Storyweb: Storytime For Grownups

This week on StoryWeb: Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl.” On October 7, 1955, Allen Ginsberg made the literary world sit up and listen to his “Howl.” It premiered at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, with Ginsberg doing a reading of the long poem. After Ginsberg’s “howl” (his answer to Walt Whitman’s “barbaric yawp”), the literary world would never be the same again. Michael McClure, another poet who read that evening, said, “Ginsberg read on to the end of the poem, which left us standing in wonder, or cheering and wondering, but knowing at the deepest level that a barrier had been broken, that a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America.” A few months later, in 1956, “Howl” was published along with other Ginsberg poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who ran City Lights Bookstore. Truly, Allen Ginsberg was one of the great twentieth-century American poets, the literary heir to the nineteenth-century American bard Walt Whitman. Whitman and Ginsberg shared so much in common. The first edition