Ginsberg's "Howl" Obscene Again
The NYT is carrying a story about WBAI, a New York City radio station that had hoped to air Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” in its entirety, only to pull out for fear of the exorbitant fines that it could incur if the FCC took exception (“up to $325,000 for every violation of its standards”). And why did WBAI want to air “Howl” in the first place?
The occasion was the 50th anniversary of a court ruling that found the poem had “redeeming social importance” and was thus not obscene.
Oops. Not so fast, First Amendment.
Now, taking my outrage as rote, I have to admit this story makes me feel a little nostalgic. It’s almost like a little time machine took me all the way back to 1957, when Elvis was king, and Allen Ginsberg was still a fringe lunatic, threatening to seduce American virgins and sell them to the Red Menace for Benzedrine money. Oh, those were the days.
And then the time machine broke, and now I’m stuck in a world where a radio station is afraid to air a poem. A poem.
Tue., Oct. 9, 2007
Reader Comments (3)
Maybe this is just a nice way of saying "Howl" sucks. Eli Whitney would've beaten the shit out of Allen Ginsberg.
Yeah, what's obscene is that there's more poetry in ten minutes of Car Guys than in all of "Howl".
Its funny you talk of poetry and anachronistic fear. The other day I was reading some nut job who was ridiculing contemporary culture: essentially wikipedia is going to produce a relativistic wasteland in which everyone believe that "two plus two equals five."
The quote stuck in mind because it recalled my favorite introduction to a volume of poetry; discussing the difficulty of his work, e.e. cummings argued that while the boring everyday brain was stuck in a world in which two plus two equals four, the poet, through imagination,
(You can read the entire preface here--its short, and far more eloquent than my butchered paraphrase).
Unless, of course, such an imagination produces curse words. Then f plus u equals 375,000 dollars.