As a person of a certain age, I have my own memories of Howl.
A summer night. Four friends who have just graduated from high school are having a double date in Greenwich Village. They have had dinner in a tiny Italian restaurant in a courtyard with Christmas lights strung in the trees, spent time in a coffee house listening to poets wearing black from head to toe, smoking cigarettes and reading their work, and now they are strolling along the avenues not ready to take the subway home to the northeast Bronx. It's a lovely soft night and everyone in the Village seems to be outside. I am in love with Greenwich Village and one of the men. He's not the one I'm going steady with. I am in love with my friend's boyfriend. He has already started at City College, I'm working at a Manhattan advertising agency and enrolled in college at night, my friend is in secretarial school, and my boyfriend is starting at a Jesuit college when the summer ends. Late in the night we stroll through the streets of used book shops that are open until midnight. Tables outside are piled with used and new books. My boyfriend and friend have wandered over to the Good Humor truck parked along the curb and are buying ice cream. The man I love - let's call him Harry - and I are hungrily browsing the book stalls. He picks out a tiny pocket-sized volume of poems, buys it, and hands it to me. It is Howl. I've never heard of it. He tells me: read it and let me know what you think - this work is amazing. Wow! I think he chose to give this book to me - he respects my mind (many years later I found out he respected my body too, but that's another story). What were those Leonard Cohen words? he touched her perfect body with his mind?) I slipped the tiny volume into my white summer purse and couldn't wait to read it at home. Well, the jist of the story is that after the first few lines I didn't understand a word of Ginsberg's poem and it scared me a little with its references to dark things I'd only read about. I never did talk to Harry about the book and he never asked. I kept the book for decades and at some point it disappeared the way things disappear as we move through our lives. One day a couple of years ago as I was perusing the shelves of a used book store in Santa Fe, I found an original copy of Howl. It wasn't the first printing like the one I'd been given, but it was the third and the original price was 75 cents. I bought it for $2 or $3 and wrote my initials on the title page, thus reclaiming it once more. I understand it a bit better now and could finally have that conversation with Harry. But I haven't seen him in thirty years and, really, do I want him to see me now?
That same year of finding that old edition of Howl, I met Ferlinghetti in his City Lights bookstore in San Francisco. My friend's stepfather helped found that famous shop with him and she introduced me . He was old, but his blue eyes sparkled with a still-dangerously liberal glint and when I arrived home from that trip I began writing poems about him.
in the summer night
we were angel headed hipsters
with ideal love in our hearts
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