Yalp!

While Saturday’s snowfall may have reminded me of winter, Sunday’s lack of a voice reminded me of what that cold weather can do to me. I couldn’t speak when I woke up and had a scratch of sound late in the day. As I joked to my mom tonight (after she made me laugh), it’s true, in high pitch I sound like a woman who has smoked about 100 packs of Marlboro Reds. That’s only funny if you know me because I’ve never smoked in my life and never intend on bringing a cancer stick to my lips. But, I sound terrible.

In the last 48 hours I’ve had approximately 30 cups of lemongrass tea, untold numbers of water bottles and the only overwhelming change is me using the bathroom every hour and a half. The worst part of this is that I can’t really do my job very well without being on conference calls, or communicate well because I sound like an adolescent boy when my voice is semi-decent. Honestly, this is very frustrating. I love talking with my friends and colleagues-- it keeps me sane.

Losing this sense of speech for two days has been truly terrible and makes me wish I could scream. For that reason, I decided to go back to one of my favorites, Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” A few posts ago I highlighted Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a friend and contemporary of Ginsberg and City Lights publishing actually made “Howl” famous in print (since it was originally a performance piece).

Howl is too long to tackle in one post, so I’ve chosen one small poem by Ginsberg, a lesser known ballad that I happen to find lovely, and then one of my favorite parts of Howl. In an irony I learned only this evening, Ginsberg called Part I of Howl “a lament for the Lamb in America with instances of remarkable lamb-like youths…" I say this rings of irony because when I used to get sick my Nana always said “poor lamb,” and it’s become a family saying. I’m a grown-up now yet I still want to hear it and tell it to my family when they don’t feel well. It may seem far- fetched, but it was interesting that the very author used a lamb to talk about his poem called Howl, which is a sound associated with wolves. I’m not sure what this means. I can’t even speak. So let’s just read!

An Eastern Ballad

by Allen Ginsburg

I speak of love that comes to mind:
The moon is faithful, although blind;
She moves in thought she cannot speak.
Perfect care has made her bleak.

I never dreamed the sea so deep,
The earth so dark; so long my sleep,
I have become another child.
I wake to see the world go wild.

Howl

Part I

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 bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
ment roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall...