![]() ![]() If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. An online version of the text appears here. ![]() It’s also listed in the Poetry section of our Free Audio Books collection. Nine literary experts testified to the redeeming social value of Howl, and, after a lengthy trial, the judge ruled that the poem was of “redeeming social importance.”Ībove, we give you Ginsberg reading Howl in 1959. US customs officials seized the copies, and California prosecutors tried City Lights founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his partner, Shigeyosi Murao, on obscenity charges that same year. Things got dicey when City Lights published the poem in 1956, and especially when they tried to import 520 printed copies from London in ’57. (James Franco reenacted that moment in the 2010 film simply called Howl.) Ginsberg first read the poem aloud on October 7, 1955, to a crowd of about 150 at San Francisco’s Six Gallery. The controversial poem became his best known work, and it now occupies a central place in the Beat literary canon, standing right alongside Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and William S. Before Banned Books Week comes to a close, we bring you Allen Ginsberg’s 1955 poem, Howl. ![]()
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