Allen Ginsberg's reading of Howl in a San Francisco art gallery more than 50 years ago created a new audience for poetry and relaunched the oral tradition, writes James Liddy
More than the literary and cultural world changed on a day a little more than 50 years ago when a bardic reading in an art gallery in San Francisco charged the written environment with new significance and created new access to the ancient art of poetry.
Allen Ginsberg gave the first reading of Howl on October 7th, 1955; immediately the poem's intrepid approach to raw experience opened up literary structures and dismantled surviving taboos about what could be said in public. Walter Goodman wrote, "If any writer personifies an American post-war avant-garde, it is surely Allen Ginsberg."
Howl's success ensured that poetry was not just written but performed - it was not as much changed as its theatrical dimension became apparent. The reading signalled the arrival of the poet as reinforced mage and media sage, as new found Shelley-an legislator and Jungian myth-person.
Another consequence of this Ginsbergian moment in history was that listeners were presented with the ritualistic aspects of poem-making. It enabled, via the media, Ginsberg and other beat writers not just the power to contain multitudes like their ancestor Walt Whitman, but the ability to move multitudes. It gave these writers the stage to categorise and exalt new kinds of love and romantic connection, and to devise new and free battle hymns.
Ginsberg is an extreme example of a poet who benefited by living in the best age for the reception of poetry. It helped that Ginsberg's talent contained a number of remarkable forerunners: he was Whitman's "barbaric yawp"; Rimbaud's Une Saison en Enfer transferred wholesale to Manhattan; Lorca's itching tenderness, and Blake's curative prophetic gift to awaken Jerusalem everywhere. Additionally, Ginsberg possessed the rabbinical tradition of liturgy and chant.
Ginsberg had moved to California from New York to continue probing the possibility of "finding the Whitman self-reliance to indulge a celebration of self". He had also had sufficient time to meditate on Blake's books to construct a breakthrough for himself.
These precursors had sent our poet on his road. Being part of the beat generation added another dimension, a group of active "souls". They elevated the processes of friendship to a sublime level, bringing the American concept of "buddyhood" to the edge of serious attachment. So Ginsberg sent an untitled draft of the poem to his fellow "angel", Jack Kerouac, who wrote back excitedly, "I received your Howl", thus naming the poem.
Kerouac's initial enthusiasm was the blessing for the poem's success.
Shortly thereafter came the great airing of the now familiar lines. Ginsberg's genius as a publicist - he was akin to Yeats in this - had well prepared the event. He had postcards distributed throughout North Beach. "Six poets at the Six Gallery. Kenneth Rexroth, MC. Remarkable collection of angels all gathered at once in the same spot. Wine, music, dancing girls, serious poetry, free satori. Small collection for wine and postcards. Charming event."
A charmingly written announcement: note particularly the phrase "serious poetry". In his introduction Rexroth, afterwards known as "the Daddy of the Beats", compared the crowd to the Barcelona anarchists. Lamantia, McClure, Whalen, an intoxicated Ginsberg, and finally Snyder read, a progression described by Kerouac in famous pages of Dharma Bums.
Ginsberg wrote to his friend John Allen Ryan, later my friend also. "When I read long poems I get carried away and begin chanting like a cantor, almost to tears, mouthing the worst obscenities."
Lawrence Ferlinghetti asked for the manuscript for inclusion in his City Lights series, saying, "I greet you at the beginning of a great career", the words of Emerson to Whitman.
The small volume has been reprinted many times: it represents the zenith of the printed poetry word as well as the re-emergence of oral poetry; subsequently the movement into popular culture, music, and self-help may have eroded the appeal of poetry again.
The text of the poem declaimed at the Six Gallery was an uneven first draft, though it was lustfully cheered. The early recordings are often of poor quality and Ginsberg's delivery is not as strong as it was later. In fact Ginsberg's ability to deliver the poem in public settings increased dramatically during his career. I heard Ginsberg read in San Francisco in 1967, in Binghamton, New York, in 1969, at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1982, at Marquette University in Milwaukee in 1988, and finally in Dublin at Liberty Hall.
On each occasion the performance was more controlled and intense than the last, the singing and harmony more poised, whether it was shorter as at Marquette, or everlasting as in Dublin.
After the local reading he was the pied piper, the crowd of young and very young trailing the Liffeyside behind him.
This autumn, naturally commencing in San Francisco, there have been anniversary celebrations of the great poem-manifesto of 1955 throughout the world. There has been a Dublin commemoration at the Sugar Club on Leeson Street and in Belfast there's an upcoming musical setting of Ginsberg's poetry.
In April, in the US's National Poetry Month, there is a programme, The Poem that Changed America: Howl Fifty Years Later. The event will launch a new anthology from Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux with writers and academics lauding the providence and continuing integrity of the poem.
When Ginsberg died in 1997 we held an improvised "cosmic Irish wake" in Milwaukee, courtesy of the proprietor Tom Connolly at the Black Shamrock on Murray Avenue. Poets, some of whom had known the deceased, keened; Ginsberg had stayed privately with friends in Milwaukee on his restless crisscrossing of the continent. Local musicians and Irish-American bands played through the night; Michael Schumacher, a biographer of Allen Ginsberg, ended the obsequies by describing the sadness and the comedic elements of the last hours. Ginsberg was generous: when he was informed of impending death he phoned friends around the country and said he would send them money. But the dark angel arrived more quickly than expected and noble intentions were frustrated.
I spoke with Ginsberg on a number of occasions, initially in San Francisco in the 1960s and concluding with afternoon tea in the Temple Bar Hotel on his Irish visit, as people waited out in the street to meet him. He told me he had spent part of the night writing a letter to Michael Hartnett, whose poetry attracted him because of its lyrical virtuosity and technical language. We spoke on our usual topic - people we knew in the San Francisco Literary Renaissance and in particular about our mutual friend, poet John Allen Ryan, who was suffering from Aids.
It is difficult to discuss one's writing if one started a literary career in the 1950s or 1960s without encountering the giant shadow of this poet. The City Lights booklets were available in Dublin shortly after their US publication: I used to see them on the shelf inside the window of a major bookseller on Dawson Street. I purchased most of them and my soul was struck and shaken by Howl. My literary fuses were blown as my tastes escalated into style. My first publication, Esau, My Kingdom for a Drink, an address in the King's Inns for the 100th anniversary of Joyce's birth, comes from the ecstatic rhythms of Howl. I have recorded my debt. "Joyce sent language, Ginsberg bestowed liberation . . . I was devoured by Howl, I began hyperventilating. Bars of Dublin turned into jammed paradises with wandering dishevelled starlets."
Allen Ginsberg had multitudes of friends, companions, and admirers. He made young people star-struck. He was a celebrity, an idol, an accomplished satirist and manager of dark humour. His later poetry was also on a vast scale; his call as a poet moved forward in high if occasionally uneven production. His Collected Poems are among the longest in the literature. Howl and Kaddish stand out as poetry as phenomenon, as cultural war. Howl is a salvo. It may well be, as Jack Spicer has claimed, the best publicised poem in the world.
James Liddy teaches Beat Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His latest book is The Doctor's House (Salmon)
