Word: ginsbergã
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...Ginsberg and his poem first vaulted to national attention two months ago when San Francisco police authorities arrested Lawrence Ferlinghetti, sometime painter and poet, and bookshop proprietor on the North Beach. Ferlinghetti, who had published Ginsberg??s poem in his Pocket Poet series, was charged with dissemination of “obscene and indecent writings” and brought to trial under California’s newly valid Obscenity...
...Howl’s trial as a lewd work was hardly in the tradition of Ulysses. It consisted mainly of a parade of poetry professors from nearby universities to justify Ginsberg??s sexual imagery as an instrument of rendering his vision of human experience. Mark Schorer (of Berkeley), Walter Van Tillburg Clark, and Kenneth Rexroth (strawman poet and loquacious spokesman for the North Beach literati) told Judge Clayton Horn that the language of vulgarity was for Ginsberg a natural vernacular. (Ginsberg, after a stint at Columbia had been educated in night-spots, ghost towns, and freight car pilgrimages...
...poem has ever deserved its title more. Howl is Ginsberg??s declaration of unfaith in Technological America, rendered by despair, erotic imagery, and dirty words. It is a cry of rage against Rockland and “the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality.” And, in a smaller way, it is a contorted and metaphorical promise of redemption from the supercharged electric chair of the raw-dealt genius. The means of penance is the essence of North Beach’s new philosophy...
...They come to San Francisco, writes Rexroth, “for the same reason so many Hungarians have been going to Austria recently.” To Ginsberg, America is Moloch (the semiotic god whose worship entailed human sacrifice, usually of the first-born); and the great minds of Ginsberg??s generation, kicked around by the machine age, looking for “jazz or sex or soup,” are sacrificed to the great American dynamo...
This past week, WBAI, a public radio station in New York City, was so worried about the FCC’s recent trend of levying astronomically high fines on stations found in violation of obscenity rules that it decided to not air Allen Ginsberg??s epic Beat poem, “Howl.” Ironically, the impetus for the planned broadcast was that it was the 50th anniversary of a ruling that deemed the poem fit for the airwaves. On Oct. 3, 1957, the courts ruled that “Howl” contained...