HOWL

It's the birthday of poet Allen Ginsberg in 1926 as well as the death day of Czech bizarro writer Franz Kafka two years earlier.

Kafka had written to his friend Max Brod: “Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me [...] in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread. [...] Yours, Franz Kafka.” But Brod had already told him that he would never destroy any of Kafka’s manuscripts — not even if Kafka himself told him to — and critics are skeptical about the sincerity of Kafka’s request. The three novels Kafka left behind — The Trial, Amerika, and The Castle — were all published by Brod, who made substantial changes to the manuscripts. He corrected Kafka’s odd spelling and punctuation, moved chapters and paragraphs around, and gave the works cleaner endings. It was not until the 1970s that the originals were translated into English as Kafka wrote them.

Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in Paterson. His father, Louis, was a poet and high school teacher; his mother, Naomi, was a communist and a paranoid schizophrenic. Naomi and Allen were very close; when she was in the grip of her delusions, he was the only one she trusted, and he often accompanied her to her therapy appointments. She spent much of his childhood institutionalized. Ginsberg spent eight months in a mental institution himself in the late 1940s, when he was arrested for harboring stolen goods; he chose to plead insanity.

He went to Columbia University, first intending to study law, but during his freshman year he met Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and William S. Burroughs. He later said, "I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs — when I was 17 — that I realized I was talking through an empty skull ... I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts."

Ginsberg left Columbia in 1948, traveled, and worked some odd jobs, and in 1954, he moved to San Francisco. He met poet Peter Orlovsky there; they fell in love and were partners until Ginsberg's death. In October 1955, Ginsberg read his poem "Howl" at the Six Gallery. The next day, bookstore owner and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti sent him a telegram quoting Emerson's letter to Whitman: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career." "Howl," which was written to be read aloud, revived oral poetry. Ginsberg said that it, along with the rest of his work, was autobiographical, and that at its core was his pain at dealing with his mother's schizophrenia.

His mother died in 1956; two days later, he received a letter from her in the mail, in which she had written, "The key is in the window, the key is in the sunlight at the window — I have the key — Get married Allen don't take drugs — the key is in the bars, in the sunlight in the window." He had wanted to have a kaddish — the Jewish mourners' prayer — recited at her funeral, but there weren't enough Jewish men present, so he wrote his poem "Kaddish" (1961) in reparation:

Toward education marriage nervous breakdown, operation, teaching school, and learning to be mad, in a dream — what is this life?

Toward the Key in the window — and the great Key lays its head of light on top of
Manhattan, and over the floor, and lays down on the sidewalk — in a single vast
beam, moving, as I walk down First toward the Yiddish Theater — and the place of
poverty
you knew, and I know, but without caring now [...]

He said, "Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does."