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Still Howling. Poet’s Statement, Discussion Topics, Awards & Reviews

Poet’s Statement about “Still Howling” and “Endnote to Still Howling”

“Still Howling” and “Endnote to Still Howling” are poetry that stand alone as the experience of the poet, as well as being an homage to “Howl” and “Footnote to Howl” and a response to Allen Ginsberg’s experience as articulated in “Howl.” 

My poems are based on my experience, that of an American woman born in 1956, the year Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems was published, who sees “the best souls of my sex” thriving in spite of the madness of the socio-political hegemony that works to trap men in power-dictated, soul-diminishing behaviors and that has made little headway in treating and respecting women as persons first – without being sexualized, suppressed or dominated.

To make into poetry my experience of 60 years of oppression and suppression, I found the structure and expression of Ginsberg’s “Howl” and “Footnote to Howl” as inspiration.  Thus, I believe that for anyone, reading “Howl” and “Footnote to Howl” enriches one’s reading of “Still Howling” and “Endnote to Still Howling.” 

In “Howl,” published November 1, 1956, Ginsberg questions the forces that destructively affect curious, brilliant minds in a culture that fails to recognize a pervasive holiness, the holiness that Ginsberg articulates in “Footnote to Howl.”  

Ginsberg begins “Howl” with the iconic line:

 “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness . .”

Applauding feminine resiliency and strength, I begin “Still Howling” with:  

“I see the best souls of my sex thrive despite the madness . . .”

Responding to Ginsberg’s refrain of “I’m with you in Rockland,” with Rockland being a hospital for treating insanity, the refrain of “Still Howling” is “I’m with you in Cockland,” with Cockland being our figurative hegemonic world (and if, of course, a wordplay on Rockland). While Rockland, though arguably, treats madness, Cockland creates the madness, and, further, is the madness. 

When Ginsberg writes that the “best minds of my [his] generation” . . . “purgatoried their/torsos night after night/with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls”, 

I respond to “endless balls” with the repetition of the word “balls” and with balls being thrown at women trapped in a “Pitching Machine.”  While Ginsberg writes of the oppressing and controlling effects of “Moloch whose mind is pure machinery!”, the machinery in my poem is the “Machinery of Balls”, which furiously harms women and their attempts of navigating, and surviving, this world of endless balls. 

The second part of “Still Howling” addresses the “Machinery of Balls” as the second part of “Howl” addresses “Moloch.”  In “Still Howling,” the first part ends with the concern of the “blows” that have oppressed and even tortured and killed our sisters of the past and of the present.  The second part begins with the question: “And what of our daughters?”, which then leads to a concern that the “Machinery of Balls” has become familiar to the daughters to the point that they even have a sense of “guardianship” towards it.  The end of the second part confirms this with the following statement of the persona poet’s daughter, my daughter, and my reply: 

“and my daughter says there are too many balls in my poem,

and she’s right, that is the exactly the point,

there are too many balls in my poem.”

The “poem” mentioned above, of course, is literally the poem “Still Howling,” but is figuratively the persona’s life, creativity, dreams, chances, opportunities, accomplishments.  But, this passage also shows that the daughter, in a generational statement, does not understand why “there are too many balls in my poem.”

In “Howl,” Ginsberg’s friend to whom he dedicated his poem, Carl Solomon, is in the mental hospital Rockland; at the end of the poem, Ginsberg writes: “in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-/journey on the highway across America in tears/to the door of my cottage in the Western night” 

“Still Howling” is crafted to begin and end its journey with its persona (or speaker, who might be seen as me, the poet) seeing “defiant Aphrodites rising above the sea” while I, the persona, by the end of the third part, which is also the end, of the poem, am “moored on the shore/of the un-navigable ocean of hegemonous men.”  I am watching my “soul-full infinite sister,” to whom I dedicate the poem, Galaxy Dancer, “dancing above me through the galaxies,/weaving barefoot tracks in the cosmos/and in the celestial sand” . . . Thus, Galaxy Dancer, has risen above this ocean, which has proven to be un-navigable, and dances above it, to “my skiff, moored on the shore”, an act of sisterhood and care.

 “Still Howling” refers to the “best souls of my sex” as Aphrodites, goddesses of love, but challenges the idea of women as important through being sexualized.  In some renditions of the Greek myth, Aphrodite was born from the castrated genitals of Uranus being thrown into the sea (by Cronus, the leader of the gods), from which she arises in the subsequent foam.  In “Still Howling,” rather than rising from the foam resulting from a male’s castrated genitals being thrown into the sea by the powerful leader of the gods, the Aphrodites rise above the sea, above what the gods can do, which is also “the ocean of hegemonous men” in “the whole planet of Cockland” and of “balls balls balls.”  Through “dancing above me through the galaxies”, Galaxy Dancer (representative of the “best souls of my sex”) has even risen into the celestial realm, bypassing entirely the “planet called Cockland.”  Also worth noting is that the harmful act upon Uranus by the leader of the gods can be seen as the controlling hegemony that traps men into power-dictated behaviors, which, is a soul castration and, through this power play, is ultimately an assault upon men’s own identities. 

I see the structure of Ginsberg’s poem as composed in the three-parts of the essay, of the sonata and, more specifically, of the rite of passage to identity—with a fourth-part, a footnote. The three parts are:

I.   Statement (state of being that usually includes physical or psychological isolation);

II.  Exploration and Development (questioning identity and what is causing the behaviors stated in Part I, specifically the “machinery” of hegemony, the liminal space referred to as “betwixt and between” by anthropologist Victor Turner);

III. Return, Changed and Compassionate (with a new identity and way of seeing and, then, as demonstrated in “Footnote to Howl,” publicly helping humanity, such as by accepting, and blessing, all).

I followed all four parts of the structure to create “Still Howling” and “Endnote to Still Howling.”

Discussion Topics

Awards & Reviews

“Still Howling” and “Endnote to Still Howling” are First Place Winner of the Best Beat Poem Contest, 2016, sponsored by Beatlick Press.

They were first published on October 5, 2016 in the journal Cacti Fur. (Click on Cacti Fur to take you to the poems.)

They were published in the poetry book Still Howling: Poems by Mary Dezember, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, October 29, 2016.

They were also published in Watermelon Isotope, edited by Kenneth Gurney, on December 12, 2016.

“…her lines simmering and ultimately erupting like a geyser, the reader taken on an exhilarating ride.”

— Ann Wehrman, critic, from the review of Still Howling in The Pedestal Magazine

Review of Still Howling by Ann Wehrman in The Pedestal Magazine

Review of Still Howling by Sheila McDermott-Sipe in Goodreads

Customer Reviews of Still Howling on Amazon 

“Still Howling is the drumbeat we’ve been waiting for in unsettling political times. Mary’s work will inspire you to forge onwards in the long march towards positive social change.

— Jordan Eddy, cofounder of Strangers Collective

 “Dezember has created telephone lines through time that reopen essential conversations. Her poetry sent me back to Ginsberg to reread and listen to ‘Howl’ which I had not done in at least fifteen years. The bounty of colors, the unabashed sensuality, the ecstasy of ‘saying yes’ took me back to Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself.’ And most poignantly, through these telephone lines, we hear female voices that have been silenced speak to us, and we must listen closely no matter how enraged we feel…I can’t imagine that in the great cosmic literary and artistic conversations that transcend time that Whitman, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Peters, Franklin, and O’Keeffe are not also giving thanks to Mary Dezember as we all should.”

— Sheila McDermott-Sipe, literary arts educator, from review on Goodreads