Published Fall/Winter 2007
 
Do Look Back
(on the Fiftieth Anniversary of Allen Ginsberg's Howl)
by Susanne E. Hall | ns 69
Last year marked the fiftieth anniversary of Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems; over a million copies of the iconic City Lights black and white paperback have been sold since its 1956 debut. The anniversary prompted the publication of a spate of books on and by Ginsberg, as well as celebratory readings around the US. One of the most interesting celebrations was one that did not happen.
In 2003, an annual weeklong art and music festival organized in New York's East Village named itself "Howl!" in honor of Ginsberg's poem. The festival was the main event put on by the Federation of East Village Artists (FEVA), a group whose "purpose is to enhance and create opportunities for artists in the production of their work and to serve the community by bringing greater access to all forms of the arts." The festival's website (www.howlfestival.com) proclaims that despite the celebrities the festival attracts, the "real stars are the hardworking independent artists and writers who continue to invigorate the neighborhood with their inconoclastic [sic] spirit." Ginsberg, presumably, is meant to symbolize both the glamorous celebrity and the hardworking Village independent artist, but his symbolic value reaches farther than that.
The festival offers us a way of understanding the current place of Ginsberg and the legacy of countercultures with which he was affiliated. The FEVA website features a banner advertising its sponsors, which include HSBC Bank, the world's fourth largest private bank, Captain Morgan, a rum brand owned by a large multinational corporation, Belvedere Vodka, known for creating the "luxury vodka" market in the US, and the official tourism website for New York City. There is also a "Links" page that lists local businesses the site encourages you to patronize. The FEVA website demonstrates the unavoidable overlap between corporate sponsors and "independent" artists and businesspeople that powers the East Village in general and FEVA in particular. These often repressed connections burst forth to derail the event in 2006.
The festival collapsed amid accusations of mismanagement and the charge that FEVA founder Philip Hartman was using the festival to capitalize on the cultural cache of the neighborhood to further his own business interests. The festival is back on for 2007, but fails to help East Village artists even more by actually occurring. It is a victim of its own premise: it adds value to the already attractive "East Village" brand, contributing to surging real estate values in the area, the very cause it was supposedly formed to work against. FEVA claims that independent artists are the lifeblood of the area, but the nostalgic fantasy of the East Village as bohemian paradise actually prices most independent artists out of living there.
It is utterly appropriate that "Howl" would become the symbol for a festival that encapsulates the difficulty of resistance in a media-saturated commodity culture, the defining dilemma of Ginsberg's work and life. In his poetry and politics Ginsberg consciously attempted various strategies of drawing on the resources of corporate America in order to attack it. Undoubtedly the festival's organizers did not intend to associate themselves with Ginsberg's failures to find a way to work against the cooptation of counterculture by corporate interests; despite that, the easy adoption of his image as a nostalgic lifestyle brand points directly to his failures.
Ginsberg's failures to negotiate the problems of resistance in an age of mass media should be embraced as part of his legacy rather than erased to make him a marker of a naïve nostalgia. Splashy features in Life magazine made Ginsberg a household name, giving him a cultural toehold from which to try to broadcast messages of dissent. But because he could never be in control of the means of production or distribution of those messages, he could not, despite his playfulness and savvy with media agents, control the manipulation of their context or alteration of their meanings. As early as 1959, Ginsberg had a well-developed criticism of the mass media; he was not an unknowing accomplice. In the August 25, 1959, issue of the then-alternative Village Voice Ginsberg states quite bluntly: "The only immediate historical data that we can know and act on are those fed to our sense through systems of mass communication. These media are exactly the places where the deepest and most personal sensitivities and confessions of reality are most prohibited, mocked, and suppressed." And yet Ginsberg knew that it was through such channels that many Americans encountered his ideas.
This crisis came to a head for Ginsberg with his long poem "Wichita Vortex Sutra," a poet's attempt to exert a will-to-power that would trump the mass media stranglehold on language and declare an end to the Vietnam War through the visionary force of poetry. The paradox that led Ginsberg to seek an audacious visionary mode of resistance is made clear in the May 27, 1966, feature in Life magazine. The piece covers Ginsberg's visit to Wichita, during which the poem was being composed. It quotes Ginsberg explaining a need to turn away from mass media sources of information: "Because of overpopulation and the highly centralized network of artificial communication, it has become necessary to have a breakthrough of more direct, satisfactory contact." This sentiment appears on a page that also features an ad for US Savings Bonds in which President Johnson urges Americans to buy them to support the war effort, admonishing the reader: "Today, None of Us Can Remain Aloof on the Sidelines." Ginsberg was not unaware of the irony that "Wichita Vortex Sutra," a poem that is a meditation on the very problem of dissent in an age of corporate control of language, reached its widest audience in the excerpt published in Life, a magazine owned by media magnate and Vietnam War hawk Henry Luce. And yet he must have felt that he could not miss the chance to express to millions of readers his aversion to using the Life magazine platform to communicate with them.
