The 6 Gallery Reading: What Did Ginsberg Read?
What exactly did Allen Ginsberg read at the 6 Gallery reading?
On October 7, 1955, at the 6 Gallery in San Francisco, Allen Ginsberg gave the first reading of “Howl.” But what did “Howl” sound like when he read it? In other words, what version of his poem did he read for the audience that night and how much of it did he read? Also, was it the only poem he read?
Perhaps these sound like pedantic, trivial questions. Perhaps it does not matter, for we know that he read some version of “Howl” and that his reading positioned him as San Francisco’s finest young poet, prompting Ferlinghetti to move forward with the publication of Howl and Other Poems. But given this is such an important moment in literary history, it seems to me worth asking such questions.
In this short essay, I’m going to explore the limited evidence on offer and present my theory of what Ginsberg read. There were no recordings, so we cannot say for sure, but I believe he read something different than what is usually believed and I think the evidence is compelling if not definitive. To do that, I’ll follow a structure I think is useful: starting with the best-known accounts of the reading and discussing the extent to which we can trust them before looking more closely at lesser-known sources, including contemporary documents.
Note that the following is not an excerpt from my forthcoming book, A Remarkable Collection of Angels, but it is of course based on the research conducted for that book. That book goes into more detail about the reactions to Ginsberg’s poem and speculates on what the other poets read that night.
The Basic Facts and/or Assumptions
When you read about Beat history and you come to the part of the book that refers to the 6 Gallery reading—as most of them do—it will say something like “Allen Ginsberg read ‘Howl’” or “Allen Ginsberg read the first part of ‘Howl.’” In other words, it either assumes he read the whole poem or the first part of the poem, or it refrains from making any specific claim.
Those who say that he “read ‘Howl’” typically do not stress the fact that he read the whole poem. The reason is likely that it’s hard to know for sure what he read except that he read at least some of his poem in an early, incomplete form, so making this claim somewhat vaguely ensures that the statement is mostly correct.
Saying that Ginsberg read only Part I is of course a more definite claim than saying he read “Howl” and leaving the reader to wonder exactly how much of it he read. Michael Schumacher in Dharma Lion, Barry Miles in Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, and Neeli Cherkovski in Ferlinghetti: A Biography have all made this claim. Each of these men had access to Ginsberg himself, who presumably told them that he’d read only Part I of his poem, so that settles it, right? These are indeed reputable sources.
In fact, before any of those books were published, Allen Ginsberg even told a journalist that he only read Part I, so that should be the end of the discussion… except that I’m not convinced that he remembered this accurately. He only made that claim many years later, and his memory of the mid-fifties was not wholly reliable, as can be demonstrated by a number of comparisons of later interviews with details in contemporary documents. Even though he would appear to be the best source, we should still check his later claims against contemporary evidence… if any can be found.
The problem with establishing facts about the 6 Gallery reading is that for all its apparent importance, almost no one went on record for more than a decade and a half after it, and the most detailed accounts came even later than that. The two notable exceptions were Ginsberg in an essay from 1957 and Kerouac in a novel he wrote late that same year. Those recalled a poetry reading from two years prior, so we should not put too much faith in them in terms of pure accuracy, but still they are closer to the source than most other recollections.
The Public Record
The first published account of the 6 Gallery reading was in an essay partially written by Ginsberg (although he did not put his name on it due to it being rather self-congratulatory). This was published in a Dutch journal. Here, he said:
The most brilliant shock of the evening was the declamation of the now-famous rhapsody, Howl, by Allen Ginsberg.[i]
He then goes on to describe the poem before returning to his reading of it:
The reading was delivered by the poet, rather surprised at his own power, drunk on the platform, becoming increasingly sober as he read, driving forward with a strange ecstatic intensity, delivering a spiritual confession to an astounded audience—ending in tears which restored to American poetry the prophetic consciousness it had lost since the conclusion of Hart Crane’s The Bridge, another celebrated mystical work.
