50 years later, ‘Howl’ still resonates

updated 1:50 p.m. ET Oct. 6, 2005

SAN FRANCISCO - In the years after he wrote “Howl,” Allen Ginsberg alternately described the poem as a song of spiritual liberation, a homage to art, an ode to gay love and a lament for his mentally ill mother.

The Beat poet who defined his times with the salvo, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” gave perhaps the most adroit explanation, however, upon publication of the original facsimile edition of the tour de force that had launched his career more than three decades earlier.

“Howl,” he advised readers in his preface, was meant to be an “emotional time bomb that would continue exploding.”

With nearly 1 million copies in print, it is one of the most widely read poems of the 20th century.

Still, critics disagree about the place Ginsberg’s best-known work holds in American letters. But even its detractors acknowledge that his provocative assault on the Cold War and conformity roared across the cultural landscape in a way that continues to resonate a half-century after its storied debut at a San Francisco art gallery.

Ginsberg first publicly read “Howl” as a work-in-progress on Oct. 7, 1955 — a date that holds as much meaning for followers of the Beats as “Bloomsday,” June 16, does for fans of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” The Six Gallery reading, as it has since become known, preceded by a year the poem’s publication and the moral outrage provoked by its defense of homosexuality and drug use.

The wine-soaked gathering also featured poets Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Phil Lamantia and Phil Whalen and was hosted by elder statesman Kenneth Rexroth. Admirers regard it as a turning point that took poetry out of the Ivory Tower — creating space for dissent and presaging the youthful rebellion that inspired folk music, sexually explicit performance art and more recently, poetry slams.

“Poets now read all over the place, but at that time they didn’t — if they were famous, they maybe read at the Museum of Modern Art,” said Jonah Raskin, author of “American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation.”

AP File Allen Ginsberg reads a poem to the assembled crowd in Washington Square Park on Aug. 28, 1966.

“This event was breaking ground in that there were people who said, ’Let’s read in this funky art gallery’ and were the opposite of silent. They were ranting and roaring and howling.”

At 29, relatively new to San Francisco and bearing the psychic scars that had landed him in two mental hospitals, Ginsberg was the last and least-known in the five-poet lineup. As legend has it, his raw, intensely personal evocation of desperate souls “who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts” stole the night.

His friend, novelist Jack Kerouac, was in the audience of about 150 at the performance. “Scores of people stood around the darkened gallery straining to hear every word,” Kerouac recalled afterward. “Everyone was yelling, ’Go! Go! Go!”’

Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of San Francisco’s City Lights bookstore, also heard Ginsberg read that night. The next day, he sent Ginsberg a telegram asking to see the manuscript of what was then Part 1 of what would grow to a three-part epic.

“I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” Ferlinghetti wrote, intentionally echoing a line Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to Walt Whitman after reading “Leaves of Grass.”

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