Ginsberg's attempts to reckon with the power of mass media manifested themselves not only in his poetry, but also in his activism. Ginsberg was an early proponent of New Left performative protest strategies that sought to engage the interest of television reporters. In November 1965, activists in Berkeley were planning a march to Oakland to follow up a demonstration that had ended in a confrontation with police and vicious opposition from the Hell's Angels. A meeting was held to discuss strategies for the protest, and Ginsberg created a detailed document entitled "How to Make a March/Spectacle" to present to the committee. Ginsberg's document, though it did not win approval as the official plan for the march, was published in the newly-established countercultural newspaper The Berkeley Barb the day before the march. In it Ginsberg claims, "a spectacle can be made, an unmistakable statement OUTSIDE the war psychology which is leading nowhere." Ginsberg wanted a parade instead of a march. The ingredients for his spectacle included flowers, crosses, stars of David, and American flags to carry; harmonicas, flutes, recorders, guitars, banjos and violins to play; children's toys to distract the opposition; candy bars, paper halos and copies of the constitution to distribute to opposition; and movie cameras to document the occasion. Under "Other More Grandiose Possibilities" Ginsberg suggested a "corps of student newsmen to interview newsmen, propagandize and soften and charm TV crews, etc." Ginsberg later explained that he had had a realization that the march "could be seen as theater, as almost all political activity was" ("Coming to Terms" 15). Although he may have wanted to see himself as radically "OUTSIDE," the theater he suggests is not actually outside the psychology of the televised war, since it participates in the same discourse in an attempt to subvert it through satire and play. As a result, it did not offer a radical alternative to that psychology, nor could it compete with mainstream "political theater," which was buttressed by a multi-million dollar system of promotion and media coverage that his own theater could never hope to match.
The "political theater" in our own moment bears examination in light of the problem Ginsberg's protests highlighted, because it seems that we may indeed be repeating the past. In a recent New York Times article Randy Kennedy profiled the ongoing "Port Huron Project," in which famous New Left speeches are reenacted by hired actors. Organized by Mark Tribe, an artist and assistant professor of Modern Culture and Media Studies at Brown University, these reenactments occur in their original locations, such as a 1965 speech by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) president Paul Potter on the National Mall. One can't help but note Tribe's trepidation about declaring this performance art series to be acts of protest: "Is it protest? Well no, not quite. Is it theater? Not really. What is it?" (qtd. in Kennedy). The inability to easily categorize the event seems to be the very effect in which Tribe is most interested, and indeed it seems emblematic of the current confusion around how to mobilize dissent. Tribe hopes that seeing the unclassifiable speeches will somehow unsettle political stasis, as well as highlight links between the military-industrial complex of Potter's speech and its more globalized operation today. And yet, the Potter speech recreation was performed not for crowds of interested students, but rather for "about 30 people, many of them involved in videotaping, recording and photographing the event" (Kennedy). As the links to press coverage by major media outlets on the project's website (http://nothing.org/porthuronproject/) suggest, Tribe's innovation is attracting media coverage to a degree that staging original, current protest speeches does not. His recognition of the power that comes with drawing media attention is apace with Ginsberg's, just as the speeches themselves echo those of Ginsberg's era. In not knowing quite what to do with the attention once he has it, Tribe seems to be stuck in the struggle begun by those whose speeches he reproduces.
The 1960s was a period of great innovation and failure for Ginsberg, as he altered his poetics and politics in order to try to achieve some kind of communication with Americans unmediated by corporate or government interests. One senses that later in his life Ginsberg had ceased to struggle as energetically: when he allowed his image to be used in a Gap advertisement in the 1990s, he shrugged off criticism by explaining he donated the money to the Naropa Institute. By this time, the dependence of dissent on corporate money and media had come to seem unavoidable, and this is where we remain today.