Although there are no concrete details, it certainly appears Ginsberg was saying that he read the whole of “Howl.” Perhaps he avoided being specific in order to present a better story or perhaps he simply remembered reading “Howl” and did not think too much about what part of the poem he read, but in any case there is absolutely nothing in this essay that suggests he read just a part of his poem. The fact that he “end[ed] in tears” pertaining to “prophetic consciousness” also does not really sit with the ending of Part I and seems more consistent with the end of Part III. In fact, everything about this admittedly vague description hints at the optimism brought in the third part of his poem rather than the bleakness of Parts I and II.
Not long after Ginsberg wrote his article, Kerouac began drafting The Dharma Bums, which largely positioned the reading as a pivotal moment in Beat history and as the beginning of the San Francisco Renaissance. It is short on details but about Ginsberg’s reading he says:
And I was the one who got things jumping by going around collecting dimes and quarters from the rather stiff audience standing around in the gallery and coming back with three huge gallon jugs of California Burgundy and getting them all piffed so that by eleven o’clock when Alvah Goldbook was reading his, wailing his poem “Wail” drunk with arms outspread everybody was yelling “Go! Go! Go!” (like a jam session) and old Rheinhold Cacoethes the father of the Frisco poetry scene was wiping his tears in gladness.[ii]
I’ve quoted the whole sentence but even within this one sentence there isn’t much to go on except that: 1) the audience was drunk, 2) Ginsberg was drunk, 3) there was some audience participation, and 4) Rexroth was moved to tears. As for what Ginsberg read: it was “his poem ‘Wail.’” Kerouac does not say he read just part of the poem or an early, incomplete version… No, he says Ginsberg read the poem.
Again, this is hardly definitive evidence one way or the other (and we should obviously be wary of using a novel to establish historical fact) but it suggests to me that Kerouac remembered Ginsberg reading much more than Part I. Note as well that we have another reference to tears, this time belonging to Kenneth Rexroth. Tears were mentioned by various observers (including Rexroth himself, who noted in a letter that others wept) but think for a moment about what tears might imply given how much of the poem he read. Had he finished just Part I or Parts I and II, then tears would indicate a profoundly depressed audience crying for the suffering of their peers. However, almost all accounts show that the audience was inspired by Ginsberg’s poem and it seems their tears were more consistent with the logical and emotional conclusion of his poem.[1] Rexroth, for example, said a few days after the reading that people had “clapped & cheered and wept.”[iii]
There were very few discussions of the 6 Gallery reading after Kerouac’s novel and before his death in 1969, but in the 1970s the Beat Generation began to be taken seriously by a small number of scholars. Pioneers such as Ann Charters and John Tytell wrote notable early books about them and as Ginsberg and Snyder were recognised as serious poets and the influence of the Beats became hard to deny, others started looking at a movement that was once considered a silly fad. The 6 Gallery reading started to be seen as a key moment in their story and people wanted to know what had really happened.
In 1973, there was Ann Charters’ landmark publication, Kerouac: A Biography, in which she wrote:
The special quality of the evening, of course, was sparked by Allen’s performance of “Howl for Carl Solomon.” Rexroth, dressed up for the occasion in a salvage shop cutaway coat, remembered, “All of a sudden Ginsberg read this thing that he had been keeping to himself all this while, and it just blew things up completely.”[iv]
She was pulling information from interviews conducted a few years earlier with the various participants. As we can see, it did not say specifically what was read but again it implies the whole poem.
In 1978 came Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac, in which multiple people remember the 6 Gallery reading and the events prior to and after it. One merely has to look at this document to see how already memories had diverged, with the various participants and observers differing in their accounts. However, no one said much about “Howl” except that it was read. There is no mention of whether that was all or just some of the poem. The inference is always just that Ginsberg read his famous poem.
