Howl
Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926 in Paterson, New Jersey. His
principal work, "Howl", is well-known to many for its opening line: "I saw the
best minds of my generation destroyed by madness".
Ginsberg left New York City in December of 1953 to go to Mexico. He
ended up in San Francisco, where took a job
doing market research while thinking about enrolling in the graduate English
program at the University of California in Berkeley. In August 1955, inspired by
a Kerouac poem titled "Mexico City Blues", Ginsberg began to type what he
called his most personal "imaginative sympathies" in the long poem "Howl for
Carl Solomon". Ginsberg read the first part of his new poem in
public on October 13, 1955 at the Six
Gallery in San Francisco. This was a big event with other poets such as Kenneth Rexroth, Gary
Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, and Philip LaMantia in attendance.
It became known as a landmark event in American poetry, the birth of
what they called the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
who ran the City Lights Book Store and the City Lights publishing house in North
Beach, immediately sent Ginsberg a note saying "I greet you at the beginning of a great
career. When do I get the manuscript?" Ginsberg later wrote; "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".
The next year Howl and Other Poems was published with
an introduction by William Carlos Williams as part of the City Lights
Pocket Poets Series. Copies were seized by the San Francisco police
in May of 1956. They arrested Ferlinghetti and his shop manager and charged them with publishing and selling
an obscene and indecent book. The American Civil Liberties Union defended Ginsberg's poem in a
an obscenity trial in San
Francisco in October 1957. Judge Clayton Horn ruled that
Howl had redeeming social value.
The reading at the Six Gallery was quite an event. Gary Snyder called
the it “a curious kind of turning point in
American poetry,” the beginning of a surge of poetry readings that brought
poets into contact with their audiences and reestablished poetry as an oral
form.
Michael Schumacher describes the evening in Dharma Lion:
After readings by Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Phillip Whalen and a
brief intermission, Allen Ginsberg moved to the podium for his first public
reading of "Howl". A number of persons in attendance--including Kerouac,
Ferlinghetti, Snyder and Whalen--had read “Howl” in Manuscript, but no one was
prepared for the impact of Allen’s dramatic reading of the poem. Allen had been
drinking wine throughout the evening and, by his own later admission, he was
intoxicated by the time the lights dimmed and he began his reading. Somewhat
nervous, he started in a calm, quiet tone, letting the poem’s words achieve
their own impact, but before long he gained confidence and began to sway
rhythmically with the music of his poetry, responding to the enthusiasm of the
audience, which was transfixed by "Howl’s" powerful imagery. Jack Kerouac,
sitting at the edge of the platform, pounded in accompaniment on a wine jug,
shouting “GO!” at the end of each long line. The crowd quickly joined him in
punctuating Allen’s lines with shouts of encouragement, and Allen, inspired by
the intensity of the room, responded with an even greater flourish to his
reading. By the time he had concluded, he was in tears, as was Kenneth Rexroth.
The audience erupted in appreciation of the work, as if each person in
attendance recognized that literary history had been made.
Ginsburg was once asked how the beat movement of the fifties having
influenced the hippy movement of the sixties. Ginsburg's response:
There are a lot of different themes that were either catalyzed,
adapted, inaugurated, transformed or initiated by the literary movement of the
fifties and a community of friends from the forties. The central theme was a
transformation of consciousness, and as time unrolled, experiences that Kerouac,
Burroughs and I had, related to this notion - at least to "widening the arena of
consciousness." For example, this world is absolutely real and final and
ultimate and at the same time, absolutely unreal and transitory and of the
nature of dream-stuff, without contradiction. I think Kerouac had the most
insightful grasp of that already by 1958. So that one spiritual insight - which
is permanently universal - led to the exploration of mind or consciousness in
any way shape or form. Whether it was Burroughs through his exploration of the
criminal world, or Kerouac through his exploration of Buddhism, or
Gary Snyder's zen meditation practices, or myself who worked with the Naropa Institute under
Tibetan Buddhist auspices. Spiritual liberation is the center, and from
spiritual liberation comes candor or frankness. So from 1948 on, Burroughs was
writing on the Mind, and this somehow moved on to gay liberation, although at
the time it wasn’t called that. You simply called it ‘explicitness’ and
‘openness.’ In 1952 Burroughs presents his manuscript and it’s totally overt,
100% out front and out of the closet - not even thinking he’s being out front,
it’s just there because there never was a closet. So that would take us to ‘55
with Gary Snyder and Michael McClure. The latter’s major theme is in biology and he had insights
regarding the reclamation of consciousness, ecological themes. It’s not your
traditional poetry. It’s modern American folklore, and it influenced everybody.
By 1950, Kerouac had already written On the Road which included the sentence,
‘The Earth is an Indian thing.’ A very beautiful slogan.
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