Allen Ginsberg was with me in Washington. Allen Ginsberg was with me in Washington where I lived briefly under the banner of white-block government buildings. Allen Ginsberg was with me in Washington where I lay awake for months in cold dormitories, possessed with visions of highway voyages across America. Allen Ginsberg was with me in Washington; I listened to his voice chant lines while I hurdled through metro tunnels, paced alongside the brick sprawl of Adam’s Morgan, and bicycled dangerously into Georgetown.
?
I must have listened to Howl 70 times that semester. His voice, monotone and clear, was broadcast the smoky interior of the famous Six Gallery in San Francisco, across 50 years of history and finally into the chambers of my earphones. Each line held such heartbreaking wisdom, insights that broke through the hypnotic smog of college cafeterias and faceless floormates. I felt in his words all the profound emotion and experience I lacked at nineteen, but yearned for with a brutal intensity. I trembled with every metaphor and sympathized with his delirium because, although my life had been easy, our battles-the battle to transcend a disturbed society-are largely the same.
?
Howl catalogued this struggle. Ginsberg wrote of forlorn intelligences who crawled through the streets of Greenwich Village, rejecting tradition and the hypnotizing whirlwind of capitalism with every furious stroke of their ink pen. He wrote of beat-down humans all trying to find the reality beneath the haze of contemporary culture, tripping toward salvation by means of drugs or philosophy or sex or meditation and eventually landing, almost broken, in the solace of each other’s intellects. He wrote of that possessive lust for freedom that gripped his senses and dragged him across the country-to Colorado, California, Mexico-into the wilderness and away from the alienating machine of 20th century America.
?
It was these that resuscitated the heart of the country into beating once again at fast syllables of words, who “blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lama lama sabbachthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the very last radio, with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies.”
?
In his words, I felt all my half-formed feelings solidify; his voice impacted me as it did countless others in whose souls existed simultaneously an exhaustive sense of isolation and an obsessive, overwhelming need to see and understand the world through something other than textbooks. Ginsberg voiced that need to shake the people around us, to cast into neighboring minds our own aggressive need for insight and experience. His revolution would not be one of violence, but one of poetry.

His poetry took me places, from Lower Manhattan’s Bowery Poetry Club to City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, sister venues amid the Beat-generation madness. I rushed out of my college skin to meet his words on the road somewhere, impatient in all my youth to understand and shape, as he did, the zeitgeist of my generation and to try to lead us out of our paralysis. I vaulted across Canal Street and heard his unparalleled gospel revolve in my head-he was with me in SoHo, where he prophesized our awakening from a media stupor, “electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes.”
?
There is hope in humanity, hope in our own transcendence. Back at home I still hear his voice echoing across the night. Even though they were alienated, the Beats had each other. I feel that, if anything, I have poetry-and Allen Ginsberg. He is with me in St. Louis. He woke me up before and shaped my adolescent consciousness. Fifty years after it was written, I feel in Howl the recurring prophesy of that unmistakable, unwavering front of liberation that sweeps through all of us when we open our eyes and purge the sticky particles of tradition from our blood. In my apartment under this Midwestern sky, I still hear him yell, “Oh victory, forget your underwear, we’re free!”