Dear Gerard,
As promised, I finished my chores and poured a fresh cup of coffee to enjoy while I savored your new inspired work.
That was my error - I now have sinuses filled with coffee - I was trying desperately to not spit it all over the freshly laundered throw.

MARVELOUS AND WONDERFUL AND HAVE NOT THE GIFT OF WORDS TO ANNOINT YOU WITH KUDOS.

IT IS CERTAINLY A CLASSIC AND I WILL TREASURE AND SEND TO ALL.

I will add the link for your inspiration today:
Dinocrat's "Howl 2006"
http://www.dinocrat.com/archives/2006/03/23/howl-2006/#respond
Click here: Dinocrat » Blog Archive » Howl 2006

This is brilliant! thanks for the good message....

Wow, like WOW you can make with the words, baby.
You've expressed my feelings on so many points far better than I could in prose. That, daddy-o is poetry!

Rather; That, daddy-o, is poetry!

great one, thanks

There's a door, to a bookshop, on Columbus, just off Broadway, in San Francisco. It's a shrine, let's face it. Now, who has the balls to paste this thing right on it? Not me. I'd be lynched on the spot. Or stoned with copies of Daily Worker.

sheer absolute genius

The person who wrote this must have been taking hallucinogenic drugs. It's really sick!

"Speaking truth to power" to me means holding up a mirror to fat-cats, plutocrats, et al - and if you think they are all in one political party, then you are eating your side's shit and proclaiming it fine chocolate.

While I am conservative, my parents are that rarest of breeds, blue-collar liberals. Showed this to my Mom and she burst out laughing - in delight. Keep up the awesome work.

My mother always told me never to use bathroom language. It is a sign of gross immaturity.

BWAHAHAHAHAHA! Great! And "African-American streets" is a nice touch.

Bloody brilliant verbage brought on by the blind batty bleating bias of brainless Bush Deranged bigots.

Yes. Yes! Freedom from the aging boomers and their hyprocisy.

Gerard:

Maybe the best you have ever done. What does it feel like to have a burst of creative energy like that? I bet you sat down and wrote that without stopping - one long brrrreeeeaaatttthhh.

And you'd win the bet.

Yowsah!

That's gonna leave a mark!

Cheers - Dinah

That's one heck of a run-on sentence. :-)

Sorry to burst your bubble of creativity but the blogger Iowahawk already did something extremely similar over a year ago. It was a paean to Howard Dean's Iowa scream. Here is the link. It might be inadverent but this post is the blogging equivalent of plagarism.

Best that there ever was

same as it ever was
same as it ever was

But that was the Best That There Ever Was

Tip of the old hat to you sir

Well, John in Tokyo, since I never saw that post what you've just done is wrongfully accuse me of plagarism. There's no "equivalent " to plagarism, there just is and is not. If you are a decent human being you'll apologize and at the same time recognize that with 20 million blogs on the planet and one of the most parodied poems of all time, there just might be a bit of a parallel running at times, at all times.

If you wanted to spend about an hour going through my archives you'll see that I don't need to copy anybody. It is all I can do to keep up with the headful of ideas that is driving me insane and by the way its a shame the way they make me scrub the floor, I ain't...... Oh, wait a minute. Where have I seen that before?

OMG, this is totally priceless!

"aging hair-plugged hipsters burning for their ancient political connection to the White House through the machinations of moonbats,"

I know who that is. HAHA

I danced, envying Ballet Pacifica (if you lived in Laguna Beach, you know what I mean) yet knowing there was life beyond. Then, 9/11 happened. And nothing..nothing was the same.
I voted for a President the second time I never could have the first. I pray on my knees & many hours, for our troops, whose names I will never know...and I reach out in my heart... to those who have been just as shaken as I-and yet who are so torn. But we come this site----because there here is a sane voice we cannot deny....

Oh, that is so damned good! Thank you!

Excellent!

"There's a door, to a bookshop, on Columbus, just off Broadway, in San Francisco. It's a shrine, let's face it. Now, who has the balls to paste this thing right on it? Not me. I'd be lynched on the spot. Or stoned with copies of Daily Worker.

Posted by: Breaks not Beats at March 23, 2006 04:38 PM"

Yes!!! That's a great idea and I just might give it a try.

That was beautiful. I am sending it to everyone I know. Left and right and they will howl. Some with pain and some with glee.

Shame it's too long for a t-shirt. I think it would make a really fabulous embroidery sampler. How great would it be framed hanging over the hearth? Too bad I can't sew. Maybe I'll have to learn, just for this project. You've inspired me.

This is stunning, I have long been a fan of Howl and have heard Ginsberg read it. Bravo, well done.

Bill Kezar sez in gmail, but is flustered by the spam filter (Sorry Bill)

"I know what it takes to create this. I never could, but have tried. Brilliant, eloquent, and the most powerful of everything I have read of what you have written. Putting it in prose form gives it a tremendous power.

