Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, Michael McClure, & Gary Snyder at the Berkeley Town Hall, March 18, 1956, captured here by Walter Lehrman, friend of the poets who lived in Berkeley at the time. Walter’s small but significant collection currently resides at Utah State University Logan, UT. (photo Walter Lehrman / courtesy Utah State University).
The first celebrated reading of “Howl”, Part I only, at 6 Gallery, October 7, 1955, wasn’t taped, so Prof. Tom Parkinson, member of Rexroth’s old Buddhist anarchist circle, organized another reading at Berkeley’s little Town Hall Theater festooned with Chinese ink brush orgy drawings by Robert LaVigne-- a couple hundred people crowded in, a mixture of artists from San Francisco, poetry aficionados, friends of Robert Duncan, ladies from the Potrero District, North Beach Bohemians, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Cassady, Ann charters, and an amazing group of poets on stage including Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Michael McClure, with Kenneth Rexroth as Master of Ceremonies. Five months after the 6 Gallery reading I’d finished Parts II and III of “Howl”. This added a huge dimension, extending the power of the poem into the Moloch section and beyond. And this was the first time I’d read “Howl” all the way through aloud, beginning to end, as well as “Sunflower Sutra”, “A Strange New Cottage In Berkeley” and “America,” further experiments with the long breath’d verse line.
