re Slow Learner Intro, Beat poets, "new cultural synthesis"

[pynchonoid]

...it's a great thing to live in a town with a guy
like Ferlinghetti still around and writing. My old
Berkeley neighbor, Charlie Zemalis, was a regular in
the KPFA scene mentioned here, a Beat poet back in the
day, and knew all these guys, many a happy hour spent
talking with Charlie about those days.... 


A free-speech landmark -- 50th anniversary of 'Howl'
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Monday, November 13, 2006

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the
precedent-setting free-speech trial over Allen
Ginsburg's "Howl and Other Poems," we've reprinted
here the introduction to "Howl on Trial: The Battle
for Free Expression," (City Lights, 2006).

The "Howl" that was heard around the world wasn't
seized in San Francisco in 1956 just because it was
judged obscene by cops, but because it attacked the
bare roots of our dominant culture, the very Moloch
heart of our consumer society. At the end of World War
II, I came home feeling disconnected from American
life, like multitudes of Americans uprooted by
military service. And we didn't stay home long. With
new larger perspectives of the world, many of us soon
took off for parts unknown. And the "white arms of
roads" beckoned westward. I didn't know the actual
demographics of it, but I had the sense that the
continent had tilted up, with the whole population
sliding to the west. It was a time of born-again
optimism, but there were also new elements in the
smelting pot of postwar America. There was a sense of
great restlessness, a sense of wanting more of life
than that offered by local chambers of commerce or
suburban American Legions, a vision of some new wide
open, more creative society than had been possible in
pre-war America. And -- as an idolizer of James
Joyce's Stephen Dedalus -- I even envisioned myself
articulating "the uncreated conscience of my race."

It took until the mid-1950s for this postwar ferment
and the visions of new generations to coalesce in a
new cultural synthesis. And it happened in San
Francisco, then still the last frontier in so many
ways, with its "island mentality" that could be
defined as a pioneer attitude of being "out there" on
your own, without reliance on government. After all,
San Francisco had been founded, not by bourgeoisie,
but by prospectors, sailors, railroad workers, gold
diggers, ladies of good fortune, roustabouts and
carney hustlers. When I arrived overland by train in
January 1951, it didn't take me long to discover that
in Italian, bohemian North Beach, I had fallen into a
burning bed of anarchism, pacifism and a wide open,
nonacademic poetry scene, provincial but liberating.
There were two or three anarchist poetry magazines
spasmodically published, but the central literary,
political force in all this was the poet and polymath,
Kenneth Rexroth, who was active in the Anarchist
Circle, waxed wroth regularly on KPFA-FM, and held
Friday night soirées in his flat filled with apple-box
bookshelves loaded with books he reviewed on every
subject from anarchism to xenophobia.

The Beat poets, joining this San Francisco scene in
the 1950s, furthered the postwar cultural synthesis,
and "Howl" became the catalyst in a paradigm shift in
American poetry and consciousness. The Beats were
advance word slingers prefiguring the counterculture
of the 1960s, forecasting its main obsessions and
ecstasies of liberation, essentially a "youth revolt"
against all that our postwar society was doing to us
(even as Henry Miller in the 1940s had sensed that
"another breed of men has taken over" in an
air-conditioned nightmare.) When the Beats -- namely
Ginsberg, Gregorio Nunzio Corso, Jack Kerouac, Neal
Cassady, Peter Orlovsky -- first appeared in San
Francisco, they hardly looked like world shakers. When
Ginsberg first walked into City Lights and handed me
the manuscript of "Howl," I saw him as another of
those far-out poets and wandering intellectuals who
had started hanging out in our 3-year-old bookstore,
which The Chronicle had already started calling the
intellectual center of the city. Bespectacled,
intense, streetwise, Ginsberg showed me "Howl" with
some hesitation, as if wondering whether I would know
what to do with it. Later that month, when I heard him
read it at the Six Gallery, I knew the world had been
waiting for this poem, for this apocalyptic message to
be articulated. It was in the air, waiting to be
captured in speech. The repressive, conformist,
racist, homophobic world of the 1950s cried out for
it.

That night I went home and sent Ginsberg a Western
Union telegram (imitating what I thought Emerson had
written Whitman upon first reading "Leaves of Grass"):
"I greet you at the beginning of a great career," and
adding, "When do we get the manuscript?" (Despite
Allen's saving every scrap of writing, this telegram
is not to be found in his archive.) When City Lights
published "Howl and Other Poems" in 1956, the holy
unholy voice of the title poem reverberated around the
world among poets and intellectuals, in countries free
and enslaved, from New York to Amsterdam to Paris to
Prague to Belgrade to Calcutta and Kyoto.

