CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

My Discovery of Howl!

In the fall of 1957, I began visiting the student bookstore at the University of Missouri where the table with books of the Beat Generation, buoyed by the victory in San Francisco from the Howl trial, changed the course of my life.  I purchased Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems, mostly because of me scanning the introduction by William Carlos Williams. That day I also purchased some issues of “Evergreen Review,” (especially the one about the San Francisco Renaissance),  and Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.

My experience at the MU bookstore helped make me obsessed with bookstores and I began to spend as much time as I could savoring their sacredness.

In my own life, reading “Howl” was an epochal event.   It was to me at 18 what Poe had been at 15, except that Ginsberg was an energizer whereas Poe tended to calm one down.  I instantly sensed that the Beats were urging us onto an intoxicating mix of spontaneity and scholarship, and not to be........

© CounterPunch