Happening (November 5)- at home-base, City Lights, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco,
City Lights Live! presents Howl@70
This event will be held onsite at City Lights. It will also be broadcast on Zoom. To experience the virtual part of the event you will need a device that can access the internet and registration is required. For registration info see here
From the City Lights web-site:
“70 years ago, Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” changed the cultural landscape permanently; poetry, the counterculture, politics, music lyrics were never the same again. Come to this event to hear several different perspectives on this iconic poem that put City Lights on the map.”
MC for the evening will be Pat Thomas (author of Allen Ginsberg – Material Wealth) alongside appearances by local luminaries, Garrett Caples, Gary Gach, Judy Halebsky, Rozemin Keshvani, Dennis McNally, D.A. Powell, Tate Swindell, and Maw Shein Win.
“In October 1955, Allen Ginsberg read the poem “Howl” at the Six Gallery in San Francisco’s Cow Hollow neighborhood. Ginsberg had written the poem for himself, never expecting to read it in public let alone publish it. Ferlinghetti was at the reading and at once recognized Ginsberg as a great new voice in American poetry. He wrote him a telegram echoing Emerson’s letter to the young Whitman upon reading Leaves of Grass: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” to which he added, “When do I get the manuscript?” Ferlinghetti did get the manuscript and published Howl and Other Poems — and the rest is history. Upon publication in November 1956, there was little attention given to it. Not surprising for a small edition of poetry from a tiny paperback press, a long way from Ginsberg’s home turf in New York. But all that changed on June 1, 1957, when police officers from the Juvenile Department arrested the bookstore manager, Shigeyoshi Murao — and later Ferlinghetti – for selling “Howl” and the magazine Miscellaneous Man. They charged that the material was obscene and would corrupt America’s youth.
Legal action against Murao and the magazine was dropped, but Ferlinghetti was forced to stand trial in the old Hall of Justice. For once, justice did prevail and “Howl” was freed. In a breakthrough First Amendment case, Judge Clayton Horn ruled that a work could not be considered obscene if it had “redeeming social significance.” This legal precedent was used in later years by Grove Press to publish classics like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Capricorn, Naked Lunch, and other works of previously banned articulations of the life force in action. The immediate effect of the trial and the accompanying national publicity made Ginsberg’s epic poem an underground bestseller and launched a revolution of new “wide-open” American literature. (Pablo Neruda told Ferlinghetti in Cuba in 1959 that he loved “your wide-open poetry.”)
Join us for this tribute to the poem that broke ground in the world of letters and freedom of speech.”