55 Years Later, Culture Still Cries Out for "Howl"

The Washington Post recently discussed the ever-growing importance of Allen Ginsberg's poem, "Howl."

From the piece...

There's a bit of a "Howl" boomlet going on -- books, photographs, an upcoming movie starring James Franco and, most immediately, a "Howl in the City" series of readings and music Friday and Saturday in Washington.

The timing of the convergence is mainly coincidental, the fruit of projects launched around the 50th anniversary of the poem, which Ginsberg first recited to spellbound hipster audiences in the fall of 1955, at the age of 29. He published it in 1956. Then came the obscenity trial in 1957, which Ginsberg's publisher won, a free-speech landmark. Ginsberg died in 1997, at 70.

"When he first read this poem, it was a cultural intervention, and it continues," says poet Anne Waldman, a friend and collaborator of Ginsberg's. "It's a time bomb, and it's a time piece."

Ginsberg had a complicated relationship with his own creation.

"I don't read it often because it's too much of a bravura piece, and I don't want to get hung up on it," he said when he and Waldman were onstage together in the mid-1970s at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, the writing program they co-founded at Naropa University in Boulder, Colo.
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"On the other hand," Ginsberg continued, "I also want to present my best."