Howl is 50
I enjoy Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation's efforts. Though I'm not a big fan of Allen Ginsberg, I was interested to learn that this month marks the 50th anniversary of the reading of Howl at The Six. Link. Excerpts:
In San Francisco, little magazines, (mostly mimeographed) published unknown poets. Moreover, poets met in private homes. Robert Duncan, the Oakland-born, UC Berkeley-educated poet, read his own dynamic work in his cozy living room. KPFA, which began in 1949, helped create a community of artists and writers. In 1953, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, an ex-New Yorker, opened City Lights – the first all-paperback bookstore in the United States. The following year he began his own publishing company and, in 1955, issued his own book, Pictures of the Gone World, as the first volume in the Pocket Poets Series.
Into this rich cultural stew came two Easterners, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who had known one another since the early 1940s and who had vowed to forge a new American literature. The Six reading reflected an intense cultural cross-fertilization between the two New York hipsters and their West Coast counterparts. Kerouac and Ginsberg came from urban, immigrant backgrounds; Snyder and Whalen grew up in farming communities and lived close to the land in the Pacific Northwest. . .
[Ginsberg] had been writing and revising his poem all summer. Although it began as an experiment with breath, literary form and language, it evolved into an epic political rant about the American nation itself and his own generation. Howl defied generals, senators, the FBI, and the whole “narcotic tobacco haze of capitalism.” On October 7, Ginsberg wasn't sure if he had finished the poem, but at 11 PM, he took the stage to read what he had so far, intoxicated from drinking the red wine that Kerouac had purchased with dimes and quarters collected from the audience. He steadied himself and began to recite the intensely personal opening line: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.”
Moving his body as he imagined a rabbi might move before a congregation, Ginsberg built up momentum and delivered the poem's characteristic alliterative phrasing, “who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy/ Bronx on Benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought/ them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain/ all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo.” He felt a “strange ecstatic intensity” well-up inside him, he would explain, and he came alive to the shouts and screams of intoxicated audience members, including Neal Cassady – the hero of On the Road and the “secret hero” of Howl – and to the cries of Kerouac, who wailed, “Go! Go! Go!” . . .
In 1956, when Howl and Other Poems went on sale for 75 cents, it caused a firestorm. The SF District Attorney prosecuted Ferlinghetti for publishing obscenity, and the little book went on to create an even bigger national and international stir. Howl and Other Poems became a bestseller. Since 1956, it has sold nearly one million copies in the Pocket Poets Series, and next year City Lights will publish a 50th anniversary edition.
