HOWL! - 50 Years Beat Literature

[Suzanne]

In this thread, we'll collect poems, newspaper clippings & pictures that mark the 50th anniversary of the Beat Literature Movement and its authors...

When Allen Ginsberg hurled his shattering poem at a San Francisco audience in 1955, it proved to be the depth charge that started the Beat movement

Practically the first thing Allen Ginsberg did when he hit San Francisco was to seek out poet Kenneth Rexroth, whose Friday night literary salons were legendary.

"What's happening? Who's interesting? What's going on?" asked Ginsberg, 29, fresh out of Columbia University in black horn-rim glasses and a sack suit.

It was 1955. The San Francisco Poetry Renaissance was in full swing, with the erudite Rexroth and poet Robert Duncan of San Francisco State at the white-hot center.

Read on

© 2005 San Francisco Chronicle

[Suzanne]

List of HOWL Readings & Celebrations at City Lights bookshop* and elsewhere.

(* Best bookshop ever! If you're in S.F., you mustn't miss it. I spent about 5 hours in there. )

Also worth reading: A History of Howl (by City Lights) and Howl at Fifty (by Common Ground Mag)

[Suzanne]

A Howl against performance poetry

'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by / madness, starving hysterical naked….'

With that line 50 years ago this month, Allen Ginsberg let rip with a poem that changed both the way poetry was perceived as a public event and pushed the limits of what poetry could say about the private: what TS Eliot called 'private words spoken to you in public'. The anniversary of the first reading of Ginsberg's 'Howl' in San Francisco's Six Gallery on 7 October 1955 coincided this year with the end of UK National Poetry Week. A comparison between the two offers a glimpse into why contemporary poetry is going wrong today.

Read on

(© spiked 2000-2005)

[Suzanne]

The NYT on 'The Poem That Changed America': "Howl" 50 years later...