Howl

I read the poem as a teenager, and I've gradually been getting more interested in graphic novels, so when I saw a graphic novel version--with Ginsberg's involvement, so I knew it wouldn't be a horrible hack job--in Powell's recently I couldn't resist.

The poem is just as viciously powerful as when I first read it; though I can only imagine it would have had more impact when it was published, in 1956. The only detail that marks it as in any way dated is the repeated references to typewriters. The significance of the age is more that it shows the disaffection and societal failure it recounts as not only not being novel--I knew that, though it's good to be reminded--but even older than I had realised. The boomer generation has somehow managed to spin this fable of rebellion having been invented in the mid-late 60s, whereas here is a long poem from 10 years earlier that oozes vitriol at the establishment and recounts insistently all the "collateral damage" of an epoch that these days seems to get romanticised as being before everything got so damn complicated.

For me, apparently unlike for most of the reviewers on Goodreads, the illustrations added quite a lot. They're beautiful in themselves, the style feels very appropriate, and they fit both the individual images and the cacophonic succession of images very well. They also add something else unexpected: by letting the book put each breath of the text on a new page, they make the poem fit the print format much better than in the text-only edition I had read before, letting it flow more naturally than it can all squashed onto one page.