Howl in April

If you are ever taking the Isaac Asimov's SuperQuiz on the Seattle Times website (which we do every week or so, because we are nerds), sometimes you will come across a question that involves a poet. And then you will use Google and Wikipedia to clarify the answer and your guesses. And then you will discover...

...that you can read sections from T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland interspersed with excerpts from Allen Ginsberg's Howl and it will sound as if a single, angry poet was writing.

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. ...etc. Drink a glass of wine or two and try it yourself with a loved one. They are both beautiful, long, angry poems, and have a shockingly similar meter (at least in their first sections). Really, someone should do a performance art piece with the two of them read together. Perhaps a third or a fourth poem as well? What else fits? Why did I not take more classes in college so I would know this? -A