Six Poets at the Six Gallery
On 7 October 1955 Allen Ginsberg read Howl aloud in a converted garage on Fillmore Street. Lawrence Ferlinghetti published it, was arrested for obscenity, and won, a 1957 ruling that a work with redeeming social importance is not obscene, which changed what American publishers could print. City Lights is still open. North Beach was cheap then.
Part of San Francisco
59 moments in this segment.
- - Neal Cassady in a Denver police mugshot. Cassady was photographed by Denver police in 1944, years before he became the restless driver at the centre of Beat writing and a fixture of the San Francisco scene. The booking image is one of the earliest surviving photographs of him.
- - Ginsberg's HOWL conjured by Alex Caldiero. Howl by Allen Ginsberg was first unleashed at the 6 Poets 6 Gallery reading on Oct. 7, 1955 in San Francisco. We honor this event by presenting a pre-howl digital mix of poets and musicians, then Alex Caldiero conjures Ginsberg's Howl.
- - JACK KEROUAC's account of The Six Gallery Poetry reading '55. Geoffrey Pond performs a monologue written by Jack Kerouac. Jack's account The Six Gallery poetry reading in San Francisco Oct 7, 1955. The night HOWL was first read by Allen Ginsberg. Kenneth Rexroth presented five young poets Allen Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, and Phili
- - Rexroth closes with The Mirror in the Woods. The final part of Kenneth Rexroth's July 1955 Poetry Center recording, closing with his poem The Mirror in the Woods. No recording of the 6 Gallery reading exists, which makes contemporaneous tape of its master of ceremonies the closest surviving sound of that year.
- - Rexroth reads The Lights in the Sky Are Stars. Part four of the Poetry Center's July 1955 session with Kenneth Rexroth, reading from his sequence The Lights in the Sky Are Stars. Recorded at the Little Theater at San Francisco State College, in the months before Rexroth convened the 6 Gallery reading.
- - Rexroth reads his Chinese translations at the Little Theater. The second part of Kenneth Rexroth's July 1955 Poetry Center recording, in which he reads from One Hundred Poems from the Chinese. Rexroth was the elder of the San Francisco Renaissance and the master of ceremonies at the 6 Gallery reading that October.
- - Rexroth records at San Francisco State on translation. Kenneth Rexroth reads from One Hundred Poems from the Chinese and In Defense of the Earth and talks about translating poetry, recorded by the Poetry Center at the Little Theater, San Francisco State College. This opening part takes up William Carlos Williams and Lawrence Hart. Rexroth would introduce the six poets at the 6 Gallery three months later.
- - Rexroth reads at the San Francisco Poetry Center. Recorded by the Poetry Center at the Little Theater, San Francisco State College, on 13 July 1955, less than three months before Rexroth would MC the 6 Gallery reading. He reads from One Hundred Poems from the Chinese and In Defense of the Earth and talks about translation. This is contemporaneous audio of the man at the centre of the San Francisco Renaissance in the exact year of the reading nobody recorded.
- - Contestants for Miss Beatnik pose beside a piece of beatnik art. Five contestants for the title of Miss Beatnik of 1959 stand before a sample of beatnik artwork ahead of the judging, sponsored by the Venice Arts Committee in Venice, California. The Los Angeles Times caption names them as Michi Monteef, Sammy McCord, Patti McCrory, Shaunna Lea and, at the rear, Jan Vandaveer. The image documents how quickly the Beat scene was turned into a publicity contest.
- - Nightlife on the neon streets in 35mm. Thirty-five millimetre film of San Francisco nightlife and street scenes from the Kinolibrary archive collections. The strip of clubs and bars is the tourist-facing city that grew up around North Beach after the beatnik became a spectacle and bus tours began running through Grant Avenue.
- - McClure reads his beast language to the lions. Michael McClure reads aloud to lions, performing the invented animal language of his Ghost Tantras. McClure read second at the 6 Gallery in October 1955, including For the Death of 100 Whales. The film is dated 1966 by its title.
- - McClure on peyote and his poetic process. An excerpt from Richard O. Moore's USA Poetry television series, filmed in 1966 with Michael McClure discussing how he writes and his experiments with peyote. Moore's series is genuine period broadcast documentary of the Bay Area poets, made a decade after the 6 Gallery reading and released here by his publisher.
- - KRON-TV looks back on the fifties city. Episode seven of KRON-TV's Decades series, made in 1987 and presented by Evan White, which uses original news footage alongside interviews to reconstruct San Francisco in the 1950s. It covers the suburbs, television, changing fashion and the pressures on city life in the decade that produced both the North Beach scene and its dispersal.
