‘Howl’ Too Hot To Hear: 50 Years After Poem Ruled Not Obscene, Radio Fears To Air It
Fifty years ago today, a San Francisco Municipal Court judge ruled that Allen Ginsberg’s Beat-era poem “Howl” was not obscene. Yet today, a New York public broadcasting station decided not to air the poem, fearing that the Federal Communications Commission will find it indecent and crush the network with crippling fines.
Free-speech advocates see tremendous irony in how Ginsberg’s epic poem - which lambastes the consumerism and conformism of the 1950s and heralds a budding American counterculture - is, half a century later, chilled by a federal government crackdown on the broadcasting of provocative language.
In the new media landscape, the “Howl” controversy illustrates how indecency standards differ on the Internet and on the public airwaves. Instead of broadcasting the poem on the air today, New York listener-supported radio station WBAI will include a reading of the poem in a special online-only program called “Howl Against Censorship.” It will be posted on www.pacifica.org, the Internet home of the Berkeley-based Pacifica Foundation, because online sites do not fall under the FCC’s purview.
“Why, 50 years later after a judge ruled that children could read this poem, people are afraid the courts will say that their ears shouldn’t hear it,” said Ron Collins, a constitutional law instructor and First Amendment advocate who is leading a small group of authors, broadcasters and free-speech advocates pushing to broadcast the poem eventually. “Yet they can go on the Internet and see far, far worse things.”
Another irony: WBAI, the Pacifica Foundation station in New York that plans to post “Howl” online, is the same station that took on the FCC more than 30 years ago over the right to air George Carlin’s comedy routine featuring the “seven dirty words.” The challenge led to a 1978 Supreme Court decision governing what naughty words can be broadcast and when.
Pacifica’s attorney for FCC issues, John Crigler, thinks airing “Howl” would be “a great test case” in the current environment. But he understands why WBAI won’t broadcast “Howl,” even between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., the hours the FCC has cordoned off for rougher language.
WBAI program director Bernard White fears that the FCC will fine the station $325,000 for every one of Ginsberg’s dirty-word bombs. If each Pacifica station that aired the poem - and possibly repeated it - were to be fined for airing “Howl,” it could mean millions of dollars in fines.
The potential impact of such penalties is daunting to a commercial-free station with a $4 million annual budget whose financial state White described as “in the black, but we’re surrounded by a lot of red ink. A fine like that might crush us.”
Interim Pacifica Foundation executive director Dan Siegel said, “And I think they’re being optimistic with that financial assessment.” Siegel said each Pacifica station is free to air the program if it wishes, but he didn’t know if any planned to.
But with a budget of $18 million for all of its five stations, Siegel said, “it might make more sense for CBS or someone like them to take on a risk like this.”
So the poem that begins “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness” finds itself an odd bedfellow in the battle against the FCC with entertainers like Nicole Richie and Cher, both of whom were deemed to cross the FCC’s dirty-words line that free-speech advocates say is constantly shifting.
Last month, several public broadcasting outlets - including San Francisco’s KQED - broadcast “clean” versions of Ken Burns’ World War II documentary “The War” because they feared the FCC would punish them for airing four four-letter words that turn up over the course of the visually graphic 14-hour documentary about the brutality of war.
At last month’s Emmy Awards broadcast, the Fox network censored three instances in which performers said words that the network felt could land it an FCC fine. One involved comedian Ray Romano using the word “screwing.” In another instance, a performer mouthed, but didn’t say, a four-letter word. The third was actress Sally Field using the word “goddamn” to describe her opposition to the war in Iraq.
Free-speech advocates and broadcasters say uncertainty about appropriateness is rooted in two recent cases that are wending their way through the court system.
Last month, attorneys for CBS asked a federal appeals court to overturn a $550,000 fine the FCC imposed for airing singer Janet Jackson’s exposed breast during her infamous “wardrobe malfunction” in the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show. The FCC said that even though the exposure lasted only 9/16th of a second, CBS failed to exercise proper control of its “employees” - Jackson and halftime show co-star Justin Timberlake.
In June, the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ruled that the FCC acted “arbitrarily and capriciously” when it planned to penalize Fox for “fleeting expletives” uttered by Cher and Richie at the Billboard Music awards shows in 2002 and 2003 respectively. The network’s attorneys said the FCC hadn’t punished such “fleeting expletives” since the 1978 Pacifica case involving WBAI and Carlin’s seven dirty words.
