7th October 1955 , Allen Ginsberg's First Reading of "Howl"

On the evening of October 7th, 1955. Ginsberg's anguished hallucinatory tour-de-force .innovative poem Howl was performed  in public for the first time at a poetry reading in Berkeley, California  which had been advertised by a postcard  proclaiming  “Remarkable collection of angels all gathered at once in the same spot. Wine, music, dancing girls, serious poetry, free satori.”
Gathered together that evening were literary icons, though many had yet to have their talents realized by the literary community. The list of poets reading included Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure and Kenneth Rexroth. Perhaps as impressive were those who merely observed, as  the likes of Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Neal Cassady and Ann Charters were among the large audience who had gathered together at Six Gallery in San Francisco. In fact, it was supposedly Kerouac who set the tone of the evening by taking up a collection for wine, which he then passed around the audience while demanding they “glug a slug from the jug.” Kerouac later described the audience as “rather stiff,” but the wine got them “all piffed so that by eleven o’clock when [Ginsberg] was reading his, wailing poem [“Howl”] drunk with arms outspread everybody was yelling ‘Go! Go! Go!’ (like a jam session).”
. Its opening lines :

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,"

 are well-known and oft-quoted. The words spoke evocatively and powerfully to the terrible political and social dilemmas of postwar America, those facing the younger generation in particular.
It quickly became a hallmark text of the Beat generation. Ginsberg’s text a jumble of images and buzzwords that vividly described the social, political and historic state of America in the 1950s, and its format emulates the chaos of affairs felt at the time.
The title of Ginsberg's poem prepares the reader for what to expect.  This will not be a quiet poem.  It will not be a sonnet or an ode.  It will be a poem of noise and unsettling images and themes. The title also expresses one of the major themes in the poem - that of madness.  To howl is usually associated with animals howling at the moon, an image that Ginsberg wanted to convey. The moon is also a symbol associated with madness.  Medical opinions from the nineteenth century and before believed that persons who were mad or evil would naturally manifest these tendencies when the moon was full.  To howl at the moon in poetic and artistic terms Ginsberg wanted “Howl” to express the pent up frustration, artistic energy, and self-destruction of his generation, a generation that he felt was being suppressed by a dominant American culture that valued conformity over artistic license and opportunity. To howl at the moon in poetic and artistic terms, then, is to suggest that  madness has entered into society and will not be silently put away.  This is a theme that Ginsberg would return to throughout his career. For a poet or the individual to howl, meant that that person was breaking from the habit of conformity to the virtues and ideals of American civilization and expressing a counter-cultural vision of free expression. Howl was also an eye opening work  in its explorations of sexuality , anguish and social issues in a non traditional poetic form , relying on a freewheeling range of influences.

Critics called “Howl” “a hymn to sincerity”, “a hymn to non-conformism”, “a hymn to nakedness in any form”, “a hymn to protest”. Incendiary but for many so necessary, Allen Ginsberg's anguished protest broke all the rules, with it's cry of consciousness and encouraged  a generation of artists to do the same. to cry for all exploitation, repression, and subjugation.
On March 25, 1956, 520 copies of the poem were seized by U.S. Customs and the San Francisco police. A subsequent obscenity trial was brought against Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who ran City Lights Bookstore, the poem’s publisher. Nine literary experts testified on the poem’s behalf. Supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, Ferlinghetti won the case, with the court deciding that the poem was of “redeeming social importance.”
Ginsberg and his contemporaries Jack Kerouac (On the Road) and William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch) became icons of the Beat generation, and later, venerated figures in the burgeoning “counter-culture” of the late 1960s and early 1970s. They were painted as rebels who had done what they pleased in the repressed, monolithically conservative era known as the Eisenhower years.
Howl would subsequently  become  one of the most widely read poems of the century, translated into more than twenty-two languages, this  epic groundbreaking poem tore down the cultural barriers of the 1950s  it would also serve  to  launch Ginsberg as one of the most celebrated  and controversial poets of our time and also  paved the way for everyone from Patti Smith to David Bowie among  many others. Over 60 years since it appeared, its influence shows no signs of fading.
In 1965 Ginsberg was simultaneously crowned Prague May King, then expelled by Czech police and placed on the FBI’s Dangerous Security List.In the 1960s and 1970s, Ginsberg studied under gurus and Zen masters. As the leading icon of the Beats, Ginsberg was involved in countless political activities, including protests against the Vietnam War, and he spoke openly about issues that concerned him, such as free speech and gay rights agendas. He travelled to and taught in the People’s Republic of China, the Soviet Union, Australia, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe, where he received Yugoslavia’s Struga Poetry Festival “Golden Wreath” 1986. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University, the first accredited Buddhist College in the West, he was Distinguished Professor at Brooklyn College from 1986 till his death on  April 5, 1997, in New York City.
Starring James Franco in a career-defining performance as Allen Ginsberg, the 2010 film Howl  is the story of how Ginsberg's  seminal work broke down societal barriers in the face of an infamous public obscenity trial, in his  famously confessional style, and illustrates the poem in animation.

'Howl' by Allen Ginsberg (with subtitles)

Animation by Eric Drooker

In 1959, Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky accompanied Ginsberg to Chicago for a benefit reading for "Big Table" [named at Kerouac's suggestion], a newly established literary publication born as a result of censorship of the student magazine the Chicago Review. The reading took place on 29 January, 1959.

Full poem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem...

Footnote to Howl - Allen Ginsberg

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!

The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!

Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!

The bum’s as holy as the seraphim! the madman is holy as you my soul are holy!

The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!

Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy Kerouac holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cassady holy the unknown buggered and suffering beggars holy the hideous human angels!

Holy my mother in the insane asylum! Holy the cocks of the grandfathers of Kansas!

Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop apocalypse! Holy the jazzbands marijuana hipsters peace peyote pipes & drums!

Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy the cafeterias filled with the millions! Holy the mysterious rivers of tears under the streets!

Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of the middleclass! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebellion! Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles!

Holy New York Holy San Francisco Holy Peoria & Seattle Holy Paris Holy Tangiers Holy Moscow Holy Istanbul!

Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the clocks in space holy the fourth dimension holy the fifth International holy the Angel in Moloch!

Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy the locomotive holy the visions holy the hallucinations holy the miracles holy the eyeball holy the abyss!

Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours! bodies! suffering! magnanimity!

Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!

                                        

                                                                                                            Berkeley 1955

Source: Collected Poems: 1947-1980 (Harper & Row, 1984)

Here is a remix of Patti Smith's Spell (Reading 'Footnote to Howl' by Allen Ginsberg), with samples from various artists & drone music. Photo : 'Exploding Hand' by Lee Miller (1930)