Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" by Nicole Steverson https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg Made for the greatest minds of YOUR generation en-us 2020-08-18 13:24:59 UTC 2025-12-07 12:52:21 UTC hello@padlet.com nicole_steverson https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/684762166 First performed at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in 1955]]> 2020-08-18 13:40:24 UTC https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/684762166 "Howl" = the most important historical artifact of the 1950s nicole_steverson https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/684769403 "Struggling to recover from the McCarthy trials that spelled doom for anyone charged with difference, the late 1950s was the edge of both promise and fear. The 1960s, with their recognition of the value of change and difference, were about to strike every American citizen, but "Howl" when it was first published in 1956 was still a threatening work." Linda Wagner-Martin]]> 2020-08-18 13:42:59 UTC https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/684769403 What It was Like: As told by Jack Kerouac nicole_steverson https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/684788425 "Anyway I followed the whole gang of howling poets to the reading at Gallery Six (Six Gallery) that night, which was, among other important things, the night of the birth of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Everyone was there. It was a mad night. And I was the one who got things jumping by going around collecting dimes and quarters from the rather stiff audience standing around in the gallery and coming back with three huge gallon jugs of California Burgundy and getting them all piffed so that by eleven o'clock when Alvah Goldbrook (Ginsberg) was reading his, wailing poem "Wail" (Howl) drunk with arms outspread everybody was yelling "Go! Go! Go!" ]]> 2020-08-18 13:49:37 UTC https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/684788425 nicole_steverson https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/684793207 A Young Allen Ginsberg: The Original Hipster ]]> 2020-08-18 13:51:20 UTC https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/684793207 nicole_steverson https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/684808666 Lawrence Ferlinghetti was at the Six Gallery to hear the 29-year-old Ginsberg read "Howl for the first time.: Ferlinghetti owned City Lights, a bookstore and publishing house in San Francisco. He asked Ginsberg if he could publish the poem. The first edition of “Howl” appeared in the fall of 1956.

“Howl knocked the sides out of things, just the way rock music in the '60s knocked the sides out of the old music world." 

]]> 2020-08-18 13:56:35 UTC https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/684808666 The Obscenity Trial nicole_steverson https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/684818713 The second printing of Howl, 520 copies printed in Britain, was seized by Customs on March 25, 1957. When the U.S. District Attorney in San Francisco refused to condemn the book, the local police arrested Ferlinghetti on charges of publishing obscene material.

"This was serious business. If Ferlinghetti had been found guilty, Capt. William Hanrahan, the juvie chief who arrested him, was going to send his cops to sweep the filth from every bookstore in the city—he’d drawn up a long list of titles—and San Francisco, which was just emerging as an avant-garde haven, would have retreated into backwater provincialism for years, if not decades." Fred Kaplan ]]> 2020-08-18 14:00:09 UTC https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/684818713 Ginsberg and Fearlessness nicole_steverson https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/684867562 At a reading of "Howl" a heckler harassed Ginsberg throughout his reading. He taunted the poet, calling him a coward, insisting Ginsberg explain what he was trying to prove onstage.

“Nakedness,” Ginsberg replied. When the heckler demanded further explanation, Allen left the stage and approached him. He accused the man of wanting to do something brave in front of the audience and then challenged him to take off all his clothes. As he walked towards the drunk, Allen stripped off all of his clothing, hurling his pants and shirt at the now retreating heckler. “Stand naked before the people,” Allen said. “The poet always stands naked before the world.” Defeated the man backed into another room.
From Michael Schumer's book Dharma Lion, a biography on Ginsberg

]]> 2020-08-18 14:15:54 UTC https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/684867562 From Mark Doty's essay "Human Seraphim: Howl, Sex, and Holiness" nicole_steverson https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/684903830 "Howl," considered in 2005, seems, more than anything else, a poem of visionary friendship, of the longing to be part of a questing (albeit erratic) company. It's a chronicle of friends seeking—take your pick, satori, godhead, enlightenment, transcendence, the permanent ecstatic—through whatever means they find at hand: Buddhist teaching, drugs, sex, and a sort of self-abuse, to use a rough term for it, involving staying up all night, travel, drinking, and cigarettes, scraping the self raw, as it were, to open every pore.

