"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 ..."
Beat scholar David Wills recently published a book about that historic evening, and to promote the book and the evening, he recounted the history in a cool piece for Quillette: "A Subterranean Celebration: How the 6 Gallery reading in San Francisco on 7 October 1955 changed the counterculture."
On 7 October 1955, Allen Ginsberg gave the first public reading of “Howl” at the 6 Gallery in San Francisco. It was only his second poetry reading and he had little reason to feel it would be successful, yet a year later he was a minor celebrity and two years after that he and his Beat Generation friends were a national obsession—loved, loathed, imitated, and parodied. That reading started the San Francisco Renaissance, too, and helped to turn the Bay Area into a literary centre. It would not be long before the Beats spawned the beatniks, who arguably became the hippies.
It can be tempting to look back at events of great historical importance and feel that they were somehow inevitable, and yet that is not true of the 6 Gallery reading. In fact, its success was wildly improbable. The poets on stage that night were mostly unknown and untested. They read difficult work that should have had very limited appeal. Nor was the gallery itself a venue one would associate with era-defining moments. And while the city held some appeal as a place for the visual arts, it did not have a great literary history.
The 6 Gallery opened in October 1954 and was named for the fact that it had six founders: five young painter friends from near Los Angeles who had teamed up with one of their teachers at the California School of Fine Arts: a poet called Jack Spicer. In their final year of studies, they decided they wanted a place to display their work and Spicer encouraged them, suggesting that they expand the gallery’s function to include not just visual art but poetry. This was not as revolutionary as it perhaps sounds. Prior to the 6 Gallery, the building at 3119 Fillmore had been home to King Ubu, which was also an art gallery that one artist recalled was “primarily devoted to poetry reading.”
David Wills is a fascinating individual and a true scholar of the Beat Generation. His book about the night will undoubtedly enlighten and entertain even the most knowledgeable and passionate of Beat fans.
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