'Howl' at Fifty

He wanted poets to rival priests and poetry readings to replace Sunday sermons. His parents named him Irwin Allen, but he called himself Allen Ginsberg, and he wrote poetry with a passion. Fifty years ago, on October 7, 1955, at the Six Gallery, an avant-garde art gallery located at 3119 Fillmore St. in San Francisco, he performed Howl for the first time in public and brought American poetry back to life. Jack Kerouac -- then his oldest, closest friend -- predicted that Howl would make him famous all over the Bay Area and that a poetry Renaissance would shake San Francisco.

Beyond the walls of "The Six," and all across America, poets -- with few exceptions -- languished and despaired. At most colleges, English departments turned up their noses at living poets -- and some dead ones, too. Even Walt Whitman went largely unread and, as the poet and critic Muriel Rukeyser observed in The Life of Poetry, men who wrote poems ran the risk of finding themselves branded homosexuals. Fifty years ago, America was still in the throes of McCarthyism and the Cold War's big cultural chill. The conformist Man in the Gray Flannel Suit epitomized American manhood. Even in San Francisco, Howl's birthplace, the district attorney would prosecute the poem -- for obscenity.

Lookouts and Dharma Bums

By the standards of today's outrageous rappers and performance artists, the groundbreaking poets who performed at The Six fifty years ago might seem staid. Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Phil Whalen, Phil Lamantia and Michael McClure grew up in white, middle-class families. They did not go hungry (except by choice) or homeless -- though they explored homeless haunts. Ginsberg would come to be known as a gay poet, but in 1955 he was only beginning to shape his sexual persona and hadn't come out of the closet. Snyder and Whalen (ex-roommates at Reed College) later became Buddhists, but in 1955 Snyder hadn't yet been to Japan and Whalen hadn't vowed to become a Zen monk. That summer, Snyder worked in Yosemite clearing trails (earlier he had been a lookout ranger in Washington's Skagit range). At 25, he was unpublished. The carefully etched poems about mountains, valleys, rocks and streams that later appear in his first book, Riprap (1959), were unknown.

In October 1955, they were all beginners. Even Kerouac, who attended the event (but didn't read), hadn't yet received literary acclaim and recognition. On the Road would be published two years later and Dharma Bums, which recounts his backpacking adventures with Snyder and The Six reading, didn't appear until 1958. Although no person of color and no woman read that night, The Six event inspired poets of color and women -- Le Roi Jones, Bob Kaufman, Diane di Prima, and Anne Waldman, to name a few -- because it brought poetry down from the sacrosanct halls of the academy. It took poetry off the musty printed page into the lives of listeners.

It is unlikely that The Six reading -- the inaugural Beat Generation event -- could have happened anywhere else but San Francisco. The city boasted a lively poetry scene, a bohemian subculture, and radical political movements. The city's thriving working-class history made a vast difference to Ginsberg, Snyder, Whalen, and Lamantia, a surrealistic poet in the tradition of the French poets of the 1920s. The city's radicalism inspired Ginsberg and encouraged him to make fun of the FBI in Howl and in his hilarious 1956 poem, "America," which stands up surprisingly well.

In San Francisco, little magazines, (mostly mimeographed) published unknown poets. Moreover, poets met in private homes. Robert Duncan, the Oakland-born, UC Berkeley-educated poet, read his own dynamic work in his cozy living room. KPFA, which began in 1949, helped create a community of artists and writers. In 1953, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, an ex-New Yorker, opened City Lights -- the first all-paperback bookstore in the United States. The following year he began his own publishing company and, in 1955, issued his own book, Pictures of the Gone World, as the first volume in the Pocket Poets Series.