
THE BEGINNING
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PENGUIN CLASSICS
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
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Howl and Other Poems first published 1956
Kaddish and Other Poems first published 1961
Published in this joint edition in Penguin Classics 2009
Copyright © Allen Ginsberg, 1956, 1961
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-141-97646-4
Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems Page 10