I am awestruck. I feel the same way looking at the paintings of the masters."

Wow.

Nearly perfect. Work in something about Ginsberg and the North American Man Boy Love Association in your next draft.

Brilliantly executed. And comprehensive, too.

Nice Work G!

50 years on Howl still roars.

Growl is already yesterday's reflux.

"...masters of war..."

Leave Bobby alone.

Otherwise, it's wonderful. It recaptures the 60's disgust for hypocrisy and shallowness, and reconfigures it for the New Establishment. Thanks.

dont quit your day job

Amen

Fantastic !

The first breath of fresh air I've breathed today.

Utter, complete, total, unmitigated, purified sh*t.

You wish you could touch Ginsberg; you wish you could produce something 1/32 as brilliant as any two lines in Howl. You can't, so you piss on Ginsberg's grave. But, alas, it's a weak stream, isn't it? Impotence will do that.

Don't even begin to flatter yourself that Ginsberg's turning in his grave, because believe me, he doesn't even know you exist. Ditto Kerouac, Burroughs, etc. They were arists; you're a salivating Weird Al hack, nothing more, nothing less.

James Joyce said art in the service of partisanship or commerce isn't art at all. Too true. WItness Growl.

Oh, and tanstaafl - you reference Vonnegut, yet gush over THIS travesty? Wow.

I "reference" Vonnegut ?

Such illiteracy, so little time...

Alas poor neo-nate Nathan... so little humor. It must be because of his downgraded political upbringing.

As a small data point, I would mention that I have touched Allen, albeit in but a friendly and admiring way.

I've even interviewed him for publication at the City Lights' office.

Bumped into him here and there, the Human Be-In, North Beach, New York.

Knew him as a man, not well, but some.

I think he'd understand and even get the joke. As some, evidently, do not.

Hey Hammerstein, we will speak in reverent respectful tones of Weird Al. He is an artist savant who posesses more genius than you or me or anyone we see regularly. As Vizzini might say, "Ever hear of Ginsburg, Kerouac, Burroughs? Morons."

By the way, the Lindsay Weir character of Freaks and Geeks fame said it best about Kerouac. To paraphrase, "he sucks".

I'm just saying, there is a wealth, a veritable wealth of litrachur with more value than the above drug-addled dead. Or so I hear.

Gerard,
I apologize for the hasty plagarism accusation. I accept your claim that you never saw Iowahawk's Howl/Howard Dean parody. Odd and random as it is, I can see how 2 people independently arrived at a similar idea, especially in your case, where you have actually met Allen Ginsburg. But I didn't get the joke about scrubbing the floor, head-full-of-ideas. What is that a reference too? I don't need to go through your archives. I've read your blog before and I enjoy it very much.

All the same, now that you are aware of it's existence, shouldn't you acknowledge the previous Howl-Blog-Parody with a link and an update and a short disclaimer?

P.S. Dear Nathan, don't you think Ginsburg is turning in his grave at the idea that the person indignantly defending his literary reputation and Sixties values (i.e., you) is an uptight, humorless, prig?

Yikes, another apology is in order for awful grammatical errors ('too' 'it's').

Oh, I cop to being a bit stroppy but it hasn't been a good week for plagerists, has it?

The floor, head full of ideas reference is to Bob Dylan's "Maggie's Farm" lyrics that can be found, as can all his lyrics, at bobdylan.com.

As for Iowahawk, I deeply admire him. He's much funnier, more consistently, than I will ever be and he did yeoman like work during the 2004 election campaign.

But as for linking to that parody.... well, if I started that it would never stop.

If you run the string Howl "Ginsberg" parody OR parodies through Google you get 19,600. It is a testament to the stature and impact of Howl that it was able to generate so many parodies. It also points, alas, to the deeply flawed nature of the poem no matter how famous it is. No matter, however, Ginsberg is well established and his Kaddish even reaches the level of greatness.

But in looking at some of the links of the Google search, I find that , alas, not even my title has not been done before.

A Dozen Parodies

Allen Ginsberg's (1926-1997) Howl, the major poem of the beat generation, inspired this collection of parodies called Growl. Like Donald Ogden Stewart's Parody Outline of History, Growl is an anthology of parodies of contemporary writing, this time of the beats such as Gregory Corso (1930-2001) and Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1919).

ABSOLUTE BRILLIANCE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My wife just asked me why I was crying.
I could only sputter, giggle and point at the screen. She rolled her eyes and left me to my mindless snickering.

Gerard. We're not worthy.

It made me ponder if things keep going as they are, there should be an Iliad: The Wrath Of Hillary.

Ouch!! It seems a little mean to me. But well done all the same.

When you finish delivering a rant like that the bartender says, "So I take it you want a double?"