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50 years later, ‘Howl’ still resonates
While “Howl and Other Poems” was being prepared for publication, Ginsberg and other Beat poets took their show on the road, performing up and down the West Coast. It wasn’t until spring 1957, after San Francisco police arrested Ferlinghetti and the manager of City Lights, Shigeyoshi Murao, on charges of selling obscene material, that the book became a symbol of the social tensions Ginsberg sought to expose.
With help from the American Civil Liberties Union, they were acquitted after a highly publicized trial, and the judge’s ruling established a legal standard for publishing controversial books of “redeeming social importance.” Judge Clayton Horn agreed with the defense that the section of the poem Ginsberg read at Six Gallery “presents a picture of a nightmare world.”
Members of the Academy of American Poets still debate whether “Howl” has only had legs because of its early notoriety, but there is no denying its “profound influence on the course of American poetry,” said Tree Swenson, the academy’s executive director.
“If the words were not compelling, if they did not have the kind of power that they have, this would not have happened,” Swenson said. “If it had been plain bad writing, no one would have bothered.”
The Six Gallery reading nonetheless remains enough of a literary milestone that 50th anniversary reappraisals of “Howl” already have begun.
Last weekend, more than 400 people crowded into the San Francisco Public Library auditorium to hear actor Peter Coyote and seven poets recite “Howl” to the accompaniment of a jazz duo. Stanford University, home to Ginsberg’s papers, is holding five “Beat Mondays” with lectures about the poem.
City Lights will publish a fully annotated Golden Anniversary edition of “Howl and Other Poems” next year. Farrar Straus & Giroux is preparing a collection of essays by writers such as Andrei Codrescu, Vivian Gornick, Phillip Lopate, Daphne Merkin, Rick Moody and Robert Pinsky called “The Poem That Changed America.” A feature-length documentary, “Howl: The Movie,” is also in the works.
This week, San Francisco plans to install a plaque outside 311 Fillmore Street — cite of the long-closed gallery.
On Oct. 7, England’s University of Leeds will host a multimedia “Howl for Now” performance that will include seven musical pieces inspired by the poem. The event, which coincides with a book of critical essays of the same name, was designed to introduce “Howl” to a new generation of young adults, said organizer Simon Warner, a music instructor at the university.
Ginsberg died in 1997 at age 70 eight days after he was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. A tireless promoter of his own work who enjoyed performing publicly until the end of his life, he would no doubt enjoy the attention “Howl” still generates and be the first to point out its continued relevance in an America struggling with terrorism and the war in Iraq.
“We are in an era where censorship is creeping back in through the Patriot Act and where people are ... being intimidated not to speak about what we should be speaking about,” said Gerald Nicosia, author of “Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac.
“If you substitute terrorism for communism, we are getting the same rhetoric.”
The anniversary couldn’t be more well-timed for those who enjoy historical parallels, agrees Ginsberg biographer Raskin.
“What the Declaration of Independence did for the U.S., the Six Gallery reading did for people who were rebelling against the conformity of American society,” he said. “And since people are still rebelling against authority, it’s just a natural place to go back to. Even rebels like to have ancestors.”
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