are you hip enough for this...

Line	Reference
“who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated.”	This is a direct reference told to Ginsberg by Kerouac about poet Philip Lamantia’s “celestial adventure” after reading the Qur'an.[27]
"Who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake — light tragedies among the scholars of war" and “who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy”	Ginsberg had an important auditory hallucination in 1948 of William Blake reading his poems "Ah, Sunflower", "The Sick Rose", and "Little Girl Lost". Ginsberg said it revealed to him the interconnectedness of all existence. He said his drug experimentation in many ways was an attempt to recapture that feeling.[28][29]
"Who were expelled from the academy for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull"	Part of the reason Ginsberg was suspended in his sophomore year[30] from Columbia University was because he wrote obscenities in his dirty dorm window. He suspected the cleaning woman of being an anti-Semite because she never cleaned his window, and he expressed this feeling in explicit terms on his window, by writing "Fuck the Jews", and drawing a swastika. He also wrote a phrase on the window implying that the president of the university had no testicles.[31][32]
"who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall"	Lucien Carr burned his insanity record, along with $20, at his mother's insistence.[33]
"... poles of Canada and Paterson..."	Kerouac was French-Canadian from Lowell, Massachusetts; Ginsberg grew up in Paterson, New Jersey.[34]
"who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoons in desolate Fugazzi's..."	Bickford's and Fugazzi's were New York spots where the Beats hung out. Ginsberg worked briefly at Fugazzi's.[35][36]
"... Tangerian bone-grindings..." "... Tangiers to boys ..." and “Holy Tangiers!”	William S. Burroughs lived in Tangier, Morocco at the time Ginsberg wrote "Howl". He also experienced withdrawal from heroin, which he wrote about in several letters to Ginsberg.[37]
"who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas"	Mystics and forms of mysticism in which Ginsberg at one time had an interest.[37]
“who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico.”	Both a reference to John Hoffman, a friend of Philip Lamantia and Carl Solomon, who died in Mexico, and a reference to Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry.[27]
“weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down.”	A reference to a protest staged by Judith Malina, Julian Beck, and other members of The Living Theater.[38]
“who bit detectives in the neck ... dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts.” Also, from “who...fell out of the subway window” to “the blast of colossal steam whistles.”	A specific reference to Bill Cannastra, who actually did most of these things and died when he "fell out of the subway window." [38][39][40]
”Saintly motorcyclists”	A reference to Marlon Brando and his biker persona in The Wild One.[37]
From “Who copulated ecstatic and insatiate” to "Who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N. C. secret hero of these poems." Also, from "who barreled down the highways of the past" to "& now Denver is lonesome for her heroes"	A reference to Neal Cassady (N.C.) who lived in Denver, Colorado, and had a reputation for being sexually voracious, as well as stealing cars.[41][42][43]
"who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the showbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steamheat and opium"	A specific reference to Herbert Huncke’s condition after being released from Riker’s Island.[42][44]
"... and rose to build harpsichords in their lofts..."	Friend Bill Keck actually built harpsichords. Ginsberg had a conversation with Keck's wife shortly before writing "Howl".[39][45][46]
"who coughed on the six floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology"	This is a reference to the apartment in which Ginsberg lived when he had his Blake vision. His roommate, Russell Durgin, was a theology student and kept his books in orange crates.[45][47]
"who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot with eternity outside of time..."	A reference to Ginsberg's Columbia classmate Louis Simpson, an incident that happened during a brief stay in a mental institution for post-traumatic stress disorder.[42][45]
"who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue... the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising"	Ginsberg worked as a market researcher for Towne-Oller Associates in San Francisco, on Montgomery Street, not Madison Avenue.[48]
"who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge..."	A specific reference to Tuli Kupferberg.[38][49]
”who crashed through their minds in jail...”	A reference to Jean Genet’s Le Condamne a Mort.[38]