Such longing, and such hammering of the individual in quest of the whole, takes place against a particularly unyielding background: the conservative, pragmatic, industrial, down-to-earth America of the late forties and early fifties, a culture that wants none of its sons' quest for the transcendent (and they are sons—this is a guys' vision of a juggernaut for holiness). America actively seeks to resist, tame, jail, medicate, or hospitalize them. What is not of the mainstream seems illicit or sick, as if their longing for firsthand experience of the divine is itself criminal, a subversive deviance.

]]> 2020-08-18 14:26:39 UTC https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/684903830 📹 nicole_steverson https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/684917670 Hear Ginsberg reading "Howl" Part 1 if you want to hear his voice ]]> 2020-08-18 14:31:02 UTC https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/684917670 Ginsberg and his mother nicole_steverson https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/684931857 Ginsberg grew up in a house permeated by despair. His mother suffered from seizures, paranoia, and schizophrenia. She was in a mental institution for 15 years and underwent multiple electroshock treatments and finally a lobotomy. ]]> 2020-08-18 14:35:15 UTC https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/684931857 Walt Whitman = Ginsberg's Literary Muse nicole_steverson https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/684960337 Here's an article if you're interested! Not required reading :) ]]> 2020-08-18 14:44:01 UTC https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/684960337 Ginsberg's Sexuality - Being Gay in the 1950s nicole_steverson https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/684972374 It wasn't until Ginsberg wrote "Howl" that he was able to accept that he was gay. And, then, he stopped undergoing therapy that attempted to make him straight. Pictured below: his lifelong partner, Peter Orlovsky 

**** See this story about how conversion therapy is still practiced even today: https://www.newsweek.com/20000-lgbtq-teens-gay-conversion-therapy-1452999]]> 2020-08-18 14:47:52 UTC https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/684972374 Carl Solomon nicole_steverson https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/684994715 Ginsberg's love when he was young. They were both institutionalized in Columbia Psychiatric Institute in NYC and both undergoing therapy for being gay. During therapy, Ginsberg lied and said he was straight, but Solomon refused to lie and as a result, received multiple electroshock treatments. Because of his bravery and courage, Ginsberg dedicated "Howl" to him. When he talks about "Rockland" in the poem, he's talking about the Columbia Psychiatric Institute in NYC. 

At the time, the medical profession deemed being gay as a sickness, and in many states, it was even a crime. ]]> 2020-08-18 14:54:51 UTC https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/684994715 The Judge at the Obscenity Trial nicole_steverson https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/685030834 The case came before Municipal Court Judge Clayton W. Horn on Aug. 16. Horn was no civil libertarian. One of the city’s four police magistrates and a regular Sunday-school teacher, he’d recently caused a stir by sentencing five women found guilty of shoplifting to go see the movie The Ten Commandments and to write reports on its moral lessons afterward.]]> 2020-08-18 15:06:34 UTC https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/685030834 Documents and Stuff You Need to Know for "Howl" nicole_steverson https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/685516602 Copy of the "Howl" PDF
Copy of "Adventures in Anaphora"
Questions to Answer WHILE you watch
Group Questions AFTER you watch

FYI: for the group questions, you'll be divided up into 6 groups, and then each group will work on 1 question :) 

I tried to color code the slides for you: 
yellow = Ginsberg's biography
blue = info about the obscenity trial 
purple = info on the first time it was read]]> 2020-08-18 17:33:13 UTC https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/685516602 2 BIG Takeaways from the Movie nicole_steverson https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/696830350 1) Who gets to decide what we consider "normal"? What does it mean to be "normal" in terms of sexuality, in terms of acceptable literature, in terms of American identity, in terms of masculinity or femininity? in terms of race and gender? in terms of what we consider vulgar?  Ginsberg talks about being torn between the doctor's sense of reality (being gay is abnormal, even criminal) and his own sense of reality (the fact that he is gay: so will he find a way to know or accept himself if his very identity clashes with acceptable social patterns) Group 6 is tackling this!

This is a BIG question we'll be pursuing as we study One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest 

2) In the closing speech, Ferlingetti's lawyers claims that "we have a desire to make the world conform to our own views." How is this so? Why is this so? How is it dangerous? What can we do? ]]> 2020-08-25 10:57:23 UTC https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/696830350 Here's a link to "Howl" on Genius if you're interested! nicole_steverson https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/697720368 2020-08-25 16:22:01 UTC https://padlet.com/nicole_steverson/5iukq5xv6z9920xg/wish/697720368