But while Pacifica’s Crigler said “Howl” would be a good test case for this new landscape, University of Virginia law professor and former FCC Commissioner Glen O. Robinson said “it is best to let the other cases go through the system first.”
“Maybe the commission would look differently on it if we were talking about Shakespeare, but Ginsberg isn’t Shakespeare,” he said.
But in an era in which a bottomless well of profanity and pornography is available online, why should it matter that “Howl” can’t be broadcast on the radio? Finding “Howl” is a quick online search away for anyone old enough to access a computer.
“But you still have to have a computer,” said Janet Coleman, arts director at WBAI, who is airing a program Wednesday about “Howl” with San Francisco’s iconic poet and City Lights Books owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti and others. Like other station employees, she feels frustrated by the current atmosphere.
“This is about the public airwaves. If we can’t control what goes on them, then how much freedom do we really have?” she said.
The power of Ginsberg’s poem isn’t lost on Ferlinghetti, who faced jail time and a fine 50 years ago for publishing “Howl.” In August, Ferlinghetti joined Collins’ group of free-speech advocates, writers and attorneys in asking WBAI to air the poem.
In an interview to be broadcast today on WBAI to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the poem’s legal victory, Ferlinghetti was asked what Ginsberg, who died in 1997, would have said about the broadcast controversy.
“Ah, well, I’m sure he’d have plenty to say about it. I often lament that he isn’t around to say it,” Ferlinghetti told WBAI.
“As Allen Ginsberg’s original publisher and editor, for most of his life, I look at the present situation as a repeat in spades of what happened in the 1950s, which was also a repressive period,” he said. “The current FCC policy wasn’t conceived just for poetry, but when applied to the case of Allen Ginsberg’s poem ‘Howl,’ it amounts to government censorship of an important critique of modern civilization, especially of America and its consumerist society, whose breath is money, still.
“It’s such a hypocritical concept of American culture in which children are regularly exposed to adult programming in the mass media, with subjects ranging from sexual to criminal to state-sponsored terrorism, while at the same time they are not allowed to hear poetry far less explicit,” Ferlinghetti said. “I suggest the FCC ban all television newscasts until after 10 p.m., when children won’t be listening.”
‘Howl’ online
Hear a recording of Allen Ginsberg reciting his poem “Howl” in January 1959 in Chicago on “Howl Against Censorship” in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the San Francisco court decision finding the poem was not obscene. The program will be posted at 9 a.m. today at www.pacifica.org.
Excerpts
The poem
The beginning of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”:
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 …
The ruling
What San Francisco Municipal Court Judge Clayton Horn, in his ruling on Oct. 3, 1957, said of “Howl”:
“The theme presents unorthodox and controversial ideas. Coarse and vulgar language is used in treatment and sex acts are mentioned, but unless the book is entirely lacking in social importance it cannot be held obscene.”
Online resources
For more information about how the FCC defines obscene, indecent and profane broadcasts:
www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumer facts/obscene.html
Voice your opinion
To contact the FCC or to file a complaint:
www.fcc.gov/cgb/com plaints_general.html
Consumer and mediation specialists also are available Monday through Friday, 5 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. PDT to answer questions and assist in filing a complaint. Call toll-free at (888) 225-5322 (voice) or (888) 835-5322 (TTY).
E-mail Joe Garofoli at jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com.
© 2007 The San Francisco Chronicle
“HOWL” A four letter word we should all be screaming!
Insane. Killing a Million Iraqis…No Problemo…saying a 4-letter word…Censored. This is Insane !
Ever since the Rivers of Bowery were dusted with ashes from 9/11, Ginsberg’s work has grown ever more essential.
The free speech movement — about 16 years after the publication of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” - made it clear that repression begins with being rid of ‘obscene’ language, that is with language that uncovers, and when government agencies are free to censor “obscenity”, they will also censor any & all information that they don’t want the citizenry to have. In the abscence of revealing free speech, hate speech, which covers up the misdeeds & complicity of its speakers with violent repression, flourishes.
LET IT OUT!!!!
OOWWWWWOOOOOOOOOO!
Freedom of speech and freedom of the press that you refer to was part of the pre-Dubya Constitution. They are not included in the Dubya Constitution.
Congress confirmed that last month.
Wow, people still listen to radio?