Yet, there is a way in which "Howl," through its 1957 obscenity trial, was a successful agent of change. The trial is the subject of a recent book on the poem, Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression, which includes excerpts from the trial, the poem itself, a timeline, the press response, and several essays on censorship. Howl on Trial adopts a liberal rhetoric about continuing the battle against censorship; however, the archival material in the book belies the effort to situate the poem's trial as an unqualified victory within the liberal free speech battle.
Ginsberg's poem was an important force in opening space for obscenity in US literature and culture. Lawrence Ferlinghetti's introduction to Howl on Trial begins by arguing: "The 'Howl' that was heard around the world wasn't seized in San Francisco in 1956 just because it was judged obscene by cops, but because it attacked the bare root of our dominant culture, the very Moloch heart of our consumer society" (xi). To be more accurate, it was the overt and explicit references to homosexual acts in the poem that were so objectionable to the authorities. The trial transcript makes this clear, and letters between Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg in the collection demonstrate their suspicion of this possibility prior to the book's publication. When Ferlinghetti was cleared of charges (Ginsberg was never charged; only the salesperson who sold the book, Shigeyoshi Murao, and its publisher, Ferlinghetti, stood trial), Howl became the first major precedent to apply the Supreme Court's new Roth standard on obscenity, which stated that objectionable language was permissible so long as a work was not "utterly without redeeming social importance." Declaring a work containing such explicit language about sexual, especially homosexual, acts as having social importance was indeed a great victory in a battle that continued for a decade to fight for the publication of sexually graphic works.
The victory in the Howl trial set the precedent for major trials to follow, including those of Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer, and Fanny Hill. However, Howl on Trial's liberatory narrative fails to investigate the ways in which this process may have lessened the ability of art to express dissent. David Gates suggests that this process has deadened art's ability to affront, because almost nothing remains radically offensive in the wake of "Howl" and the precedent it helped protect. As he puts it: "something's been lost by our welcoming 'Howl' into the canon: the possibility of another 'Howl'" (164). The gains made by the increased freedom of speech around sexuality were extremely significant for artists and activists working on issues related to sexuality from the 1950s into the 1970s, and we have Ginsberg's courageous frankness to thank for opening up dialogues that made such gains possible. Nevertheless, Gates is right. "Howl" is not an eternally full well to which we can keep returning. It cannot shock us with the same force that it always has. In this respect, "Howl" is a poem whose impact has diminished precisely because of its own initial success.
In an essay included in another fiftieth-anniversary publication on "Howl," The Poem that Changed America, Ginsberg explains thirty years later how he wanted the poem to function in perpetuity: "I was curious to leave behind after my generation an emotional timebomb that would continue exploding in US consciousness in case our military-industrial-nationalist complex solidified into a repressive police bureaucracy" (146-7). Looking back on "Howl" fifty years after its composition, we do the poem a disservice if we buy into Ginsberg's logic here; there are important ways in which "Howl" is a bomb that could only go off once. Surely the poem can continue to raise readers to consciousness, but as Ginsberg himself presciently appreciated, his continued popularity is a testament not to the success of his strategies of indictment of the US military-industrial-media complex, but rather to that complex's impressively nimble resilience. In order to honor "Howl" and Ginsberg's long career, instead of celebrating how "Howl" changed America, we should look back carefully at its failure to do so. We should appreciate the radical strategies of resistance "Howl" opened up, and at the same time admit to ourselves their only temporary potency.
Works Cited
Farrell, Barry. "The Guru Comes to Kansas." Life Magazine 27 May 1966: 78-90.
FEVA Website. Federation of East Village Artists. 22 July 2007.
Gates, David. "Welcoming 'Howl' in the Canon." The Poem that Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later. Ed. Jason Shinder. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 159-164.
Ginsberg, Allen. "Coming to Terms with the Hell's Angels." Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995. Ed. Bill Morgan. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. 14-18.
---. "I've Lived With and Enjoyed 'Howl'." The Poem that Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later. Ed. Jason Shinder. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2006. 143-147.
---. "Poetry, Violence and the Trembling Lambs." The Village Voice 25 Aug. 1959.
Howl! Festival Website. Federation of East Village Artists. 15 June 2007.
Kennedy, Randy. "Giving New Life to Protests of Yore." New York Times 28 July 2007.
Morgan, Bill, and Nancy J. Peters, eds. Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression. San Francisco: City Lights, 2006.
Port Huron Project Website. 21 August 2007.
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