September 2005 | Editor’s Note
When Ginsberg Howled
This month’s cover, Larry Kennan’s iconic photo of Michael McClure, Bob Dylan, and Allen Ginsberg standing in a City Lights Bookstore alley, is more than just a piece of sixties nostalgia. Keenan was a 21-year old student when his teacher, McClure, asked if he would like to photograph a group of his friends. They turned out to be a veritable who’s who of the Beat movement, and, for the next year, Kennan documented the end of that scene, culminating in this signature 1965 image.
It had been ten years since Ginsberg, McClure, Gary Snyder, and other then unpublished poets had gathered for a reading at The Six Gallery, an event that revolutionized American poetry.
It saw the birth of what Jonah Raskin, in this month’s cover story, describes as “an innovative kind of ecological poetry.” But, most importantly, Ginsberg, an American Buddhist, activist and eco-visionary, debuted his epic jeremiad, Howl at the reading. As Raskin chronicles, this inaugural Beat Generation event could only have happened in San Francisco. The power of the Beats’ and Ginsberg’s free-form, spontaneous, mind utterance was not lost on Dylan, who soon adapted their jazzy, hipster rhythms and free verse phrasing to the medium of popular songwriting. Ginsberg howled and Dylan rocked. Kennan’s photo captures the synergy of those visionaries and a passing of the torch: two middle-class Jewish-American poet-prophets whose verse transformed our ways of seeing and hearing.
A series of Bay Area events will commemorate Howl ’s fiftieth anniversary. Ginsberg also appears in Martin Scorsese’s 3-hour documentary on Dylan, No Direction Home, which airs this month on PBS.
Ginsberg, writes Mark Gonnerman, helped launch a global movement of eco-awareness and left us a “wisdom of earthly relations” that endures and continues to inspire. His poetry resonates with the righteous anger of an Old Testament prophet raging against the shallowness, corruption and injustices of our time. Exiled from Eden, Ginsberg knew its heart, but his anger never exceeded his compassion. Ginsberg’s voice and vision live on, and we honor his legacy in this issue. He was a friend to us all.
— Carl Nagin
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