Having seen the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness,
bus-station baggage handler and struggling poet Allen Ginsberg wrote a
protest poem with a working title of “Howl for Carl Solomon.” He first
publicly performed a piece of the unfinished poem across the Bay in
October 1955 in a San Francisco art gallery/former gas station. Shortly
afterward, Ginsberg moved to Milvia Street in Berkeley and continued to
work on this and other poems, sometimes upstairs at Caffe
Mediterraneum, a Telegraph Avenue coffee shop that served an exotic,
high-powered coffee drink called espresso. Finally, on March 18,
1956, Ginsberg was ready to publicly perform the long poem with a
shortened title (now just “Howl”). As described by Gary Snyder, who
also read that night, the event took place at “a little theater on
Shattuck, next to a bowling alley and down the street from a moving
company.” There the small-but-raucous audience, surrounded by panoramic
drawings of an orgy by painter Robert LaVigne, heard the complete
“Howl” as well as the premieres of “Sunflower Sutra” and
“America.” A recording of the event, made on a reel-to-reel
machine, has been in print for half a century and is still considered
the definitive audio version of the poem. The entire first edition of
Howl & Other Poems was confiscated and its publisher
arrested for obscenity; the 520 copies of the book weren’t released
until a judge’s acquittal on October 3, 1957.
.Best Obscure 1950s Beat History Site
Where "Howl" Was Premiered to the World
