You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the

podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.

It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.

What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism

and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.

And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject

you might not even have thought you were interested in.

Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,

you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.

Great Lives is a download from Radio 4. We hope you enjoy what you're about to hear.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked.

Today's program is about freedom and the fight for it.

Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynam-

Our hero battled for free speech, free expression, freedom from oppression and freedom from

traditional values. And he did it through the writing and reading of raw, freewheeling poetry which inspired American counterculture and founded the

beat generation.

floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz who bared their brains to heaven under the

The poet Alan Ginsburg reading his celebrated poem Howell and my guest whose

chosen Alan Ginsburg is poet, editor and artist Michael Horovitz, a man I describe as both an artist himself and a lifelong facilitator, sponsor and inspirer of other people's art.

Alan Ginsburg described Michael as a cockney, albionic, New Jerusalem, jazz generation,

sensitive bard. Michael, you knew Ginsburg. Jazz Generation sensitive Bard.

Michael, you knew Ginsburg, but what was your first introduction to his work?

...