![]() ![]() Jack Kerouac, whose brilliant light was snuffed out by alcohol all too soon, was in the audience during that first reading. ![]() The myths of the '50s were crumbling as lives filled with boredom, addiction, and adultery threatened to burn through the calico curtains and perfectly manicured lives and lawns of suburbia.īut where Bernstein turned to ironic lyrics and catchy tunes to rail against the deadening absolutes of the Eisenhower/McCarthy era, Ginsberg howled against a society that had driven so many of his Beat comrades to alcohol, drugs and death.Īlso reading at the San Francisco gallery were Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Philip Lamantia, and Michael McClure. That the poem's coming out party, so to speak, came just a few months after the somewhat closeted Leonard Bernstein's 40-minute opera, Trouble in Tahiti, opened on Broadway, was no accident. Hearing it read aloud by Ginsberg, in a voice in which heartbreak and fury intermingle, is an experience like no other. "Howl," the defiantly gay manifesto that Allen Ginsberg read aloud for the first time at a Six Gallery public reading in San Francisco in 1955, railed against the life-snuffing hetero-oppressive conformity of the 1950s.įilled with anger and rage, "Howl" bemoans the causes of addiction as it simultaneously celebrates Walt Whitman, Ginsberg's Beat Generation comrades, cum, Bach, jazz and jism, the Bible, and a litany of transgressive acts. ![]() ![]() It was the poem that defined a generation. ![]()
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