- - Allen Ginsberg recites his poem Howl in 1995 (truncated). Poet Allen Ginsberg reads his poem “Howl” at a poetry reading at Six Gallery in San Francisco. The poem was an immediate success that rocked the Beat literary world and set the tone for confessional poetry of the 1960s and later. Ginsberg was born in 1926 to a high school English teacher father and
- - The Source traces the Beats to their deaths. Chuck Workman's feature documentary follows the Beats from Ginsberg and Kerouac's 1944 meeting at Columbia through to the deaths of Ginsberg and Burroughs in 1997, with actors performing the writing. It is a full-length documentary about the movement, clearly labelled as such, and reaches San Francisco as one stop on a longer arc.
- - Ferlinghetti reads at a La Jolla bookshop. Lawrence Ferlinghetti reads and speaks at D.G. Wills Books in La Jolla. Filmed in 2005, when the City Lights founder was in his mid-eighties and still touring bookshops to read.
- - Ferlinghetti reads Poetry as Insurgent Art at Moe's. Ferlinghetti reads from Poetry as Insurgent Art at Moe's Books in Berkeley on 17 September 2007. The book is his late manifesto, and the reading shows the publisher of the Pocket Poets series still arguing for poetry as a public and political act.
- - City Lights turns fifty on Columbus Avenue. The bookstore's fiftieth-anniversary party on the corner of Columbus and Broadway, with Ferlinghetti talking about the early years and reading a poem to the crowd. The shop opened in 1953 with five hundred dollars each from Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin.
- - McClure at Berkeley's Holloway poetry series. A full-length reading and conversation with Michael McClure for the Holloway Series at UC Berkeley. His work runs from Ghost Tantras, which he famously read to the lions at the San Francisco Zoo, to the play The Beard and his records with Ray Manzarek, and here he accounts for it himself.
- - Jazz Heritage Center Presents - Harlem of the West. WW II ended, The Fillmore became The Place. "The Set" where you could get anything legal, illegal, local or foreign, wet and wild, dry and dicey. The soldiers were back and times were good, everyone wanted to have a good time while settling down in the port city of San Francisco. Placed against the
- - Howl - out in the UK 25/2/10. Starring James Franco as Allen Ginsberg. The story of Ginsberg's masterful poem and the subsequent obscenity trial that ensued, HOWL weaves together 3 strands of the story: imagined interviews with Ginsberg recounting his inspiration for the poem, the resulting court case and the poem itself, animat
- - Trailer for the Kenneth Rexroth documentary. Hen House Studios' portrait of Kenneth Rexroth, the poet, critic and translator generally credited with instigating the San Francisco Renaissance. It was Rexroth who introduced the readers at the 6 Gallery on 7 October 1955, in what an eyewitness recalled as a bow tie and a shabby old coat rather than the dapper suit of legend.
- - McClure reads for University of California television. University of California Television films Michael McClure reading a selection of his poetry and discussing his work. McClure was the youngest of the poets Rexroth introduced at the 6 Gallery in 1955 and one of the few who left a first-hand account of the evening, including Rexroth's shabby coat and bow tie.
- - Ferlinghetti reads inside City Lights during Litquake. Lawrence Ferlinghetti reads a poem at City Lights as part of Litquake, filmed in the Columbus Avenue shop he opened in 1953. The store's upstairs Poetry Room remained a working reading space more than half a century after it published Howl and Other Poems.
- - Ferlinghetti on his painting and the City Lights years. David Perry interviews Lawrence Ferlinghetti about a museum exhibition of his visual art and about his history in San Francisco. Ferlinghetti bought out his partner Peter D. Martin's half of City Lights in 1955 for a thousand dollars and built the publishing arm around the Pocket Poets Series.
- - Ferlinghetti reads Joyce inside City Lights. Filmed in the shop he co-founded in 1953, Ferlinghetti reads from Joyce for City Lights' own Banned Book Project. The framing is deliberate: the store's publisher was himself prosecuted in 1957 for issuing Howl and Other Poems, and Judge Clayton Horn's October verdict found the book carried redeeming social importance.
- - Trailer for Christopher Felver's Ferlinghetti documentary. Christopher Felver filmed Ferlinghetti over the course of a decade for this feature portrait. The trailer sets out the case the film makes, that the bookseller was less a Beat poet than the catalyst who published and defended the others.
- - A writer of the fifties recalls the Beats and the bomb. The writer Robert Briggs describes witnessing an atomic bomb test while serving in the US Army and the Beat Generation he belonged to in the 1950s, in a film directed by Chel White. First-hand testimony from within the scene rather than commentary about it.
- - Ferlinghetti on his Italian heritage and the bookshop. The Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco films Lawrence Ferlinghetti speaking about rediscovering his Italian ancestry, in his role as cultural ambassador. The conversation touches on the founding of City Lights in North Beach, the Italian quarter where the Beat scene took hold.
