2. ART, IDEOLOGY, CRITICISM
MODES OF READING
HOWL: LECTURE 1
ART, IDEOLOGY, CRITICISM
PROFESSOR EMMA MASON

4. The 1957 ‘Howl’ trial: prosecuting attorney Ralph McIntosh

5. ‘You don’t understand the individual words taken out of their context
‘You don’t understand the individual words taken out of their context. You understand the whole impression that is being created You can no more translate [poetry] back into logical prose English than you can say what a surrealistic painting means in words, because it’s not prose. Poetry is a heightened form of language through the use of figurative language and rhythm, sometimes rhyme.’
– from transcript of trial, in Howl on Trial, ed. Bill Morgan and Nancy Peters

7. Founded by Ginsberg, Anne Walden and Chögyam Trungpa
Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa University, Colorado
Founded by Ginsberg, Anne Walden and Chögyam Trungpa

9. the last few generations in American poetry were much too dominated by aggression and egotism - and my own feeling, actually, was that we, as a group, as a community, were dealing with that problem, and were aware of it, and had been aware of it for a long time …

10. as we had trouble with [this], as yogis have had trouble with the misinterpretation of tantra, though our practice has not been so ancient in terms of a specific lineage...our practice as poets in America has not been so ancient and venerable and coherent …

11. There has been a funny kind of lineage in America, beginning with, at least, Henry David Thoreau, and maybe before, going through Walt Whitman, through many solitaries, like Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville, (who had a funny kind of bodhisattva national consciousness, and were attempting to introduce another mode of consciousness into America, not exactly a spiritual consciousness, but in the sense of listening and quiet and attention to the woods, and attention to the land itself)
- Ginsberg, lecture at Naropa 1970

15. Rob Nixon,
Slow Violence and the
Environmentalism
of the Poor (2013)

16. Joseph McCarthy
Republican US Senator
‘MCARTHYISM’

18. ‘life is essentially holy and should be so lived’

20. Trungpa Rinpoche:
You can think without thinking. There is a certain kind of intelligence connected with the totality that is more precise, but it is not verbal; it is not conceptualized at all. It does think in some sense, but it is not thinking in the ordinary sense.
Student:
Is it thinking without scheming?
Something more than that. It is thinking without scheming, but it is still something more than that. It is a self-existing intelligence of its own.
- Seminar with Rinpoche, 1972