SOURCE: Bowering, George. “How I Hear ‘Howl.’” In On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg, edited by Lewis Hyde, pp. 370-78. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984.

In the following essay, which was first published in 1969, Bowering discusses the experience of listening to a recording of Ginsberg's spoken version of “Howl.”

(Poetry is a vocal art. In the following impression of Allen Ginsberg's poem, I will refer not so much to the printed versions as to his spoken version on the Fantasy LP 7005, Howl and Other Poems.)

… The central image of “Howl” is the “robot skullface of Moloch,” the mechanical monolith that eats the children of America. The original Moloch was just as fearful, tho not so widely powerful. This was the old Canaanite god that appealed to the wives of the original Solomon, & earlier to the followers of Moses. He was figured as a giant stone statue with...