HOWL @ 70

HOWL at 70

70 years ago, Ginsberg's poem Howl changed the cultural landscape permanently; poetry, the counterculture, politics, music lyrics were never the same again. Come to this event to hear several different perspectives on this iconic poem that put City Lights on the map.

MC Pat Thomas (author of Allen Ginsberg "Material Wealth") with appearances by Garrett Caples, Gary Gach, Judy Halebsky, Rozemin Keshvani, Denis McNally, DA Powell, Tate Swindell, and Maw Shein Win

In October 1955, Allen Ginsberg read the poem “Howl” at the Six Gallery in San Francisco’s Cow Hollow neighborhood. Ginsberg had written the poem for himself, never expecting to read it in public let alone publish it. Ferlinghetti was at the reading and at once recognized Ginsberg as a great new voice in American poetry. He wrote him a telegram echoing Emerson’s letter to the young Whitman upon reading Leaves of Grass: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” to which he added, “When do I get the manuscript?” Ferlinghetti did get the manuscript and published Howl and Other Poems — and the rest is history. Upon publication in November 1956, there was little attention given to it. Not surprising for a small edition of poetry from a tiny paperback press, a long way from Ginsberg’s home turf in New York. But all that changed on June 1, 1957, when police officers from the Juvenile Department arrested the bookstore manager, Shigeyoshi Murao — and later Ferlinghetti — for selling “Howl” and the magazine Miscellaneous Man. They charged that the material was obscene and would corrupt America’s youth.

Legal action against Murao and the magazine was dropped, but Ferlinghetti was forced to stand trial in the old Hall of Justice. For once, justice did prevail and “Howl” was freed. In a breakthrough First Amendment case, Judge Clayton Horn ruled that a work could not be considered obscene if it had “redeeming social significance.” This legal precedent was used in later years by Grove Press to publish classics like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Capricorn, Naked Lunch, and other works of previously banned articulations of the life force in action. The immediate effect of the trial and the accompanying national publicity made Ginsberg’s epic poem an underground bestseller and launched a revolution of new “wide-open” American literature. (Pablo Neruda told Ferlinghetti in Cuba in 1959 that he loved “your wide-open poetry.”)

Join us for this tribute to the poem that broke ground in the world of letters and freedom of speech.

About the speakers

Garrett Caples is a poet and editor. An editor at City Lights Books, Caples curates the new American poetry series, City Lights Spotlight. From 2005 to 2014, he wrote on hip hop, literature, and painting for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. He has written numerous collections of poetry which include: The Garrett Caples Reader, Complications, Power Ballads,The Rise & Fall of Johnny Volume, and Lovers of Today . His fiction includes the book Proses: Incomparable Parables! Fabulous Fables! Cruel Tales!

Gary Gach is an author, translator, editor, and teacher living in San Francisco. His work has been translated into several languages, and has appeared in several anthologies and numerous periodicals. He has hosted Zen Mindfulness Fellowship weekly for 12 years, and he swims in the San Francisco Bay.

Judy Halebsky is the author of three poetry collections—Sky=Empty, Tree Line, and Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged)—and the chapbook Space/ Gap/ Interval/ Distance. Born and raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she holds an M.F.A. in English & Creative Writing from Mills College and a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from the University of California, Davis. On fellowships from the Japanese Ministry of Culture, she spent five years living in Japan, where she trained in Butoh dance and Noh theatre. She now directs the low-residency MFA program at Dominican University of California.

Rozemin Keshvani is an independent curator, writer, and archivist. She is the coeditor of Better Books: Art Anarchy Apostasy (the 1960s sister bookshop to City Lights in London where Ginsberg landed after being ejected from Prague and planned the Internatonal Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall in June 1966) and the author of several works on sculptors, including Adam Barker-Mill, Gustav Metzger, Gary Woodley, and Werner Schreib.

Dennis McNally is a New York Times Bestselling author, historian, lecturer, and music industry professional. He is the author of Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America, as well as, On Highway 61: Music, Race and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom; and A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead. He served as the first archivist for Bill Graham Presents in 1983. Having been selected as the Grateful Dead’s authorized biographer in 1980, he became the band’s publicist in 1984. From 1984 to 1995, he toured with the band, in the process working on its behalf at the United Nations, the White House, and Congress. He is the recipient of ASCAP’s Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson award. McNally edited together a set of interviews with Jerry Garcia for Hachette and the Garcia Estate in 2016 called Jerry on Jerry.

D.A. Powell is the author of the poetry collections Tea, (1998), Lunch (2000), Cocktails (2004), Chronic (2009) winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, as well as, Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (2012) winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. His latest book is called Repast.

Archivist, Poet and Photographer, Tate Swindell is the founder of Unrequited Records, which specializes in poetry records released on the vinyl format. The latest release was an album of rare Gregory Corso readings from the late 1970s that included previously unpublished poems. In addition to an album of rare Bob Kaufman recordings due out in 2020, he recently co-edited the Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman for City Lights Books (2019). Tate, and his brother Todd, worked extensively on the Harold Norse archives, which were donated to the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. He is currently writing a memoir about his experiences as a pioneer in the San Francisco medical cannabis movement. His previous collections of writings include Palpitations, The Creation of Deadlines and Fotopomes.

Maw Shein Win’s most recent full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn, 2024), and her previous collection is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020). She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA. the 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Awardee, and a 2025 Recipient of the Nomadic/San Francisco Foundation Literary Award. Win teaches poetry in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco and in the Low Residency MFA Program at Dominican University. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse.To learn more about Maw’s work visit: mawsheinwin.com

Made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation