Obscene odes on the windows of the skull

Hit a record high in the classroom today: I taught Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.”  My fourth-year students are studying law, so I introduced the historically divine origin of justice and the idea of legislating morality.  Then I gave out part I of Ginsberg’s iconic poem.  I taught them all about the Beat writers and warned them that this poem was very racy, if not downright dirty.  So we started reading it out loud, and that’s no easy task even for a native speaker.  The kids were plowing through, and it was so cute hearing their accented pronunciation, saying things like ee-DA-ho for Idaho.  About 1/3 of the way through, I gave them the option to stop, but they wanted to continue.  So we read the whole 3-page section, theoretically in order to talk about the obscenity trial.  We did in fact discuss the trial, but it was an incredible thrill for me to share the poem with these students.  I was genuinely proud of them for working through the whole thing, and some of them even enjoyed it (though none asked for, say, other Beat titles...).  Of course they didn’t know all the words Ginsberg uses, and I wonder if they even realize how explicit some of those lines are, but they definitely got the point.  And, amazingly, they even got the rhythm.  By the time we got to the last line, my student pronounced the words “good to eat a thousand years” like a regular Beat(nik).  It was somewhat daring for me to give out this literature, but they got it, and got into it.  I don’t know if it affected their souls, but my experience was nothing less than spiritual.  Talk about the best minds of my generation...