World Class Poetry Blog

Poetic Parody: “Scowl”
11 December 2007, the poet @ 8:48 pm

I had the idea awhile back to write a parody of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” I was going to title it “Scowl.” But someone beat me to it.

I’m a bit impressed. While I would have written it differently, the second section of the poem really stands out. But the opening line doesn’t really do it for me.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by downsizing, starving hysterical naked,

The part that ruins it for me is the downsizing. Every other word seems, in parodied terms, necessary. But downsizing seems a bit overplayed in contemporary poetic rants. Besides, it just doesn’t compare to “madness.” And the rest of that first section seems, to me at least, forced. The poem doesn’t really come alive until the second part when the rhetorical “sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed” open up their skulls and consume the brains and imaginations. Oh, that line is rich!

I wasn’t there when Ginsberg penned his heroic rant, nor was I even close when he read it publicly at that famous event which led to his arrest and the arrest of his publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti. But I can imagine the tempest. I can imagine Ginsberg standing there in lewd nude and chanting his poetic yawp above the rooftops of American whitewashed walls, offering his “madness” to them all. God, I’d love to have been there.

“Howl” deserves a good parody. I mean, a really good parody. One that truly honors the spirit and the tenor of the time as well as the soul of the man who rose above it. The question is, is there a soul alive today who can deliver a truly poetic “Scowl” that rises above the status of hack? Well, is there?

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