Ginsberg's original title was "Howl for Carl Solomon."
Editing the poem, I persuaded him to call it simply
"Howl," making "for Carl Solomon" a dedication, and
thus implying a more universal significance. Putting
the collection together, I talked him into including
"In the Baggage Room at Greyhound." And still later,
when I asked for more, he sent me "Footnote to Howl."
We had already published two books by Rexroth and
poetic pacifist Kenneth Patchen, and they'd been
printed in England by John Sankey. But the four-letter
words (not including "love") in "Howl" would cause
censorship to raise its lascivious head. British law
held the printer liable for prosecution, and he elided
certain words, with Allen's and my reluctant consent.
(Later, after the trial, these so-shocking words were
restored.) Before sending the manuscript to the press,
I showed it to the American Civil Liberties Union in
San Francisco, because I suspected we would be busted,
not only for four-letter words but also for its frank
sexual, especially homosexual, content. And the ACLU
promised to defend us. When we were indeed arrested,
our little one-room bookstore would have been wiped
out without the ACLU.

As for myself, I thought, well, I could use some time
in the clink to do some heavy reading. But for
Shigeyoshi Murao, who actually sold the book to the
police officers, it was a heavier story. A Nisei whose
family had been interned with thousands of other
Japanese Americans during the war, he led me to
understand that to be arrested for anything, even if
innocent, was in the Japanese community of that time,
a family disgrace. To me, he was the real hero of this
tale of sound and fury, signifying everything.

In the trial itself we were defended pro bono by the
famous criminal lawyer Jake Ehrlich, and Lawrence
Speiser and defense counsel Albert Bendich of the
ACLU. They were absolutely brilliant -- Ehrlich
especially so in his presentation of our case to the
court and his devastating cross-examination of the
prosecution's witnesses, and Bendich in his expert
summation of the decisive Constitutional issues.

Among our witnesses, professor Mark Schorer of UC
Berkeley, coolly defended "Howl" as "an indictment of
those elements in modern society that, in the author's
view, are destructive of the best qualities in human
nature and of the best minds. Those elements are, I
would say, predominantly materialism, conformity and
mechanization leading toward war." (Schorer also said
"the picture which the author is trying to give us
[is] of modern life as a state of hell," which
reminded me of Bertolt's Brecht defining Los Angeles
as a modern hell and Pier Paolo Pasolini saying the
same of modern Rome.) Allen himself was never
arrested, though he wrote many supportive letters from
abroad. We never had a written contract for "Howl, not
even a handshake," but his letters more than once
confirmed our agreement, assuring me also that he
would not "go whoring around New York" for big money,
and urging me to publish Kerouac, Corso, Bill
Burroughs, so we could "altogether crash over America
in a great wave of beauty." When Judge Horn announced
that we were innocent, a Chronicle reporter shoved a
mike in my face, and I just stood there struck dumb,
unable to articulate what I sensed might foreshadow a
sea change in American culture. (Later I learned, from
Allen himself, how to use such opportunities "to
subvert the dominant paradigm.") I couldn't realize
what was to happen in the revolution of the '60s, but
I suspected that this was just Allen's first strike as
the conscience of the nation and a provocateur for
peace. Fifty years later, Ginsberg's indictment still
rings in our ears, and his insurgent voice is needed
more than ever, in this time of rampant nationalism
and omnivorous corporate monoculture deadening the
soul of the world.
Celebrating The Howl's 50th

In 1956, City Lights published Allen Ginsberg's "Howl
and Other Poems." Soon after, the publisher was
arrested for distributing "obscene material." Fifty
years later, it's time to celebrate the publication of
"The Howl and Other Poems" and the anniversary of the
court decision that set the legal precedent for
subsequent First Amendment battles.

WHO: Marc Bamuthi Joseph, artistic director for Youth
Speaks, Bill Morgan, editor of "Howl on Trial," Al
Bendich, attorney who successfully defended Howl,
Dorothy Ehrlich, executive director of ACLU-NC; and
others.

WHAT: A reading and panel discussion.

WHEN: 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m., Wednesday, Nov. 15.

WHERE: Commonwealth Club of California, 595 Market
St., San Francisco.

HOW: To get more information and advance tickets, go
to www.commonwealthclub.org or call (415) 597-6700.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is the owner and publisher of
City Lights Books in San Francisco.

Page B - 5
URL:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/11/13/EDG9ALI9TS1.DTL



 
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