Correspondence #57: David S. Wills

Review of 'Howl' premiere disputed

David S. Wills, founding editor of the long-running journal Beatdom, has been prompted to write by Rock and the Beat Generation’s recent review of Donald Heneghan’s books charting the history of City Lights’ acclaimed poetry imprint.

Wills feels that our critique of those publications invites an alternative view but he also wants to address wider questions about the original reception of Allen Ginsberg’s first reading of ‘Howl’ in October 1955.

This latest correspondent is well placed to comment on the ways in which the premiere of Ginsberg’s long poem was absorbed at the time and reflected on later.

His forthcoming book on the occasion ‘Howl’ made its debut, A Remarkable Collection of Angels: A History of the 6 Gallery Reading, should emerge in time for the 70th anniversary of the gathering in autumn 2025.

Email, July 9th, 2025

Dear R&BG,

In a recent review of Donald Heneghan’s excellent two-book overview of the City Lights Pocket Poet Series, Jonah Raskin – author of American Scream, a must-read for those interested in Allen Ginsberg – made a small error. He wrote:

Lawrence Ferlinghetti used to complain to me that newspapers and magazines didn’t review poetry readings. For the most part they didn’t in his lifetime. They still don’t, not unless the reading is a mega-event with international stars, or a groundbreaking reading such as the one that took place at the 6 Gallery in 1955 when Ginsberg read a part of ‘Howl’. Richard Eberhart reviewed that event for the New York Times and rightly so. His report was titled ‘West Coast rhythms’.

The big problem for Beat historians is that no one reported on the 6 Gallery reading and certainly not the New York Times. In fact, it took almost two decades before the media began to acknowledge that it had ever happened and that’s precisely why so many falsehoods exist concerning this most important of event.

I have spent the past several years researching the 6 Gallery reading of October 1955 and, in the course of doing so, I have read much of what Eberhart wrote both publicly and privately about the Beats and the San Francisco poetry scene. As such, the paragraph above stood out to me as inaccurate and I’d like to issue a correction in case we accidentally add to the ever-growing list of myths about the event.

What Eberhart mentioned in his article was in fact the so-called ‘repeat performance’ of March 18th, 1956, held as the Berkeley Town Hall Theater. I say ‘mentioned’ because even that was not a review. Eberhart came to San Francisco a little after the second reading and then gave his own poetry readings and lectures whilst visiting with his dear friend Kenneth Rexroth.

Rexroth of course was the MC for the 6 Gallery reading and he performed as one of the poets at the Berkeley reading (also doing some very drunken MC work at the same time). He and Eberhart had been friends for years and Eberhart felt rather sorry that his reputation so massively eclipsed that of his friend’s. Private letters show Eberhart repeatedly doing favours for Rexroth, including writing an overly flattering profile and accepting any of Rexroth’s poems whenever doing a guest editing position at a reputable publication. A proud man, Rexroth was more than a little uncomfortable with this.

When Eberhart visited San Francisco, Rexroth and Ginsberg both tried to impress upon him the vitality of the growing poetry scene and it does seem Eberhart was impressed. He even made comments as such in the local media (possibly at the behest of Rexroth). Soon after returning home, he received a letter from Rexroth, who had already contacted the New York Times and suggested Eberhart review the West Coast scene. Eberhart – who as I’ve said was willing to do almost anything to help his friend – readily agreed.

What is interesting is the degree to which Rexroth and Ginsberg influenced Eberhart’s article. I don’t want to suggest that anything terribly unethical took place, but Eberhart leaned heavily on Rexroth for information, then pressed many of the local poets (whose names he did not even know, for the most part) for biographic detail. Ginsberg, unsurprisingly, was very forthcoming and wrote a long and famous letter describing ‘Howl’ (This letter was so substantial that it was actually published itself in 1976).

Eberhart seemingly worked on his article over the summer but it’s clear that he was mostly editing together ideas Rexroth and Ginsberg had provided him. In fact, there are lines Rexroth uses in subsequent articles that almost appear to plagiarise Eberhart until you realise that actually Eberhart had probably borrowed those lines from Rexroth, who had a habit of repeating his own favourite phrases. Further evidence that Rexroth had contributed more than simply the concept for the article comes from the fact that Eberhart split the payment from the New York Times 50/50 with his old friend.

That was a rather long digression but I thought it was important to note that what Eberhart wrote was not a review of the 6 Gallery reading and in fact, if he had reviewed that event, we would certainly have more information about it 70 years later. (Alas, surprisingly little is known. My forthcoming book will change that). Eberhart’s article was not even a review of the later poetry reading, and so Ferlinghetti’s complaint about the media not reviewing poetry readings lacks even this supposed exception.

Perhaps Raskin thought Eberhart had mentioned the 6 Gallery reading because his article quotes from a postcard that is sometimes cited as being the promotional card drawn up by Allen Ginsberg and send out in early October 1955 but actually it is a pared-down version of the postcard for the Berkeley reading, whose text was mostly written by Gary Snyder. The text for the first postcard is almost always incorrectly given for reasons that are too complex to explain here but the second postcard is nearly correct in Eberhart’s article. I believe for space constraints the editors shortened it, which is a shame because these were in fact like small poems themselves.

I will add one final point to this already over-long letter, which is in reference to the following from Raskin’s review:

Had Heneghan ripped off City Lights? I wondered when I saw the look-alike cover?Had he violated copyright? No, he had not. His covers are not exact copies of the volumes in the ‘Pocket Poets Series’. They are, as Heneghan himself points out, ‘homages’.

I realise Raskin is not accusing Heneghan of theft here but it is important to note that even if City Lights had a problem with the homages, they would have no legal or ethical basis for said complaint due to the fact that Ferlinghetti himself borrowed the original design and concept from Kenneth Patchen’s An Astonished Eye Looks Out of the Air (1945). The similarity can be seen here:

Finally, I will add that I thought these two books were an enjoyable overview of a vital poetry series and I would recommend them. They are indeed not vast bibliographies, as Raskin said, but they are nonetheless interesting summaries based on the author’s collection of City Lights titles.

Regards,

David S. Wills

Editor’s note: Apart from his Beatdom editing commitments, Wills is the author of books about William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Hunter S. Thompson. With particular reference to his new book’s title, I asked him what was the correct style for the Six/6 Gallery. He told me: ‘6 Gallery is deliberate because that's what the six founders wanted it to be called. The name Six Gallery was used in the media and by later historians but this was very much against the wishes of the people who ran the gallery, so the 6 Gallery is correct.’

See also: ‘Book review #52, City Lights: Pocket Poets Series’, July 6th, 2025