- - Inside City Lights as a working bookstore. The Exploratorium's series goes inside City Lights to look at how the shop actually operates, six decades after Ferlinghetti and Martin opened it as an all-paperback store at 261 Columbus Avenue. It treats the place as a functioning literary institution rather than a Beat relic.
- - McClure reads a poem for Diane di Prima. McClure reads a poem beginning with a line by Diane di Prima, one of the San Francisco poets who came up in the wake of the 6 Gallery reading. The recording is one of a short series filmed with him in the Bay Area.
- - McClure reads Raven's Feather. A short piece to camera in which McClure reads Raven's Feather. The ecological strand in his work goes back to the 6 Gallery bill itself, where he read For the Death of 100 Whales.
- - McClure reads Acid Mementos to camera. Michael McClure, who read second at the 6 Gallery in 1955 with Point Lobos: Animism and For the Death of 100 Whales, reads his Acid Mementos poems. He was the youngest of the six and outlived nearly all of them, still performing this work on camera six decades on.
- - Snyder reads The North Coast at the public library. Gary Snyder reads his poem The North Coast at the San Francisco Public Library, presenting illustrated poems with the artist Tom Killion. Snyder closed the 6 Gallery reading in October 1955 with A Berry Feast and left for Japan the following year on a Zen studies scholarship.
- - Gary Snyder reads at White Lotus Farms. A full evening with Gary Snyder recorded at White Lotus Farms on 17 September 2015. Snyder left for Japan in 1956 on a First Zen Institute scholarship after the State Department initially refused him a passport, and the Zen and wilderness commitments audible here were already present when he closed the 6 Gallery reading.
- - The Harlem of the West: Jazz and supper clubs on Fillmore. Fred Jordan, San Francisco African American Chamber of Commerce, talks about how he loved to go to jazz and supper clubs in The Fillmore District of San Francisco in the 1970s. At the time there were 29 clubs over the space of only a few blocks, and all the great musicians of the time recorded there
- - Ferlinghetti and Hirschman on the North Beach scene. Lawrence Ferlinghetti and poet Jack Hirschman speak at Berkeley for the California Countercultures series about the Beat Generation in North Beach. Ferlinghetti co-founded City Lights and published Howl; Hirschman organised the San Francisco International Poetry Festival. Two participants describing the neighbourhood scene from inside it.
- - Di Prima and Ferlinghetti look back on the Beat city. The Washington Post films Diane di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Herbert Gold recalling San Francisco in the 1950s and 1960s, when the city was the setting of the Beat literary movement, and reflecting on how it has changed since. Three writers who were present, speaking about the neighbourhood the scene made and then lost.
- - Snyder on the West Coast scene of the fifties. Gary Snyder, who closed the 6 Gallery bill with A Berry Feast, recalls the West Coast Beat scene of the 1950s for the New Mexico History Museum. He opens with the question the reading came out of: since none of them could get published, why not give a poetry reading.
- - Robert Hass opens a Beat portrait exhibition. Robert Hass reads at the San Francisco Public Library on 25 March 2018, opening Christopher Felver's exhibition of forty years of photographic portraits of American poets. The show is itself an argument about the visual record of the scene, assembled long after the founding moment that no camera attended.
- - Ferlinghetti interview tapes on City Lights and the trial. Paul Iorio's mini-documentary presents audio from an interview he recorded with Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 2000, cut with material on City Lights, Ginsberg and the Howl obscenity case. Ferlinghetti was charged with publishing the book while his manager Shigeyoshi Murao was charged with selling it. Judge Clayton Horn acquitted them in October 1957.
- - Ferlinghetti poems gathered for his hundredth birthday. Optic Nerve assembled a cluster of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poems from its archives to mark the poet's hundredth birthday. Ferlinghetti co-founded City Lights on Columbus Avenue in 1953 and published Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems as Pocket Poets No. 4. He was still publishing and painting in his tenth decade.
- - Ferlinghetti at one hundred on Democracy Now. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who co-founded City Lights with Peter D. Martin on Columbus Avenue in 1953 and published Ginsberg's Howl in the Pocket Poets series, marks his hundredth birthday in this hour-long broadcast. He speaks as poet, publisher and defendant, the man who was charged with publishing the book that the state tried to seize. It is a first-person account from the last surviving principal of the case.
