Author: Bill Morgan
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN: 0872868451
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Howl and Other Poems, with nearly one million copies in print, City Lights presents the story of editing, publishing and defending Allen Ginsberg’s landmark poem within a broader context of obscenity issues and censorship of literary works. This collection begins with an introduction by publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who shares his memories of hearing Howl first read at the 6 Gallery, of his arrest and of the subsequent legal defense of Howl’s publication. Never-before-published correspondence of Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Kerouac, Gregory Corso, John Hollander, Richard Eberhart and others provides an in-depth commentary on the poem’s ethical intent and its social significance to the author and his contemporaries. A section on the public reaction to the trial includes newspaper reportage, op-ed pieces by Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti and letters to the editor from the public, which provide fascinating background material on the cultural climate of the mid-1950s. A timeline of literary censorship in the United States places this battle for free expression in a historical context. Also included are photographs, transcripts of relevant trial testimony, Judge Clayton Horn’s decision and its ramifications and a long essay by Albert Bendich, the ACLU attorney who defended Howl on constitutional grounds. Editor Bill Morgan discusses more recent challenges to Howl in the late 1980s and how the fight against censorship continues today in new guises.
Author: Allen Ginsberg
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061137456
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
First published in 1956, Allen Ginsberg's Howl is a prophetic masterpiece—an epic raging against dehumanizing society that overcame censorship trials and obscenity charges to become one of the most widely read poems of the century. This annotated version of Ginsberg's classic is the poet's own re-creation of the revolutionary work's composition process—as well as a treasure trove of anecdotes, an intimate look at the poet's writing techniques, and a veritable social history of the 1950s.
Author: Ronald K. L. Collins
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538125900
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s name does not appear in any First Amendment treatise or casebook. And yet when the best-selling poet and proprietor of City Lights Books was indicted under California law for publishing and selling Allen Ginsberg’s poem, Howl, Ferglinghetti buttressed the tradition of dissident expression and ended an era when minds were still closed, candid literature still taboo, and when selling banned books was considered a crime. The People v. Ferlinghetti is the story of a rebellious poet, a revolutionary poem, an intrepid book publisher, and a bookseller unintimidated by federal or local officials. There is much color in that story: the bizarre twists of the trial, the swagger of the lead lawyer, the savvy of the young ACLU lawyer, and the surprise verdict of the Sunday school teacher who presided as judge. With a novelist’s flair, noted free speech authorities, Ronald K. L. Collins and David Skover tell the true story of an American maverick who refused to play it safe and who in the process gave staying power to freedom of the press in America. The People v. Ferlinghetti will be of interest to anyone interested the history of free speech in America and the history of the Beat poets.
Author: Allen Ginsberg
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
ISBN: 9780872860179
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 72
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Book Description
The epigraph for Howl is from Walt Whitman: "Unscrew the locks from the doors!/Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!" Announcing his intentions with this ringing motto, Allen Ginsberg published a volume of poetry which broke so many social...
Author: Jonah Raskin
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520939349
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 334
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Book Description
Written as a cultural weapon and a call to arms, Howl touched a raw nerve in Cold War America and has been controversial from the day it was first read aloud nearly fifty years ago. This first full critical and historical study of Howl brilliantly elucidates the nexus of politics and literature in which it was written and gives striking new portraits of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs. Drawing from newly released psychiatric reports on Ginsberg, from interviews with his psychiatrist, Dr. Philip Hicks, and from the poet's journals, American Scream shows how Howl brought Ginsberg and the world out of the closet of a repressive society. It also gives the first full accounting of the literary figures—Eliot, Rimbaud, and Whitman—who influenced Howl, definitively placing it in the tradition of twentieth-century American poetry for the first time. As he follows the genesis and the evolution of Howl, Jonah Raskin constructs a vivid picture of a poet and an era. He illuminates the development of Beat poetry in New York and San Francisco in the 1950s--focusing on historic occasions such as the first reading of Howl at Six Gallery in San Francisco in 1955 and the obscenity trial over the poem's publication. He looks closely at Ginsberg's life, including his relationships with his parents, friends, and mentors, while he was writing the poem and uses this material to illuminate the themes of madness, nakedness, and secrecy that pervade Howl. A captivating look at the cultural climate of the Cold War and at a great American poet, American Scream finally tells the full story of Howl—a rousing manifesto for a generation and a classic of twentieth-century literature.
Author: Bill Morgan
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN: 9780872864177
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252
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Book Description
An entertaining read as well as a practical walking (and driving) tour, this guide covers the entire Bay Area, and comes with an introduction by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Author: Jason Shinder
Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
ISBN: 9780374173432
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
Reflections from America's prominent writers on the seminal poem "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg, on the eve of its fiftieth anniversary.
Author: Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN: 0872866785
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
One of the longest relationships between a publisher and a writer, documented in an intimate correspondence spanning their respective careers.