"who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave"	Many of the Beats went to Mexico City to “cultivate” a drug “habit,” but Ginsberg claims this is a direct reference to Burroughs and Bill Garver, though Burroughs lived in Tangiers at the time[50] (as Ginsberg says in "America" "Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister"[51]). Rocky Mount, North Carolina, is where Jack Kerouac’s sister lived (as recounted in The Dharma Bums).[52] Also, Neal Cassady was a brakeman for the Southern Pacific. John Hollander was an alumnus of Harvard. Ginsberg's mother Naomi lived near Woodlawn Cemetery.[43][45]
“Accusing the radio of hypnotism...”	A reference to Ginsberg’s mother Naomi, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. It also refers to Antonin Artaud’s reaction to shock therapy and his “To Have Done with the Judgement of God”, which Solomon introduced to Ginsberg at Columbia Presbyterian Psychological Institute.[53][54]
From "who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism..." to "resting briefly in catatonia"	A specific reference to Carl Solomon. Initially this final section went straight into what is now Part III, which is entirely about Carl Solomon. An art movement emphasizing nonsense and irrationality. In the poem, it is the subject of a lecture that is interrupted by students throwing potato salad at the professors. This ironically mirrored the playfulness of the movement but in a darker context. A Post WW1 cultural movement, Dada stood for 'anti-art', it was against everything that art stood for. Founded in Zurich, Switzerland. The meaning of the word means two different definitions; "hobby horse" and "father", chosen randomly. The Dada movement spread rapidly.[55][56][57]
"Pilgrim's State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls ..." and “I’m with you in Rockland”	These are mental institutions associated with either Ginsberg’s mother Naomi or Carl Solomon: Pilgrim State Hospital and Rockland State Hospital in New York and Greystone Park State Hospital in New Jersey. Ginsberg met Solomon at Columbia Presbyterian Psychological Institute, but “Rockland” was frequently substituted for “rhythmic euphony”.[53][54][58]
"with mother finally ******"	Ginsberg admitted that the deletion here was an expletive. He left it purposefully elliptical “to introduce appropriate element of uncertainty.” In later readings, many years after he was able to distance himself from his difficult history with his mother, he reinserted the word "fucked." [55]
"obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter (alt: variable measure) & the vibrating plane.” Also, from "who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space" to "what might be left to say in time come after death."	This is a recounting of Ginsberg's discovery of his own style and the debt he owed to his strongest influences. He discovered the use of the ellipse from haiku and the shorter poetry of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. "The catalog" is a reference to Walt Whitman's long line style which Ginsberg adapted. "The meter"/"variable measure" is a reference to Williams’ insistence on the necessity of measure. Though "Howl" may seem formless, Ginsberg claimed it was written in a concept of measure adapted from Williams’ idea of breath, the measure of lines in a poem being based on the breath in reading. Ginsberg's breath in reading, he said, happened to be longer than Williams’. "The vibrating plane" is a reference to Ginsberg's discovery of the "eyeball kick" in his study of Cézanne.[59][60][61]
"Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus"/"omnipotent, eternal father God"	This was taken directly from Cézanne.[53][62]
”to recreate the measure and syntax of poor human prose...”	A reference to the tremendous influence Kerouac and his ideas of “Spontaneous Prose” had on Ginsberg’s work and specifically this poem.[63][64]
“what might be left to say in time come after death”	A reference to Louis Zukofsky’s translation of Catullus: “What might be left to say anew in time after death...” Also a reference to a section from the final pages of Visions of Cody, “I’m writing this book because we’re all going to die,” and so on.[53]
"eli eli lama sabachthani"	Psalm 22:1, also one of the last words of Jesus: "Oh God, why have you forsaken me?" This is actually a revision of the phrase in Psalms, which would be properly transliterated as azavtani. The phrase used by Ginsberg would be properly translated as "Why have you sacrificed me?" This ties into the themes of misfortune and religious adulation of conformity through the invocation of Moloch in Part II. Though Ginsberg grew up in an agnostic household, he was very interested in his Jewish roots and in other concepts of spiritual transcendence. Although later Ginsberg was a devoted Buddhist, at this time he was only beginning to study Buddhism along with other forms of spirituality