In 1982, McClure explicitly wrote that Ginsberg had read the whole of “Howl” but only included a short section of it in that book: Scratching the Beat Surface. McClure’s account is the most detailed one and so perhaps this is the source of some of the confusion, with people simply seeing that he had only reproduced a section of Part I. He was also a little fanciful and inaccurate, offering a very poetic account but situating it in December rather than October. He wrote and spoke about “Howl” elsewhere and always he referred to the whole poem and the ideas put forth in Part III.
There were other accounts during this period but they all said roughly the same thing: Ginsberg read “Howl.” They are a bit vague and often the details are wildly inaccurate, so it’s hard to put too much faith in them. In later years, memories became far less reliable and historians began picking between the aforementioned accounts and later interview answers, often making additional assumptions that were then repeated by others.
In the mid-eighties, Ginsberg worked with Barry Miles to put together the excellent collection, Howl: Original Draft Facsimile.[2] Ginsberg clearly saw this as his chance to explain his most famous poem and establish a historical record around it and I believe he did so in a very honest and sincere way, even though sometimes his memory failed him, leading to slight errors. In an introductory note to the book, Miles wrote:
Part I was the only section regarded by Ginsberg as sufficiently complete to be read in public at the time of the Six Gallery reading on October 7, 1955.[v]
This is a believable statement provided in a highly reputable publication, and it seems to have changed how people think of the 6 Gallery reading, at least in terms of Ginsberg’s part. Given that Miles and Ginsberg worked together to produce this book, it is safe to say that it was not an assumption but rather something the poet by now believed as well. But does this mark a turning point in Ginsberg’s memory of the 6 Gallery reading? Not exactly. I’ve outlined the best-known sources until this point but there was one lesser-known book, Jane Kramer’s Allen Ginsberg in America, published in 1969, that quoted Ginsberg as saying:
I read last, and I was very drunk, and I gave a very wild, funny, tearful reading of the first part of “Howl.”[vi]
This seems to settle the matter: Ginsberg read only Part I of “Howl.”
But of course we are once again relying upon memory. The book was published 14 years after the 6 Gallery reading and I believe the interview itself came 12 years after it (1967). This brings us closer to the reading in a chronological sense than most other sources, but it’s still quite a long time in terms of remembering specific details (especially considering how drunk he was). So can we trust his memory? After all, he said here, “I read last” and we know for certain that he did not. He was the penultimate poet, with Gary Snyder following him. Ginsberg also struggled with other details from that year and had a number of false memories, particularly concerning how the reading was organised, so perhaps we ought to be sceptical about taking his later account as the absolute truth.
About six years after Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Michael Schumacher published his excellent biography, Dharma Lion, and here the author repeats the claim that Ginsberg had read only Part I:
Believing them to be incomplete, Allen had not read the second or third parts of “Howl” at the Six Gallery, but he began reading these sections at readings shortly thereafter, testing the “Moloch” section for audience response and modifying it in a way that included the phrases that received the most favorable reaction.[vii]
This claim is not referenced in the notes section at the end of the book, but given that Ginsberg was extensively interviewed, it is possible that he was the source of this information. It is also quite possible that the claim was repeated after being read in Miles’ or Kramer’s books, for Schumacher refers to both texts elsewhere in his notes.
By this point, we had the definitive book on “Howl” and the definitive biography of Allen Ginsberg both stating quite explicitly that only Part I had been read at the 6 Gallery reading. Others came later. American Scream states that Ginsberg only read Part I and claims “Part III did not exist at all,” but Ginsberg said in 1961 that Part III had been “half-written” on the same day as Part I. It’s hard to know how much of either Part II or III had really been written by October 7 but certainly there were versions of both that he could have read from. Finally, the claim was repeated many years later in The People v. Ferlinghetti: The Fight to Publish Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. Here, it says not only that he read Part I of his poem but that he took 14 minutes to read it. This is believable but it begs the question: How did the authors know that? We do not have a recording and the man they would surely have asked, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, had a pretty poor memory concerning that event. (He recalled Gregory Corso being there, for example.) How could he possibly have remembered the exact length of the poem several decades later?
Further Evidence
Given the problems I’ve mentioned, I think it’s important to look for other sources against which we can cross-check the claims made elsewhere. This sounds obvious and one might wonder why it is almost never done by people writing about the 6 Gallery reading, and the reason is simply that there is very little available evidence. The best source is a letter written the following day that is entirely about the reading. Unfortunately, whilst many people have quoted it, almost none of them have actually read the letter and they merely repeat the same few sentences with the same telling transcription error. This is partially why we know so little about the reading.
I am talking about the letter Jack Goodwin wrote on October 8, 1955, which he sent to painter John Allen Ryan, who was in Mexico City for most of the latter half of 1955. He was one of the founders of the 6 Gallery but missed the reading. Goodwin sat next to Kerouac in the front row and documented the reading for his friend. He often wrote accounts of cultural events that year because he recognised the importance of the vibrant arts scene and felt a duty to record it.
Like everyone else, Goodwin was impressed by Ginsberg’s reading. In his letter, he covered the whole reading although he focused more on Ginsberg than the others, saying of this part:
this was it, the mccoy and the high point of the evening. […] He shouted at the top of his voice for upwards of a half hour, and he had the common touch and the audience was with him all the way, he actually whipped them up into hysteria. […] Ginsberg’s main number was a long descriptive roster of out-group, pessimistic dionysian young bohemians and their peculiar and horrible feats, leading up to a thrilling jeremiad at the end, that seemed to pick up the ponderous main body of the poem and float it along stately overhead as if it were a kite. There was a lot of sex, sailors and language of the cocksuckingmotherfucker variety in it […][vii]
There is a lot to unpack here but first let’s recognise these aspects:
1. He shouted at the top of his voice for upwards of a half hour.
2. “Howl” was the “main number”—i.e. it was one of several poems read.
3. There were at least two distinct parts of his poem: “a long descriptive roster […] leading up to a thrilling jeremiad.”
“Howl” is of course a long poem and as such its length could vary substantially from one reading to another depending on his pacing of certain parts and the pauses he gave. Back then, he had a very strange way of reading the first lines, inserting long pauses between oddly grouped collections of words. People often say that he read for 12 or 14 minutes, but they were all remembering this upwards of 20 years later, so I would definitely put more faith in the man who wrote just 24 hours later that it lasted 30 minutes or more. Given that time limit, it seems improbable that Ginsberg read just Part I, no matter what he claimed decades after the fact.
There is no doubt in my mind that the “long descriptive roster of out-group, pessimistic dionysian young bohemians and their peculiar and horrible feats” refers to Part I of “Howl.” I hardly feel the need to explain it except to those who haven’t read “Howl.” But what of the “jeremiad”?
Goodwin clearly states that this roster “[led] up to a thrilling jeremiad at the end.” Was this Part II? For those unfamiliar with the term, the Cambridge Dictionary says a “jeremiad” is “a long list of complaints or problems” and Merriam-Webster calls it “a prolonged lamentation or complaint.” Interestingly, “jeremiad” was exactly the word used by Rexroth a few days later, looking back on the reading. He said it had been “a real jeremiad of unbelievable volume.”[viii] Rexroth seems to have considered the whole of “Howl” a jeremiad but Goodwin very clearly viewed one part of the poem as a “roster” and there being a “jeremiad” following it. Certainly, it is easy to see why this term might have been used for Part II but I suppose it could also describe Part I and II combined.
There are only a few other contemporary accounts, one of which says that “Ginsberg’s was the best, a long rambling diatribe, completely disaffiliated […]”[ix] This could refer to Part I or the poem as a whole, so it does not really help us. The same is true for Kerouac’s letter to John Clellon Holmes, in which he says, “Allen is howling his HOWL pome and other crazy poets there, it’s mad.”[x] It suggests the whole poem but does not tell us for sure. (However, given Kerouac’s knowledge of its structure would he perhaps not have been more specific, saying for example “read from his HOWL poem,” if Ginsberg had not read the whole thing?)
The evidence suggests that Ginsberg read more than Part I and I would wager that he read at least Part I and Part II in spite of later claims. But is that all? I see no reference to Part III though this was likely in better shape as of early October than Part II. Ginsberg had little confidence in that part of his poem even four months later and it changed more than any other section. Yet he had certainly begun work on it well before the 6 Gallery reading and it is possible. Then there’s the fact that early versions of Part II were extremely short and Part I probably wouldn’t have taken much more than 12-14 minutes, so why did his reading take more than 30 minutes?
Given the evidence, I feel confident in saying that Ginsberg read much more than Part I of “Howl” even if it’s impossible to say what exactly he read from Parts II and III. However, I’m going to be a little more speculative now, so please indulge me for a moment. Absolutely no one then or later said that Ginsberg read anything other than “Howl” but given the length of time that he read, it is quite possible that he began with other, shorter works, possibly of a local flavour.
Remember that Goodwin said, “Ginsberg’s main number…” and then described “Howl,” yet this phrase came two thirds of the way through a long paragraph on Ginsberg’s performance that night. He does not mention any other poems and simply talks about Ginsberg’s oratorial genius and the atmosphere of excitement in the small, sweaty room of drunk bohemians who were cheering him on… but “main number” strongly implies there had been other poems before “Howl.” This indicates to me that “Howl” was the final of several poems Ginsberg read that night.
Is there any more evidence to support this? There is nothing definitive but that is probably because there are so few surviving sources and those were all very much fixated on “Howl,” which was the highlight of the evening. Rexroth, for example, merely wrote that “Allen Ginsberg read a terrific poem…” but it’s hard to tell from context whether that meant “He read one poem”[xi] or “He read several, with one of them standing out in particular.” Others are similar in saying that Ginsberg read “Howl” but none of them say that it was his only poem. It was clearly just the stand-out poem. Allen Joyce said, “Ginsberg’s most was the best…” which seems to suggest Ginsberg read only one, but that’s not the only way the sentence could be interpreted and he had crossed out “most,” so the sentence could well have been intended as “Ginsberg’s most impressive poem was…” indicating that there was more than one.
My suspicion is that he read “A Supermarket in California,” which he had given a successful performance of at the San Francisco Arts Festival in September. (More details on that here.) He also sent this poem to William Carlos Williams along with “Howl” in early December, feeling very confident about this particular work.
As I said, this is speculative and all we know for sure is that Ginsberg read some version of “Howl” and most likely much more than Part I. But that begs the question… What did “Howl” sound like in October 1955?
Which Version?
Although there is a stereotype of Beat spontaneity and Ginsberg at times leaned into this, the fact is that he substantially edited and expanded “Howl” over the course of many months. There were various manuscript drafts saved and collected in the book I discussed earlier—Howl: Original Draft Facsimile. For those who cannot find a copy, these are free to view on the Stanford University website. All of these drafts are undated; however, I managed to pin down the date for the writing of Part I Draft #1[3] in a long essay written last year.
These were clearly not the only drafts Ginsberg wrote. From a close examination of his correspondence and later from audio recordings, it is obvious that there were others. There were certainly different versions of “Howl” Part I written between Draft #1 and #2, for example. However, for the purposes of this essay it is enough to recognise that changes became increasingly minor with each draft, which is to say that changes from Draft #1 to #2 were substantial but those between Draft #4 and #5 were mostly about word choice and the occasional alteration to line order.
We know that Draft #2 was written by the end of August and in early December he sent a manuscript close to Draft #3 to William Carlos Williams, so it stands to reason that what was read at the 6 Gallery fell between Drafts #2 and #3. That’s quite a long span of time and Ginsberg was certainly working hard on his poem during these months, but perhaps most of his energy went into Parts II and III. As I’ve said, Part II saw the most revision.
By October 7, Ginsberg had been working on his poem for two months and it seems to have shocked even the people who read it in August. No doubt this was partially due to his oratorial prowess, but I strongly suspect—as I mentioned above—that it was also because these people had read Part I and Ginsberg had now given the poem a defined three-part structure that included an emotional resolution. But what of Part I? How much had it changed? Was it closer to Draft #2 or #3?
We can look closely at Goodwin’s account for clues. He wrote that Ginsberg’s poem contained “a lot of sex, sailors and language of the cocksuckingmotherfucker variety.” Readers today would no doubt say, “Ah yes. ‘Howl’!” because few classic poems have included so much cocksucking. But was that always a part of his poem?
The word “cock” appears in Draft #1 of Part I but those cocks are not being sucked. There were fellatio-giving sailors, which could explain Goodwin’s description, but Ginsberg simply says that people were “blown” by these sailors. This remains the same through Draft #2 and #3. Would Goodwin have heard “cock and endless balls,” then later “blown by […] sailors” and tied these together? After all, there is a reference to “mother finally fucked” (although not “motherfucker” specifically; this does not appear in any version of any part of the poem). The word “cocksucker” appears in Part II from Draft #12 onwards, which lends further support for the argument that he read that section.
Perhaps a more interesting clue comes from Goodwin’s reference to “a kind of Greek chorus by the name of Carrowac.” (He was talking, of course, about Jack Kerouac, who sat/lay on the floor next to him.) If we turn again to the dictionary (this time Merriam-Webster), we learn the phrase means:
a chorus in a classical Greek play typically serving to formulate, express, and comment on the moral issue that is raised by the dramatic action or to express an emotion appropriate to each stage of the dramatic conflict
Goodwin was referring to the fact that Kerouac famously offered some degree of commentary from his position by the stage, possibly shouting “Go! Go! Go!” but by other accounts ad-libbing more freely with general commentary of an enthusiastic nature. (Ginsberg recalled him saying “Yeah” and “So there!” and “Correct!”[xii])
But why did Goodwin choose this term? It is not exactly in the common parlance, neither now nor in the mid-fifties. Admittedly, Goodwin was a learned man, erudite and hip, with a good knowledge of grammar and quite possibly of the classics. (He despaired of the San Francisco poets’ view of Gertrude Stein as “classic.”) He was a composer of a number of plays and so he may have been familiar with the concept. But what if this was a reference to something Ginsberg wrote in his poem?
In Draft #1 of Part I of “Howl,” Ginsberg wrote, “with a greek chorus of visible madman doom / with his own mother finally fucked.” No other version of any part of “Howl” ever included the phrase “greek chorus” but its inclusion here and the fact that Goodwin used this very phrase the day after the 6 Gallery reading, in a letter that described the poem and quoted (or at least paraphrased) certain interesting language, suggests to me that Ginsberg read that line. Particularly considering its proximity to “with his (own) mother finally fucked,” which was likely the inspiration for Goodwin’s memory of the word “motherfucker,” I think this tells us something about what was read.
I am not saying that Ginsberg read Draft #1, which clearly he had moved past even by late August, but certainly he had a habit of deleting lines and then reinserting them at a later date. (We can see that in this essay tying together “Howl,” “The Names,” and various other poems.) I believe he used the “greek chorus” line in at least one version of his poem written between what we know as Draft #2 and #3.
It is much harder to date versions of Part II. We know that he’d begun Draft #1 in August and that Draft #5 was written after meeting Gary Snyder (and they first met on September 8). However, that is not hugely helpful because he could have written this before or after the 6 Gallery reading. There is reference in Snyder’s diary from October 2 that could be interpreted as alluding to a writing session that resulted in this draft but it is unclear.
Conclusion
Will we ever know for sure what Allen Ginsberg read at the 6 Gallery reading? Probably not, but until now there has been no real scholarship aimed at that particular event and so of course we have made no headway. I hope that this essay, other essays I have written, and most of all my recently published book can provide the basis for further investigation of this important moment in Beat history. I don’t claim to have all the answers—far from it—but these are steps in the right direction and I really hope that people will build upon my research to bring yet more clarity.
