The psalm is a form with religious and prophetic resonances. The long line seems to test the limits of breath. The form is able to incorporate shorter units of thought (by using punctuation within the line) and longer, more complex syntactical structures that give it sometimes the feeling of accretion (meaning building through lists of evidence) and sometimes a meandering, rambling, even unstable sense of its own construction. Does this line approach a point of ranting? And if it does: are not the mad part prophet?
from HOWL (Part I) by Allen Ginsberg
For Carl Solomon
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 tenement 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…
1955. - See more HERE
After reading through the handouts given to you in class (and the examples of ANAPHORA in MoP--on handout) and hitting the link to read the first section of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (first few lines above), write a 30+ line poem incorporating some or all the strategies of the psalm form: its long lines, its anaphora (repeated beginning words or phrases), its rolling, wave-like loose rhythm, its incorporation of lists, its penchant for holding content that is mythic. Even Smart’s cat becomes a totemic creature in this form.
Be big. This form should empower you to speak of and to the world in sweeping gestures. Step outside your smallness and become Whitmanesque. Do not fear talking to God, or your cat, or the universe—of pleading, ranting, or proclaiming in grandiose language your ideas for what the world is, should, or could be—they are part and heart of this tradition. Let it flow, editing is for later. As Ginsberg famously insisted: First thought, best thought. This is the place to open the floodgates of the soul.
Or, as Dear Uncle Walt said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”
Psalm on.
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