Howling After a Poem
A couple of years ago, in a CanLit class with Carolyn Smart, we had the choice to write an “After a Poem” for our final assignment. “After a Poem”s are rewrites of pre-existing poetry using the same words, but rearranging them, trying to retain the original word frequency, while also trying to keep the original feel. One of the authors we were studying, Helen Humphreys, made a bit of a name for herself by writing them.
I’d just found a really cool edition of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, so I took the second part of the eponymous poem, wrote out all the words and their frequencies (download the PDF if you’re interested), and came up with this (original follows):
(Howl!) After a Poem
A thousand years of soulless genius exists in these streets.
Generations of breakthroughs scream farewell to heaven;
dreaming about incomprehensible, unobtainable bullshit.
Endless stairways, invisible miracles, spectral cities;
my name longs for Moloch.
Without Him, there exists no aluminum, no ashcans, no smokestacks.
No congress to crucify.
Moloch stands laughing as bloody fingers illuminate the banks of war.
Stone flowers are my government. Oil is my poverty.
Frightened boys stand with sobbing men,
prisoners in the madhouse of invincible America.
Children dream of love, nightmares pure as granite.
Moloch in every apartment and
every suburban suicide.
Gone are the angels and demons of early religions.
Skyscrapers are the new treasure tombs—crossbone cities.
The new national machinery fingers the holy breast;
parks paved for endless buildings.
Mind your despair, cocksuckers!
Electricity is the new Sphinx!
Robots the new Jehovah!
Ecstasy the new flood!
Everywhere, bombs of epiphany are sexless skeletons,
running from consciousness,
carrying their cocks like visions of the Crown.
Their brains, blinded by the fog of wild abandon, scream at radios in solitude.
Moloch enters sorrow’s boat waving.
The ugliness of a loveless capital is ten lonely dollars for imagination.
Moloch is a cannibal dynamo
Eyes of fate light jailhouse cities.
The mad wake under the street, lifting love to the clouds.
Vast filth into crazed minds,
stunned bodies hallucinate vast highs.
All armies are animal,
all omens miracles.
- Matthew Gruman
Howl
II
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog!
Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks!
Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body!
Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! Spectral nations! invincible mad houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
- Allen Ginsberg
Moloch
In the Masoretic text the name is “Molech”; in the Septuagint “Moloch.” The earliest mention of Molech is in Lev. xviii. 21, where the Israelite is forbidden to sacrifice any of his children to Molech. Similarly, in Lev. xx. 2-5, it is enacted that a man who sacrifices his seed to Molech shall surely be put to death. Then, curiously, it is provided that he shall be cut off from the congregation. In I Kings xi. 7 it is said that Solomon built a high place for Molech in the mountain “that is before Jerusalem.” The same passage calls Molech an Ammonite deity. The Septuagint as quoted in the New Testament (Acts vii. 43) finds a reference to Moloch in Amos v. 26; but this is a doubtful passage. In II Kings xxiii. 10 it is stated that one of the practises to which Josiah put a stop by his reform was that of sacrificing children to Molech, and that the place where this form of worship had been practised was at Topheth, “in the valley of the children of Hinnom.” This statement is confirmed by Jer. xxxii. 35. From II Kings xxi. 6 it may be inferred that this worship was introduced during the reign of Manasseh. The impression left by an uncritical reading of these passages is that Molech-worship, with its rite of child-sacrifice, was introduced from Ammon during the seventh century B.C.
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