- - Howl by Allen Ginsberg - Lisa Mansell (Banned Books Week). English and Creative Writing Senior Lecturer, Lisa Mansell explores the controversial themes in 'Beat' poem 'Howl' by Allen Ginsberg, that resulted in an obscenity trial on its publication. Want to find out more about English and Creative Writing? - Book an open day at
- - Ginsberg's HOWL - SunLit Festival Reading Presented by FOJKH 4_16_2019. Irwin Allen Ginsberg was a legendary writer, philosopher, Beat Generation Poet and friend of Jack Kerouac, our organization (Friends of the Jack Kerouac House Inc) honored the life of Ginsburg, June 3rd 1926-April 5th 1997, with a performance of "Howl" as part of last year's SunLit Festival hosted b
- - Performance of Ginsberg's HOWL 4.16.19 FOJKH (Extended Edition). Performance of Ginsberg's HOWL on 4.16.19 at the SunLit Festival Co-hosted by Friends of the Jack Kerouac House, Inc and Keep St Pete Lit at the Old Key West Bar and Grill in St. Pete, FL Read by Becca McCoy, Bob Devin Jones, Pete Meinke and JoEllen Schilke Irwin Allen Ginsberg was a legendary wr
- - Harlem of the West - The Fillmore Jazz Era. Elizabeth Pepin Silva and Lewis Watts will present an illuminating slide show and talk about the new edition of Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era. Through dozens of archival photographs and oral accounts from the neighborhood residents and musicians who experienced it at its
- - 65th Anniversary of The Six Gallery Poetry reading & HOWL. Actor/musician Geoffrey Pond presents a tribute to the memorable with two monologues, the first featuring his youthful dinner at Carolyn Cassady's (Neal Cassady's widow and great writer), second a history come to life performance from Jack Kerouac's account from The Dharma Bums of the The Six Galler
- - The Look of Beat. Dear Friends of KSRB, This last Wednesday marked the 65th Anniversary of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl." He first read it at The Six Gallery in San Francisco on October 7th, 1955, electrifying his fellow poets and attendees, including, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, David Meltzer, Michael McClure and Philli
- - How Indiana made Kenneth Rexroth. A history podcast on Rexroth's Midwestern upbringing, the part of his life usually skipped in favour of San Francisco. His mother died in 1916 and his father in 1918; what he brought west was already formed before he laid the groundwork for the Renaissance that produced the 6 Gallery reading.
- - A public television portrait of the vanished city. A public television documentary surveying San Francisco as it was, including the North Beach of the Beat years, uploaded by a viewer after it went out of distribution. The programme records bars, cafes and streets that the scene used and that later rent rises dispersed.
- - Bay Area television reports Ferlinghetti's death at 101. KPIX reports the death of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet, painter and co-founder of City Lights Bookstore, at the age of 101. He had opened the shop at 261 Columbus Avenue in 1953 with Peter D. Martin, each putting in five hundred dollars. The last of the figures who published and defended Howl in court.
- - Flowers outside City Lights after Ferlinghetti's death. Ferlinghetti died on 22 February 2021. The Chronicle filmed San Franciscans leaving flowers at the shop the following day, one mourner speaking about what the bookstore meant to the city's countercultural life.
- - The Chronicle's memorial evening for Ferlinghetti. Two months after Ferlinghetti's death in February 2021, the San Francisco Chronicle staged an evening of poetry, song and readings in his memory, with Tongo Eisen-Martin and Jack Hirschman among the participants. It records how the city's living poets accounted for the man who published Howl and kept the shop open for sixty-eight years.
- - Trailer for the ruth weiss documentary. ruth weiss escaped Nazi Europe as a ten-year-old refugee and became a jazz-backed poet in North Beach, one of the few women given standing in a scene remembered almost entirely through its men. The trailer for this Emmy-winning documentary sets out a life that spanned ninety-two years.
- - City Lights marks McClure's last book of poems. The first day of City Lights' memorial tribute to Michael McClure, who died in 2020, built around Mule Kick Blues, his final collection. Anne Waldman, Eileen Myles and Garrett Caples read from the work of the last surviving reader from the 6 Gallery bill.
- - How Did The Six Gallery Reading Get Its Name? - Im a 50s Baby. How Did The Six Gallery Reading Get Its Name? Step back in time to a moment in American literature that still sparks creativity and inspiration. In this engaging video, we’ll take you to the Six Gallery in San Francisco, where a gathering of poets and writers came together on October seventh, ninete
- - A filmed portrait of the City Lights publisher. A biographical profile of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, born 1919 and dead in February 2021, tracing the Paris bookshop world he came of age in and the San Francisco store it inspired. It covers his role as the publisher who took on Howl and the ACLU-backed defence he arranged before the book was ever printed in England.
- - Howl Audio Commentary. Howl is a 2010 American film which explores both the 1955 Six Gallery debut and the 1957 obscenity trial of 20th-century American poet Allen Ginsberg's noted poem "Howl". The film is written and directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman and stars James Franco as Ginsberg.
