a creative atelier
a creative atelier
Fringe Festival
Austin, TX
"She calls it Howl, after Ginsberg's 1955 poem, but Teresa Harrison greeted her opening night audience with quiet confidentiality, joking and wrestling with a microphone stand as her accompanist Mark Williams caressed his great bass fiddle, painted in 1960's psychedelica.
Dark-eyed with her throaty voice and long mane of dark hair, Harrison could have been one of those beat babes back in the 1950's. Her familiarity with us, the cavernous empty setting of the Blue Theatre stage and the antics with her stage manager and bassist put us into quirky shadows like those of some San Francisco or New York coffeehouse, a spell reinforced by two battered manual typewriters stacked one on top of the other...
Not just a poetry reading. Not a howl but instead an incantation . . . As the séance began, she placed a chess clock in front of the microphone to be swatted down when the chess move is complete. The conclusion of each piece was marked with a smart slap on the clock, a change in the lighting and a different approach to the word and performance.
A small oriental gong. A reluctant bartender and jug of wine... a gas mask. An American flag draped over a suitcase of props that she unpacked . . . more than a dozen of them, each deftly placed on the tabletop with the place of a disaster: Columbine. Oklahoma City. Waco. They spilled off the edge and rolled toward the audience. A verbal reel of place names and people, each one a mental hook in American culture.
Swat. A stretch of Ginsberg. Swat.
The bassist droned, thrummed, resounded like loneliness itself -- sometimes sounding over, sounding out, covering Harrison's words as I leaned forward trying to peel the meanings from the dense-packed phrases.
And Howl, of course. Every word of it, along with other poems from that collection. The long litany of holy things, persons, moments that would never been pronounced in a church; the recognition of Moloch, the biblical beast-god demanding sacrifices, repeated, identified, named perhaps in exorcism perhaps in recognition.
Powerful, inclusive, hypnotic a shaman's revival of an intensity of experience rarely known in our superficial age."
Boulder, CO
"Ginsberg revisited: Harrison gives a dizzying, powerful 'Howl'
In preparation to review the stage adaptation of Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" I re-read the 2,825-word ode to Ginsberg's dear friend Carl Solomon
Teresa Harrison is just the breathing being to howl Ginsberg's poem. In her performance, produced by Boulder's square product theatre, Harrison is part carnival barker, part
bluesman, part ecstatic shaman. (She could play the lead in any future biopic of rocker poet Patti Smith, too.)
I've never been a fan of Ginsberg's poetry. But I think that was because I've confused it with Ginsberg the celeb literati -- the man who drew stares as he drank coffee at the original Penny Lane coffee shop on Pearl Street, the hippie Buddhist caught on celluloid chanting frantically while tensions rose before the 1968 riots in Chicago, the poet whose rocking-back-and-forth delivery seemed disconnected from his words in a reading I saw in Boulder 25 years ago.
Now, thanks to Harrison, I think I get why "Howl" was strikingly ahead of its time, and a seminal moment in American poetry.
In a pre-poem diatribe, Harrison gives us some context by squeezing the poem in a verbal vice. Between the beginning of the Mayan civilization and the coming end to the Mayan calendar, between the Bolshevik Revolution and the "George Bush axis of evil," between World War II and Columbine, came "Howl."
By the time Harrison speaks the memorable opening line, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness," the words are shifting through her body, shuttering,
slinking, pulsating, flowing out of her.
The poem, rhythmically splashing with place, obscenity, religious and mundane imagery, and glimpses of pain surrounding Ginsberg and Solomon's time in an asylum, bursts forward. The jazz that inspired the Beat poets and the Buddhism that inspired Ginsberg is there in the lines and in the spaces in between.
At one point, Harrison gives contemporary context to the piece with a whimsical interlude that finds her trying to connect with a lover (played by Paul Fowler, who provides excellent keyboard accompaniment for Harrison throughout the play) in online jargon.
The most impassioned moments come at the end during "Footnote to Howl," Ginsberg's "holy, holy, holy" poem that offers a soft antidote to "Howl's" raging bewilderment.
Ultimately, the performance is dizzying and powerful.
Curl up in your favorite chair and read some poetry if you like. But do yourself a favor and let Harrison do the work for you in Howl."
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