Author: Diane di Prima
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN: 0872868575
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
One of The Millions' Most Anticipated Books of 2021. Lyrical and unforgettable, part elegy and part memoir, we present a previously unpublished masterpiece from the Beat Generation icon. Simultaneously released with an expanded edition of di Prima's classic Revolutionary Letters on the one-year anniversary of her passing. In the autumn of 1964, Diane di Prima was a young poet living in New York when her dearest friend, dancer, choreographer, and Warhol Factory member, Freddie Herko, leapt from the window of a Greenwich Village apartment to a sudden, dramatic, and tragic death at the age of 29. In her shock and grief, di Prima began a daily practice of writing to Freddie. For a year, she would go to her study each day, light a stick of incense, and type furiously until it burned itself out. The narrative ranges over the decade from 1954—the year di Prima and Herko first met—to 1965, with occasional forays into di Prima's memories of growing up in Brooklyn. Lyrical, elegant, and nakedly honest, Spring and Autumn Annals is a moving tribute to a friendship, and to the extraordinary innovation and accomplishments of the period. Masterfully observed and passionately recorded, it offers a uniquely American portrait of the artist as a young woman in the heyday of bohemian New York City. Praise for Spring and Autumn Annals: "The book is a treasure. Moving between the East Village, San Francisco, Topanga Canyon and Stinson Beach with young children, di Prima's life is unbelievably rich. She studies Greek, writes, prepares dinners and feasts, and co-edits Floating Bear magazine. Diane di Prima is one of the greatest writers of her generation, and this book offers a window into its lives."—Chris Kraus "Extolled by a writer who radically devoted herself to the experiential truth of beauty and intellect, in poverty and grace, in independent dignity, and in the community of Beat consciousness, Diane di Prima's Spring and Autumn Annals arrives as a long-lost charm of illuminated meditations to love, life, death, eros and selflessness. An essential 1960s text of visionary rapaciousness."—Thurston Moore "Freddie Herko wished for a third love before he died; and what a love is in this book's beholding, saying, and release. Di Prima's dancing narrative, propelled and circling at the speed of thought, picking up every name and detailed perception as a rolling tide, fills me with gratitude for the truth of her eye. Nothing gets past it, not even the 'ballet slippers letting in the snow.'"—Ana Božičević "A masterpiece of literary reflection, as quest to archive her dancer friend's life, to make art at all costs and the price dearly paid. Di Prima's observational capacity is profound, her devotion and loyalty assures her deserved place as a national treasure. She generously instills in us the call of poetic remembrance as an act of resistance, and gives voice to the marginalized participants in experimental cultural movements that carried courage in creative rebellion while envisioning freedom of the human spirit. Di Prima’s poetic memoir of the artist journey is a triumph. A must read and reread for years to come."—Karen Finley
Author: Preston Whaley
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674045125
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
Reopening the canons of the Beat Generation, Blows Like a Horn traces the creative counterculture movement as it cooked in the heat of Bay Area streets and exploded into spectacles, such as the scandal of the Howl trial and the pop culture joke of beatnik caricatures. Preston Whaley shows Beat artists riding the glossy exteriors of late modernism like a wave. Participants such as Lawrence Lipton, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and at great personal cost, even Jack Kerouac, defied the traditional pride of avant-garde anonymity. They were ambitious to change the culture and used mass-mediated scandal, fame, and distortion to attract knowing consumers to their poetry and prose. Blows Like a Horn follows the Beats as they tweaked the volume of excluded American voices. It watches vernacular energies marching through Beat texts on their migration from shadowy urban corners and rural backwoods to a fertile, new hyper-reality, where they warped into stereotypes. Some audiences were fooled. Others discovered truths and were changed. Mirroring the music of the era, the book breaks new ground in showing how jazz, much more than an ambient soundtrack, shaped the very structures of Beat art and social life. Jazz, an American hybrid--shot through with an earned-in-the-woodshed, African American style of spontaneous intelligence--also gave Beat poetry its velocity and charisma. Blows Like a Horn plumbs the actions and the art of celebrated and arcane Beat writers, from Allen Ginsberg to ruth weiss. The poetry, the music, the style--all of these helped transform U.S. culture in ways that are still with us. Table of Contents: Introduction: Opening Measures 1. Horn of Fame 2. On the Brink 3. Celluloid Beatniks 4. Ready for Breakfast 5. Howl of Love Conclusion: The Horn Keeps Blowing Notes Credits Index Mr. Whaley, in this book, takes an academic approach to a subject that is just now beginning to attract scholarly interest. He thoroughly fleshes out a range of sources that span the artistic spectrum in order to give balance and objectivity to his treatment of American culture during the bebop and beat eras. The 1960s, with the Civil Rights Movement, the advent of hippie culture, and the protests against the Vietnam War, has long garnered attention from scholars, writers, musical historians, and filmmakers alike. In the popular conception of pop culture, the 1950s are often labeled boring or drab by comparison. Preston Whaley's analysis, however, will go a long way toward identifying the cultural movements of the 1940s and 1950s as part of a linear whole, a direct predecessor of the cultural revolution of the late 1960s. --Douglas Brinkley, author of World War II: the Axis Assault, 1939-1942 This book has a nice exuberance and conviction, a consistent vision and a persuasively engaging tone. It has a winsome, masculinist, optimistic, expansive style that is reminiscent of beat literature itself. --Maria Damon, author of The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry Whaley's Blows Like a Horn made me want to read ruth weiss, see The Subterraneans, reread Visions of Cody and well, I already listen to Coltrane and read Howl all the time .. but these are signs to me of a very effective book. Whaley wants to find a new way of talking about the Beats and post-Beat culture, one that doesn't fall into the rhetoric of liberation and resistance that is so common in the analyses of this genre, or to the cultural studies critiques of the beats that have pointed out the movement's appropriation by the hegemonic structures of Western, white, patriarchal, hetero capitalism and left it there. Whaley looks for a hitherto ignored space in Beat culture in which the aspirations, experiments and prejudices of the Beats can be directly related to precisely the kind of struggles that cultural studies itself is engaged in as a field. The Beats may not solve all problems, but they are aware of many of them, to varying degrees. There's a subtle, improvisatory quality to Whaley's writing that mirrors the kind of in situ politics and aesthetics that he's trying to evoke in Beat culture. He moves between high and low, personal and theoretical as the situation needs. He talks to the reader directly. There's a refreshing directness here, a willingness to address fundamental human situations. --Marcus Boon, author of The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs
