BY: CONNOR BRIAN
The first time I read Howl my chest exploded, the words were a ticking time bomb that sent shockwaves down my spine, it cracked open my skull and out poured out my imagination like a bag of milk.
The poem opened the individual minds of an entire generation, but it didn’t just change our worlds, it changed America.
Poet Michael McClure wrote that Howl was, “a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America and its supporting armies and navies and academies and institutions and ownership systems and power support bases,” and it did just that.
On March 25, 1957 the U.S. Customs officials seized 520 copies of Howl and other poems as they arrived from London publishers on the grounds the book was “obscene.” Five days later two undercover cops from the San Fransisco Police Department’s Juvenile Bureau went into City Lights bookstore and arrested and jailed the owner, Lawrence Felighetti, for publishing and distributing obscene material. Widely publicized by the media, young beats watched the court case on the edge of their seats, raising their middle finger to censorship and the ivory towers of literature. Eventually presiding Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that the poem was not obscene because it possessed “redeeming social importance,” and “An author should be real in treating his subject and be allowed to express his thoughts and ideas in his own words.”
In the name of free speech it landed the first strike in the fight against federal obscenity laws. Allen Ginsberg held his words like a baseball bat and smashed the constricting barriers of social taboo.
Howl is the diary of an outsider, a misfit, who refuses to water down his self-expression. It created a spark for a generation to be unapologetically open, to make their voice their art, telling us that “We’re all golden sunflowers inside,” and to boldly “Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.”
Image source: ggpht.com
