From Newark to Howl
Allen Ginsberg was born on 3 June 1926 in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in nearby Paterson. His father, Louis, was a schoolteacher and poet, and his mother, Naomi, suffered from serious mental illness, an experience that shaped much of his later writing. He studied at Columbia University in New York, where he met Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. That circle became the core of what is usually called the Beat Generation roots of the later hippie scene.
By the mid-1950s Ginsberg had moved to San Francisco. On 7 October 1955 he read the first part of a long poem at the Six Gallery, a small space that hosted poets and artists. The poem was “Howl”, and the reading is often remembered as a turning point for the Bay Area poetry scene.
Howl and the 1957 obscenity trial
City Lights, the San Francisco bookshop and press run by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, published Howl and Other Poems in 1956. Its frank references to drugs and homosexuality drew official attention. Copies were seized in 1957, and Ferlinghetti was arrested and tried on obscenity charges that same year.
Judge Clayton Horn ruled in October 1957 that the book was not obscene, on the grounds that it had some redeeming social importance. The trial gave the poem far more publicity than a quiet release would have done, and the book sold widely. It also became a landmark in arguments about literary censorship in the United States.
Ginsberg followed it with Kaddish (1961), a long elegy for his mother, and spent much of the early 1960s travelling, including to India. In 1965 he was reportedly expelled from Cuba and from Czechoslovakia after being crowned a festival “king” in Prague, and these episodes added to his reputation as a poet who crossed political lines.
The Human Be-In, January 1967
By 1967 Ginsberg was in his forties, older than most of the young people filling San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, but he was widely respected there. On 14 January 1967 he took part in the Human Be-In at the Polo Fields in Golden Gate Park. Poets, musicians and speakers, among them Gary Snyder, Michael McClure and Timothy Leary, addressed a large crowd, and Ginsberg led chanting.
Estimates of attendance are usually given in the tens of thousands, and no exact figure is reliable. The event is generally seen as the moment the neighbourhood’s scene became national news, a few months before the Summer of Love.
The Pentagon exorcism, October 1967
Ginsberg also joined the national antiwar movement. On 21 October 1967 tens of thousands of protesters gathered in Washington for the March on the Pentagon. A group of poets, musicians and activists, including Ginsberg and the Fugs’ Ed Sanders, took part in a ritual that was billed as an exorcism of the building, with chanting and symbolic gestures. Organisers reportedly spoke of making the Pentagon rise into the air, a joke-serious piece of political theatre rather than a literal claim.
The idea was to answer a military machine with humour and ceremony instead of force. Many people found it absurd; others thought it a sharp, imaginative form of protest. Norman Mailer wrote about the day in The Armies of the Night, published in 1968.
Later activism and teaching
Ginsberg stayed politically active for the rest of his life. He was in Chicago during the unrest around the 1968 Democratic National Convention and later gave testimony at the trial of the protesters charged over it. He supported causes ranging from opposing the Vietnam War to criticising the US government and drug policy. His collection The Fall of America won the National Book Award for poetry in 1974.
In 1974 he helped found the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute (now Naropa University) in Boulder, Colorado, with the poet Anne Waldman. He also practised Buddhism for many years, and he became friends with musicians such as Bob Dylan and, later, with punk and rock performers.
His activism was never uncontroversial. His public defence of sexual freedom, including his association with controversial groups, drew criticism from many quarters, and historians treat that part of his record carefully.
Ginsberg died in New York on 5 April 1997, aged 70, from complications of liver cancer. By then Howl was widely taught, and he was regarded as one of the most recognisable American poets of the century, not only for the poem but for showing how a poet could be a public figure in a protest movement.