On Oct. 7, 1955, the Six Gallery in San Francisco presented a reading by five well-known poets of the local scene (including poems by a sixth). Allen Ginsberg went on second to last, reading his new, unpublished poem Howl. The response was so strong — chants of “Go, go, go”, led by Jack Kerouac from the audience — that Kenneth Rexroth, the “M. C.”, called a break before the last reading, Gary Snyder doing “Berry Feast”. Afterward, elated, the crowd moved out for Chinese food.
It’s the signal event of the Beat moment in poetry — and yet it’s doubly exceptional. The poem is unique in Ginsberg’s oeuvre, to begin with. He wrote other good things (mostly during the same year or so), but nothing, not even Kaddish, is at the same level. Within a few years, he had moved on to the “King of the May” phase of his career, best captured, I think, in Jane Kramer’s book — a benignly inclusive celebrity but no longer primarily a poet.
And further, Ginsberg was not really “of” the San Francisco scene, but rather a globetrotter, for whom the globe revolved around New York (and New Jersey). His time in the Bay Area lasted about two years, from 1954 through 1956. He was clearly inspired by the scene he found there, and he came to symbolize it, but he didn’t shape it in the way Rexroth did, or Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer. (Or Snyder, in his way, dropping in periodically from the Cascades, the Sierras or Japan.)
Or Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and impresario of the City Lights bookstore and press, who made a slim volume of Howl and the other poems Ginsberg had been working on that year. This became the focus of an obscenity trial, ending two years later in victory for the press.
But all gossiping aside, we have to be grateful that the stars should have aligned themselves, however briefly, so powerfully that Ginsberg could ring on like that through line after Whitman-biblical line, dense, rich, hyperbolic and accessible like nothing else in our canon. It’s too tempting not to quote a bit (only hard to stop):
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head, […]
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
15 comments
October 7, 2008 at 10:46 pm
Vance
Hmm, looking more closely at that image of the announcement above, I think it’s too good to be true — it seems to have been made on a computer with a typewriter font. (“Kerners are go!”)
October 7, 2008 at 11:24 pm
kid bitzer
that’s not typewriting, that’s writing.
October 8, 2008 at 7:08 am
The Modesto Kid
What a lovely picture! Thanks for the link to the Gordon Ball piece, I’m going to need to spend some time on reading and digesting that.
nothing, not even Kaddish, is at the same level
I’ve noticed this and been surprised — my engagement with poetry is at a much more idly recreational level than yours seems to be; but every time I read something by Ginsberg that is not Howl, I find myself distracted and unable to get into it. The two times I saw him reading I was charmed and rapt. So I guess I relate to him more as a performer than as a poet?
October 8, 2008 at 7:17 am
kid bitzer
parallel question:
did langston hughes ever write another poem in the same *league* as the trumpet player?
October 8, 2008 at 7:41 am
Vance
He’s not the first poet, even in English, to write the poem of an age and nothing else so strong.
That said, some of the other poems in the same little book (“Transcription of Organ Music”) are good too, just lighter.
October 8, 2008 at 7:48 am
Ben Alpers
From the “Howl” volume, both “America” and “Sunflower Sutra” have stood up pretty well (though the latter works perhaps because it’s such a period piece).
October 8, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Marichiweu
Innaresting – a lot of beat fans I know think of Kaddish as the much superior poem. Not as world-conquering, of course, but strictly on poetic merit…
October 8, 2008 at 2:11 pm
Vance
I’d be interested to hear that argued. Obviously largely a matter of taste; I’m not a “beat fan”, which may account for the difference.
October 8, 2008 at 7:18 pm
grackle
I don’t know from being “a beat fan” but the influence of Ginsberg on my life is undeniable. In high school, in the early ’60’s, I discovered a record store in the student union of Okla. State U which had both a policy of allowing one to listen to records in booths on ear-phones and also had a record of Ginsberg reading Howl, which in their liberality, they allowed me to listen to numerous times. It was, admittedly, one of many strands, but one that lent a certain courage to not being merely complacently secure. I have had an abiding affection for him for these many years since. I would also recommend Wichita Vortex Sutra as another wonderful poem:
beloved of all the brides of Kansas City,
kissed all over by every boy of Wichita–
O but how many in their solitude weep aloud like me–
On the bridge over the Republican River
almost in tears to know
how to speak the right language–
And the collaborative piece of the same name by Philip Roth, particularly luminescent in the quartet version by the Kronos quartet.
October 8, 2008 at 7:32 pm
grackle
I have to append, that at the time, I had no incling of the meaning of the words, but the shear flow of the recitation captivated me in a sense of the wonder of being alive in whatever circumstance.
October 8, 2008 at 7:35 pm
grackle
Whoops, Yglesiased- make that inkling
October 8, 2008 at 9:50 pm
Vance
It’s also possible that you exchanged Roth for Glass up there.
October 8, 2008 at 10:14 pm
grackle
Pretty funny probably part of a Republican plot
October 9, 2008 at 2:41 am
kid bitzer
iceberg, goldberg….
November 9, 2008 at 1:10 am
Removed by Angelic Hosts « The Edge of the American West
[…] they moved to San Francisco. Hedrick and others founded the Six Gallery, remembered today for the first reading of “Howl”. He and DeFeo established themselves on Fillmore Street, and for the next ten years, a rotating […]