Dragging themselves through the Negroes' streets at dawn, looking for an angry fix. GINSBERG: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked. Jones, we knew something was happening here and if you had an ounce of curious rebelliousness in you, you wanted to understand why Ginsberg began his poem this way. I had no notion of what it was, but I sure sensed the energy in it. Mohammed and angels staggering on tenement roofs, illuminated. Incomparable, blind streets of shuddering clouds. And for me, a kid in California, its imagery at that time was completely incomprehensible. Professor ROBERT HASS (University of California Berkley): I have to say I was in high school at the time and I heard that this book had been banned, so of course we all went out and bought it. Robert Hass is a former American Poet Laureate who teaches poetry at the University of California Berkeley. I wasn't the only bewildered young reader.

True, there was some raunchy language I'd never heard in high school literature classes, as well as talk of illegal drugs, but I didn't understand much of the poem.

Some of my military friends gathered with me around the record player and as Ginsberg rolled out his rant against contemporary America, we stared at each other with puzzled looks. I'd read about the trial in Playboy magazine and bought the fantasy label recording expecting something really salacious. JOHN MCCHESNEY: I first heard Ginsberg's Howl on a recording when I was an enlisted man in the Air Force stationed in a dusty, west Texas town during the late 1950s. Lawrence Ferlinghetti was tried and later acquitted and Ginsberg himself became a legend, gaining a following among scores of young people of the time, including NPR's John McChesney. ALLEN GINSBERG (Poet): Who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yards, wondering where to go and went, leaving no broken hearts? Who lit cigarettes in boxcars, boxcars, boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms and grandfather night?īLOCK: The San Francisco bookstore owner who published Howl got slapped with an obscenity charge for putting Ginsberg's word into print. Here he is, reading a passage about the ordeal of his friends rebelling against the button down 1950s: Ginsberg broke all the rules of conventional poetry and used language that many Americans weren't used to hearing in public. At the time, Allen Ginsberg's Howl was like nothing else. The San Francisco bookstore City Lights published a poem that became an anthem for the beat generation. The date was November 1, 1956, 50 years ago next week. From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.

Ginsberg poem howl