Howling
bowing
eating shit, force fed
by a pack of political sheep
owned, bought and paid for
the poor man begs his dinner
nothing really changes
only the lies they want you to believe
well, here is Howl:
https://notes.utk.edu/bio/greenberg.nsf/0/6f7dd8b9270db5c585256d0d001e0a93?OpenDocument
among 317,000 references to it via googl
omigawd, i read it and now am so corrupted LOLLLL
such wankers
I never heard Howl before, thanks. We need it more than ever.
Idiots still control us. We’re still howling about it 50 years later, and still censored. Oh wait, even more censored. We’re backspinning. Congratulations, America!
No, this is great! Allen would have loved to know that his opus still had such potentency, that it still caused some of us to expose our banality and flabby morality, and that by censoring it, it brings it to light to a new generation who need to heed its message! “Howl” was and is one of the greatest American poems.
indeed–HOWL reveals how far we haven’t come in 50 years. sure, many advancements in science, consumerism, etc. but in our hearts and minds we are nowhere. we need a good spiritual lawyer, ’cause we’re morally bankrupt.
“No, this is great! Allen would have loved to know that his opus still had such potentency, that it still caused some of us to expose our banality and flabby morality, and that by censoring it, it brings it to light to a new generation who need to heed its message!”
He wished to be a national poet, and in the early ’80s he refused to recite it at readings because he regarded it as a response to a particularly ugly piece of the nation’s history, which he saw returning with the reign of Reagan. Inasmuch as Howl retains its potency, it’s a failure; I believe that he’d prefer it were as familiar and uncontroversial as Paul Revere’s Ride was for earlier generations — that would signal a true advance in human freedom.
Yes, we are more censored then ever before. As a pastor, I am not allowed to think differently than my parishioners, not by my denomination, but by the parishioners themselves. Although I hadn’t preached a sermon on homosexuality, I was forced out of my first church because I though homosexuals should be accepted in the church, and advocated that those who wanted to take a negative stand on the issue should slow down and seriously study why others think differently than them. In my second church, I was fired because I said that I believed in Just War theory, instead of the currently popular Any War theory, also without my preaching from the pulpit on the issue. Among my strongest supporters in that church were two World War II vets, a Viet nam Vet, and a couple, who had three grandchildren serving in Iraq, by the way. Big Brother is finally here complete with the thought police. The government does not even have to work that hard to censor us. We do it to ourselves.
Poetry has power and poetry with content is something the ruling elites do their best to supress but it lives and continues to change lives.
WOW ! I often wonder why we don’t have the same type of inspired genius leadership that defined many aspects of the the 60’s cultural revolution ?
Have we become internalized catatonics wallowing in a collective psychosis silently banging our heads against the wall ?
Yet, a local group of amateur poets here in the new Montana had a Ginsberg reading shortly after his death. I wrote the follwing eulogy and won all the Moose Drool (local micro-brew) I could drink. PEACE !
GINSBERG
I pray my thanks to Saint Allen
for fucking the brain of America
with words and divine madness
of beat love and compassion
for the giant problem child yet to look
in the mirror and be relieved
of terminal cultural constipation.
Sitting in the Berkeley public library
you became the universe transformed
spare change in your head for assets
wondering how to tell the world
with nothing more than poetry
becoming a winged blunt instrument
gushing a sexual rush of dharma dreams
shattering the delusions of your time.
Tripping through India smoking dope
with naked ash covered Sadhus
you were baptized in the Ganges river
where half cremated torsos floated to the edge
of the city and devoured by starving dogs
howling to the sky that everything is sacred.
Johnson and Nixon murdered
from the White House pissing
on the graves of Kennedy and King
feeding industry orgasms of profit
without feeling a thing when napalm burned
gook children crying out for Mama San
wondering why their flesh was on fire.
Generals lounged by Bangkok pools
wallowing in pot belly blow jobs from
sweet Thai butterflies on C.I.A. drugs
while Buddhist monks burned alive
to make news in Life magazine.
Poverty line grunts died jungle deaths
fragging officers for justice or survival
forced to fight for the corporate right
to cleanse the planet of dirty reds
who fought for country, ancestors, family,
and those yet to be born.
Burroughs injected ten kilos of heroin
into his third eye when he saw
the psychosis of obscene normalcy
on every billboard and TV screen amazed
by the hypocrisy of our national naked lunch.
New jazz mutations filled poems of beat
ideas born on dissident bummer roads of freedom
played by Parker and Coltrane
liberating legions of slaves with every solo
flight on a shortcut to enlightenment
and an early grave by giving too much.
But you chose to chant OM and be peace
facing angry Chicago convention pigs
salivating with billy-club lust
for the dangerous queer and flower freaks
and mothers worried their son would be
the first on the block to come home in a box.
