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Allen Ginsberg, an American poet, wrote primarily of controversial issues of his time such as gay rights, drugs, and anti-war movements while under the influence of psychedelic drugs. One of his most famous poems called Howl, which was written in 1955 during the Civil Rights Movement, readily expresses his viewpoints on these matters. Ginsberg uses this poem to expose the public to his experiences and viewpoints, in which he stated, ‘“in publishing 'Howl,' I was curious to leave behind after my generation an emotional time bomb that would continue exploding in U.S. consciousness in case our military-industrial-nationalist complex solidified into a repressive police bureaucracy.”’

Amy Newman, who is also an American poet and a professor, created her own rendition of Ginsberg’s poem, giving it the same title as he. Newman states the reasoning behind the writing of this poem:"By understanding the personal—his friends and contemporaries—as universal, Ginsberg’s visionary method attended to the rebellious, the exhausted and suffering among us; his poem brings redemption and transcendence. I’ve read and taught “Howl” with much admiration, but a year or two ago I noticed the near-total absence of women in the poem."She also explains that he elaborates on the men of his time that were rebellious, when women  “were arguably more nonconformist than the men." The 1950s-60s era, the time when Ginsberg wrote this poem, was the time when women were transitioning from their “housewife” lifestyle into full-blown feminists. Unsatisfied with their lives, these women started to break away from the magazine’s version of the “perfect wife” and began “finding ways to escape the stereotypes." Newman realized these facts and decided to act on them, hoping to make more discoveries about his lack of a woman figure along the way.

She also refused to ignore the women of the Beat Generation (of which Ginsberg was associated with, and which was most famously known for its male writers) in her writing. The list consisted of Edie Kerouac Parker, Joan Vollmer Adams Burroughs, Carolyn Robinson Cassady, Elise Cowen,  and Joyce Glassman Johnson. Though they are never named, she writes of  issues related to this era in her version of Howl such as abortion, body-shaming, sexuality/sexual harassment, stereotypes associated with women, and the like. Additionally, she claims her poem is not meant to be a “critique of the original”, it was meant to override Ginsberg’s misogynistic mindset.

Like Ginsberg, Newman religiously uses the word “who” as the pronoun throughout her poem, perhaps with the same intentions as Ginsberg in which he explained, "I depended on the word 'who' to keep the beat, a base to keep measure, return to and take off from again onto another streak of invention." The structure of her poem is intentionally similar to his; they both begin with the statement “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by. . .” where they then veer off in opposite directions. Throughout the poem, Newman continuously takes what Ginsberg originally wrote, and morphs it into a viewpoint that illustrates the constraints women endure in today’s society. Though Newman’s poem is undeniably shorter than Ginsberg’s, they both convey comparable experiences in which they each created not with malice, but with the intentions to culturalize the public.