Howl

'In publishing Howl, I was curious to leave behind after my generation an emotional time bomb taht would continue exploding in U.S. consciousness, in case our militarty-industrial-nationalist complext solidified into a repressive police bureaucracy/''I was also curious to see how (Eric Drooker) would interepret my work. And I though that with today's lowered attention span TV consciousness, this would be a kind of updating of the presentation of my work . . . To me, the megalopolis landscapes are the most interesting - that gigantic skyscraper vision. he really captured that sense of Moloch I was going for in the second section of Howl - 'Moloch whose buildings are judgment!' 'I began collecting Drooker's posters soon after overcoming shock, seeing in contemporary images the same dangerious class conflict I'd remembered from childhood, pre-Hitler block print wordless novels . . . to solitary artist dwarfed by the canyons of a Wall Street megalopolis lay shadowed behind my own vision of Moloch . . . What 'shocked' me in Drooker's scratchboard prints was his graphic illustration of economic crisis similar to Weiman-American 1930s Depressions . . . Drooker illustrated the city's infrastructural stress, housing decay, homelessness, garbage-hunger, and bitter suffering of marginalized families, Blacks and youth, with such vivid detail that the authoritarian reality horror of our contemporary dog-eat-dog Malthusian technoeconomic class-war becamse immediately visible . . . As I'd followed his work over a decade, I was flattered taht so radical an artist of later generations found the body of my poetry still relevant, even inspiring. Out paths crossed often . . . ' - ALLEN GINSBERG