It was the poem that defined a generation. 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.
Filled 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. Hearing it read aloud by Ginsberg, in a voice in which heartbreak and fury intermingle, is an experience like no other.
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,
Bay Area Reporter :: Allen Ginsberg s first recorded Howl
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John Wieners photographed in Detroit, Mich., in 1966. (Photo by Leni Sinclair / Getty Images)
During the last three decades of his life, the poet John Wieners lived in a one-bedroom walkup at 44 Joy Street, on the back side of Boston’s Beacon Hill. By some accounts it was a drab, minimalist apartment, furnished with wicker patio chairs and decorated with Wieners’s own collages of travel brochures and movie magazines. The refrigerator was empty and unplugged. After he won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1986, grocery bags of champagne lined the walls replaced, gradually, by the empty bottles.