For further revelations to emerge, I suppose it would require the unexpected discovery of previously lost evidence, such as a tape, a manuscript, or even a particularly detailed letter or journal entry. But alas, the poets and audience members and gallery owners were not really interested in documenting that time. Jack Goodwin was the exception. Much useful evidence is known to have been lost or destroyed, suggesting it is unlikely we will find something more useful than Goodwin’s letter.
It seems very unlikely that there were any audio recordings of that reading. It is not impossible and certainly people connected to the gallery were actively recording poetry at that time, so perhaps one day a tape may surface. Gary Snyder said in December 1955 that Ginsberg had been recorded and that a tape was circulating but that could refer to any number of subsequent readings, with the most likely candidate being his Poetry Center performance. I hoped that a photo might turn up because a few photographers were in the audience and at least one was rumoured to have taken photos, but it is unclear whether this was really true and it seems extremely unlikely that she really did. But of course a photo still wouldn’t tell us what was read.
What is most tantalising is the fact that copies of “Howl” seem to have been printed and disseminated that night. Allen Joyce noted this in a letter to Jack Spicer a little later. This would of course answer almost all our questions… and it would no doubt make the person who finds it quite wealthy, given that another early draft is currently on sale for $375,000. This shows that such documents do occasionally appear (like the Joan Anderson letter did a decade ago) but with each passing year it seems a little less likely and the 6 Gallery reading remains frustratingly myth-like.
If you want to know the full story of the 6 Gallery reading, then consider getting a copy of A Remarkable Collection of Angels. I do not claim that it can put forth every little detail without doubt, but it is by a long measure the most comprehensive account. It looks at the history of the building, at the galleries that were there before the 6, at the poets’ and painters’ lives, and then attempts to piece together the story of how that reading was organised and carried out. It explores the aftermath, too, showing how Ginsberg in particular used the success of this one poetry reading to position himself as the most famous poet of his era. The book went on sale on October 7, 2025.
Footnotes
[1] I think this should be fairly obvious to those who have read “Howl” but if it is not then I would direct you to his 1956 letter to Richard Eberhart and his 1958 letter to John Hollander, both of which outline his aims with the structure of the poem and his intention for the third part to be an “expression of sympathy and identification with” the people so badly oppressed in Part I.
[2] The full title is Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript & Variant Versions, Fully Annotated by Author, with Contemporaneous Correspondence, Account of First Public Reading, Legal Skirmishes, Precursor Texts & Bibliography. I will abbreviate it in the text for obvious reasons.
[3] I will use “Draft #1,” “Draft #2,” etc as per Miles’ categorisation of the manuscript in the aforementioned book.
Endnotes
[i] Originally published in Litterair Paspoort, no. 110 (Nov. 1957), this essay was partially reprinted in the collection, Deliberate Prose. It’s on pages 239-242.
[ii] Kerouac, Jack, The Dharma Bums (Penguin Books: New York, 1986) p.13-14
[iii] Kenneth Rexroth and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, p.214
[iv] Charters, Ann, Kerouac: A Biography (Straight Arrow Books: San Francisco, 1973) p.235
[v] Ginsberg, Allen, Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript & Variant Versions, Fully Annotated by Author, with Contemporaneous Correspondence, Account of First Public Reading, Legal Skirmishes, Precursor Texts & Bibliography (Harper Perennial Modern Classics: New York, 2006) p.xxiii
[vi] Kramer, Jane, Allen Ginsberg in America (Random House: New York, 1969) p.48
[vii] Schumacher, Michael, Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2016) p.217
[viii] Goodwin’s letter is archived with Lewis Ellingham’s Poet Be Like God Research Materials at Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego.
[viii] Kenneth Rexroth and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, p.214
[ix] Allen Joyce to Jack Spicer, mid-October, 1955
[x] Charters, Ann, Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters 1940-1956 (Penguin: New York, 1996) p.524
[xi] Kenneth Rexroth and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, p.214
[xii] Kramer, Jane, Allen Ginsberg in America (Random House: New York, 1969) p.48