Today is the birthday of Lawrence Feringhetti who, unlike most of his fellow Beat Generation Poets, still lives and is entering his 10th decade. A publisher as well as a poet he became famous unintentionally when he published Alan Ginsberg’s Howl and had the San Francisco Police attempt to ban its release. The resulting trial served to make the Beat Poets overnight celebrities and spread their work worldwide. All this brings me back to a theme I’ve visited before, does censorship truly do what it sets out to accomplish?
Attempt to buy Mein Kampf at Indigo-Chapters and you will learn that Heather has banned its sale in her stores. Mind you she also bans the distribution in her stores of Xtra, a gay publication, along with EYE, NOW and in what I consider a counter-intuitive move the Montreal Review of Books. However a visit to Amazon reveals no less than a dozen offerings and a visit to Project Gutenberg allows you a choice of versions downloadable for free. Did the prosecution of Ernest Zundel do anything but serve to give the anti-Semite clad in his patented yellow safety hat a platform to publicize his hate? In the end it was his German citizenship and their request for his extradition that got him; not any effort on the part of our own courts.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t condone the promulgators of hate; I just believe that they should be allowed to rot in obscurity. In the end Ferlinghetti got the last laugh and went on to a long and successful career as a publisher and Howl made Ginsberg a celebrated poet. You can read it here:
http://www.pangloss.com/seidel/Ramble/howl_text.html
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