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Hello and thank you for downloading the BBC World Service History Program witness with me Simon Watts.

Today I'm taking you back to 1955 and one of the most important literary events in American history, the first reading of Alan Ginsburg's poem, Howell.

It's October 7, 1955 and at a modern art gallery in San Francisco a young poet

called Alan Ginsburg stands up to read a new work called Howell. A gay man and a Bohemian, Ginsburg feels oppressed by

mainstream America and he makes an impassioned cry for freedom.

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,

angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night. a supernatural darkness of cold water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz?

I think of Alan as being a Mahatma. Mahatma means big soul. And Alan was a big soul. The poet Michael McClure also read his

work that night. Alan was an intensely dedicated since childhood radical socialist and he spoke against the social

cruelties especially against the absolute stunning attempt to kill the existence of homosexuality.

In 1950s America being gay was illegal and in Howell Ginsburg also broke to booze by talking about

madness and drug-taking. The poem was equally daring in form going on for hundreds

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