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48
Allen Ginsberg
in music and literature. Feeling the pressure, the F.C.C. ruled that
“indecent” material could only be broadcast on the radio between
midnight and 6 a.m. Broadcasters then had to decide whether material
was offensive to the community or not. In January 1988, “Howl”
was scheduled to be read on several radio stations as part of a weeklong
series on censorship. The broadcasters at five Pacifica stations
backed off. No one could fight the censorship, since there was no
law to challenge. Meanwhile, the F.C.C. fined several other stations
around the country for broadcasting movies and other materials that
the commission deemed “indecent” (Morgan). For the time being,
Ginsberg’s opposition triumphed, returning the nation to the idea
that had prevailed in the U.S. prior to 1957, i.e. that all art should be
suitable for children.
Howl mirrored the changes Ginsberg saw and heard around him
in America. It also advanced those changes. In the 1970s, in the hippie
counterculture he had helped to create, Ginsberg promised to rewrite
Howl to reflect the euphoria of the hippies. The new Howl would
be positive and redemptive, he said, and would begin with the line,
“I have seen the best minds of my generation turned on by music.”
But the poem was never written, perhaps for the good reason that it
could not have been transformative; it could not have presented the
unknown, the unimagined. It would have been part of the furniture of
that era, rather than a living howl in the teeth of the world.
NOTES
1. Throughout this article, “Howl” indicates the title of the poem
rather than the book Howl and Other Poems.
2. All quotations from “Howl,” unless otherwise indicated, will be
from the 1956 Howl and Other Poems.
3. AGHO indicates Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript and
Variant Versions, Fully Annotated by Author, with Contemporary
Correspondence, Account of First Public Reading, Legal Skirmishes,
Precursor Texts & Bibliography.
4. In the original, the line read “starving, mystical, naked . . .”
5. Kerouac’s The Town and the City was published in 1950 but was
unsuccessful. On the Road would not be published until 1957.
6. The original line was “dragging themselves through the angry
streets at dawn looking for a negro fix. . . .” Ginsberg switched