2022
Saturday Morning, Reading ‘Howl’ janet egan
If everybody takes one page from “Howl” and you all read it aloud at the same time in front of the Kerouac Commemorative at Bridge and French streets it sounds like a Buddhist chant. It feels like a prayer in the mouth. Vibrating. Urgent. Impassioned. Cacophonous. If you look up from the Commemorative you see the outline of the old Keith’s Theater in the red brick wall. In true New England fashion, you can read what “used to be.” If you listen you can hear Allen Ginsberg reading by candlelight at the dedication of this monument to his good friend Jack. And you’re glad somebody taped it. You’re glad to be here now in the cold morning dampness among granite columns etched with prose and poetry. If you drop a stone into the still water of the canal, you can see ripples go out and out and out wrinkling the reflections of the warehouse, the mill, the fence, the pipes, the bridge . . . outward and outward until you can’t see it anymore, but it’s still rippling all the way to the Merrimack River, down river to Newburyport, and out to sea.
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The Lowell Review