National Endowment for the Arts et al. v. Finley et al. The Supreme Court upheld a “decency” standard for NEA grants.
1999–. ACLU v. Ashcroft. Since the 2002 COPA [Child Online Pornography Act] victory of the ACLU in the Supreme Court, cases that concern the government’s attempt to restrict access to “obscene” material on the Internet are still being contested. The ACLU is representing plaintiffs who publish literary and educational materials online, including Salon.com magazine, Powell’s Bookstore, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti/City Lights Books. The language of some of the laws’ propositions could prevent access by everyone (not just children) to educational material on AIDS, for example, or to works of literature. The plaintiffs further assert that reliance on “community standards” improperly allows the most conservative communities to dictate what should be considered indecent. Under present law, Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” could be subject to censorship once again if offered on City Lights’ web site.
References:
American Civil Liberties Union. www.aclu.org
American Library Association. www.ala.org
Clark, Allan. Instances of Censorship throughout History. Humanist Association of San Diego. www.godless.org
Ehrlich, J.W., ed. Howl of the Censor. San Carlos, CA: Nourse Publishing Co., 1961
Ernst, Morris L. and Alan U. Schwartz. Censorship: The Search for the Obscene [Milestones of Law Series]. NY: Macmillan, 1964
Haffercamp, Jack. “Studies in Erotology,” Libido. www.libidomag.com
Kovarik, Bill. Interactive Media Law. Radford University, Radford, VA. www.radford.edu
Noble, William. Bookbanning in America: Who Bans Books? and Why. Middlebury, VT: Paul S. Eriksson, 1990
“The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.”
—Walt Whitman
DEDICATION To—
Jack Kerouac, new Buddha of American prose, who spit forth intelligence into eleven books written in half the number of years (1951–1956)—On the Road, Visions of Neal, Dr. Sax, Springtime Mary, The Subterraneans, San Francisco Blues, Some of the Dharma, Book of Dreams, Wake Up, Mexico City Blues, and Visions of Gerard—creating a spontaneous bop prosody and original classic literature. Several phrases and the title of Howl are taken from him.
William Seward Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, an endless novel which will drive everybody mad.
Neal Cassady, author of The First Third, an autobiography (1949) which enlightened the Buddha.
All these books are published in Heaven.
Lucien Carr, recently promoted to Night Bureau Manager of New York United Press.
Howl for Carl Solomon
Introduction by William Carlos Williams
When he was younger, and I was younger, I used to know Allen Ginsberg, a young poet living in Paterson, New Jersey, where he, son of a well-known poet, had been born and grew up. He was physically slight of build and mentally much disturbed by the life which he had encountered about him during those first years after the First World War as it was exhibited to him in and about New York City. He was always on the point of “going away,” where it didn’t seem to matter; he disturbed me, I never thought he’d live to grow up and write a book of poems. His ability to survive, travel, and go on writing astonishes me. That he has gone on developing and perfecting his art is no less amazing to me.
Now he turns up fifteen or twenty years later with an arresting poem. Literally he has, from all the evidence, been through hell. On the way he met a man named Carl Solomon with whom he shared among the teeth and excrement of this life something that cannot be described but in the words he has used to describe it. It is a howl of defeat. Not defeat at all for he has gone through defeat as if it were an ordinary experience, a trivial experience. Everyone in this life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated.
It is the poet, Allen Ginsberg, who has gone, in his own body, through the horrifying experiences described from life in these pages. The wonder of the thing is not that he has survived but that he, from the very depths, has found a fellow whom he can love, a love he celebrates without looking aside in these poems. Say what you will, he proves to us, in spite of the most debasing experiences that life can offer a man, the spirit of love survives to ennoble our lives if we have the wit and the courage and the faith—and the art! to persist.
It is the belief in the art of poetry that has gone hand in hand with this man into his Golgotha, from that charnel house, similar in every way, to that of the Jews in the past war. But this is in our own country, our own fondest purlieus. We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels. This poet sees through and all around the horrors he partakes of in the very intimate details of his poem. He avoids nothing but experiences it to the hilt. He contains it. Claims it as his own—and, we believe, laughs at it and has the time and effrontery to love a fellow of his choice and record that love in a well-made poem.
Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell.
HOWL
For
Carl Solomon
I
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree