I wrote recently about the 1957 obscenity trial of Howl, And Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg. I felt a certain nostalgia writing the piece, because the trial took place fifty years ago when I was a kid, and the Beatnik writers, of whom Ginsberg became the most famous, seem so rarified to me now. It’s as though they had been filmed in black and white and the movies now jump and rattle as we watch them, the images scratched, browned, and antiquarian. Also, it gave me considerable pleasure to know that the government censorship that the “not guilty” judgment in that trial abolished had remained abolished ever since.

Yesterday, however, I learned that this is not true.

For the fiftieth anniversary of the trial, Pacifica Radio, the organization made up of the community-supported radio stations KPFA, KPFK, WBAI and others, considered the possibility of broadcasting a reading of the poem “Howl”. It happens that, besides being the object of a landmark First Amendment freedom of speech judgment in a court of law, “Howl” is one of the truly remarkable poems of the twentieth century. So a commemoration of it seemed altogether laudable. But because of feared Federal Communications Commission rules on what constitutes obscene or unacceptable speech on the public airwaves, Pacifica determined not to do the broadcast on its stations. They worry that if the FCC fines them for broadcasting unacceptable speech, they will have to involve themselves in a freedom of speech suit, the costs of which could bankrupt Pacifica and put the stations out of business.

 Allen Ginsberg reading “Howl” in New York City in 1966.
So the problem is subtler now than it was in 1957. You don’t have to wait for actual censorship itself. The very fear that it will come causes organizations to muzzle themselves now. Perhaps you’d win in a trial. But you don’t test the waters willy-nilly because you’ll drown in the attorney fees that will result, no matter the judgment in court.

Luckily, though, we have the Internet. The rules regarding broadcasting do not pertain to webcasts, and Pacifica has posted a reading of “Howl” by Ginsberg himself on their site, as part of a longer program in which a very illuminating discussion of the history of the poem’s publication, the 1957 trial, and the importance of the poem as literature can also be found. (If you go to this link, it may be useful to you to have a copy of the text of "Howl" in front of you.) Besides the poem itself, the highlight of the program is a conversation with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, now eighty-eight years old, the San Francisco poet and bookseller who originally published “Howl.”