The Chokecherry Tree

" It's a tree Lu. A chokecherry tree." (93)

This description not only startled me but moved me in a such a way that I could not get past this image when I first read these words. Sethe's back was so torn, ripped, swollen, and red that it was unrecognizable. It was no longer a human back, but a tree. Just to think how many times this woman was whipped, and how much pain she suffered before she escaped is disturbing. I say disturbing because I can never and will never understand how humans can treat other humans as if they're a piece of meat; as if they were meaningless creatures devoured of their dignity. When Amy described Sethe's markings as a chokecherry tree, I immediately thought of this image to right. I have seen this image time and time again of this African-American man with his back towards the camera displaying his chokecherry tree back.

I was touched by Amy's efforts to comfort Sethe; making something so gruesome and painful into something delightful.

"See, here's the trunk-- it's red and split wide open, full of sap, and this here's the parting for the branches. You got a might lot of branches. Leaves, too, look like, and dern if these ain't blossoms. They little cherry blossoms, just as white. Your back got a whole tree on it. In bloom." (93)

This is a such a tender moment between the two because here's a white girl, massaging, and making light of this colored-woman's tribulations. Amy was thoughtful enough to come up with such a description. She didn't talk on and on about how terrible it was. She decided to make it better by associating the markings with something beautiful instead of something horrid.

Howl Part 1: Reckless Living

Upon reading this poem, I encountered this overwhelming feeling of recklessness. Reckless in time, space, living, breathing, eating...just reckless. The first few lines of the poem generates this downward spiral that is going to be displayed in strange form, which in my ind was proven to be right.

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...

These minds that the speaker introduces us to are the, who's, we see throughout the entire poem. These are people who, the speaker initially stated, have been destroyed and are now dragging themselves looking for that angry fix. Because this is the notion these minds are driven by, recklessness consumes them in their travels to seek temporary fix. This recklessness exudes the feeling of getting nowhere fast. At least that is the way I interpret it.

There is a lot of references to hopelessness and failure:

"who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,"

"who wandered around and around at midnight in the railway yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,"


"who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,"

All of these just overwhelms me with the thoughts of those people who can't seem to get their life together. Even the structure of the poem shows the scrambling of this type of life. The lines go on and on with commas making the scrambling pause now and then. The speaker is displaying a certain lifestyle that is in a way muted. It is a lifestyle that not all experience but many wish they would never to experience.

It's a progression of unfortunate events that make these who's continue on with a reckless lifestyle. The imagery I get is a collage of drug addicts life. Perhaps Ginsberg wasn't describing solely a drug addict lifestyle but it certainly felt like it especially with all the drug references or objects that are used like drugs for example, benzedrine, turpentine, narcotic tobacco haze, cooked rotten animal lungs, and opium.

Perhaps he was describing his life during the first World War stated in the introduction by Williams Carlos Williams. Williams stated that he was " mentally much disturbed" by this event and this disturbed Williams as well. Therefore this poem could be describing those dark moments in his life before becoming a successful poet. If this poem is a connotation of this period then it makes a lot more sense because he's not describing people at random, it's people or events he has encountered.