Television reporters were impaled
on picture window glass by uniforms of hate
without numbers or faces rabid as
Mayor Daily foaming and spitting
his street gang roots of ignorance
behind a clenched fist for the messengers
of peace occupying his city turf.
Each day young black men returned
to windy city homes in body bags
wiggling to the blues of Junior Wells
who cried, “My brother’s over in Vietnam”
while the Panthers died in dreaming sleep
from bullets through doors and walls
only to have the mess cleaned up in time
for mass and the St. Patrick day’s parade.
Bored with America we stayed up all night
riding flashing subway noise and light
to the park climbing on the bronze
statue lap of Abraham Lincoln posed
only to discover he had no penis,
so we painted his metal nails hot pink
and asked how it felt to have pigeons shit
on your head and his thoughts on democracy
for the rich that gave us the ghettos
of the Great Society and blood
in the sewer drains of Kent State.
The United States of idiots wasn’t worth a dime
dropped in a hydrogen jukebox
exploding and exposing a redneck bar
on any main street where their dicks got hard
while beating on hippies cuffed and jailed
for looking like a crazed incarnate Christ
threatened by The Man with endless torture
if they dared to open their hearts
or tried to fly over the cuckoo’s nest.
You sang of cocks and cum and nipples floating
above this world graced by Tantric angels
whispering that gender is an illusion
to the mind of the Buddha
but realizing the bliss of kundilini
could be bent into Samsara
and fuel the obsessions of capital war.
They tried to crucify your love of men
but you laughed and dropped your shorts
exposing homophobic feminine fears
manifested as mutant thoughts for bigger bombs
bursting into circumcised mushroom clouds
of radioactive male military insanity.
For all to see you caressed the holy goof
who drove his crystal blues too fast
and touched the sacred ground
of a holy purple anus twitching
to atonal Sufi melodies played
by Thelonious Monk spinning
as the F.B.I. fished your turds from toilets
to analyze what made you so crazy
since Hoover wasn’t to blame
it must have been reefer madness.
Migrations of suffering Dharma arrived
invisible to the West over a million
Tibetan bodies paving the way
for Kissinger’s trade with China of
death detente and burgers for Bejing
infected with mad America disease
and new themes for Hollywood.
In the end you became a Tibetan pilgrim
gazing at Lhasa lost on the high plateau
wondering how all this happened
understanding the Buddha’s antidote
for Christians hooked on the hopeless horrors
of violating their commandments
as they killed for peace and new cars.
Your visions embraced the Milky Way
with star semen light of altruistic passion
words of holy shit still rotting
in the compost of our minds
sprouting flowers from time to time
between the lines of every work today
blissfully bombing mad America
with the ghost of your truth
and tough poetic love.
Yo J Conrad! Nice work! Send it to Kronos Quartet! They might cover it like they did HOWL! I’m stealing a copy, with your screen name attached of course!
jungleboy:
Thanks. I had a lot of tormented fun writing that poem some of which is real experience mixed in with Ginsberg’s life. I once actually took a dip in the Ganges…etc. Partially burned funeral toros really do float down the river.
If anyone likes the poem feel free to share it with friends or whatever. My complete name is John Conrad Smart, and I fell into Common Dreams after writing the following war crimes article for my paper in a less poetic style.
” Public debt for private profit is the game played by an imperial White House and our complicit Congress of invertebrates. Checks and balances and the separation of powers have diminished while militarism is gaining ground. Our constitutional republic has been hijacked and not by Muslims.”
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/07/31/2886/
I can be reached at lamagonzo.hotmail.com the handle being derived out of reverence for the Dalai Lama and Hunter S. Thompson.
“The Trouble With Our State”
By Daniel Berrigan
The trouble with our state
was not civil disobedience
which in any case was hesitant and rare.
Civil disobedience was rare as kidney stone
No, rarer; it was disappearing like immigrant’s disease.
You’ve heard of a war on cancer?
There is no war like the plague of media
There is no war like routine
There is no war like 3 square meals
There is no war like a prevailing wind.
It flows softly; whispers
don’t rock the boat!
The sails obey, the ship of state rolls on.
The trouble with our state
–we learned only afterward
when the dead resembled the living who resembled the dead
and civil virtue shone like paint on tin
and tin citizens and tin soldiers marched to the common whip
–our trouble
the trouble with our state
with our state of soul
our state of siege–
was
Civil
Obedience.