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the
current
Monday
Report
below!
This week's report by Gerald Nicosia
HOWL San Fran: The People vs Litquake
EDITOR's NOTE: This week’s Monday Report features Kerouac
biographer and Beat expert Gerald Nicosia. An upcoming
report in the ULA's HOWL Protest series will feature San
Francisco street poet Gary Peterson. They bring us two
perspectives on a story that almost slipped through the
cracks. In October 2005 there were two different tributes
in honor of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Allen
Ginsberg’s poem “Howl”. Which one did the ULA’s Christopher
Robin attend? Which one did the lit-snobs attend? Read on
to find out...
There really was no "underground HOWL" versus an "establish-
ment HOWL." It was much more a people's event, versus a
commercial ripoff event. I have always tried to do free events
(except when I organized the benefit to raise money for Jan
Kerouac's kidney failure and legal expenses in 1995), feeling that
poetry belongs to everyone--or, as Neruda said, "Poetry, like bread,
is for everyone." I spent more than six months organizing the free
HOWL tribute at the SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY. I
arranged for people who were at the actual reading in 1955 to take
part in the tribute, like San Francisco State professor Mark
Linenthal, for poet and writer friends of Ginsberg and the group
like David Meltzer, Ron Loewinsohn, and Herb Gold to take part, I
arranged for local post-Beat younger poets like Jessica Loos and
Nicole Henares to take part, etc. etc. I even arranged for Peter
Orlovsky to come, but he is controlled by the Ginsberg Estate, since
Ginsberg had him declared incompetent before he died. And the
Ginsberg Estate refused to allow Peter to come, since they
apparently view him as an asset of the estate, and they "don't want
anything to happen to him." Peter was almost in tears with me on
the phone when he told me that they wouldn't let him come. The
library was willing to pay his way from Vermont. Thus began my
first inkling that the commercial powers that be want to control
their interest in Ginsberg properties.
My worst battle, though, was with the so-called Litquake frauds.
Two people began this travesty about four years ago, a yellow
journalist for the SF WEEKLY, Jack Boulware, and his partner, Jane
Ganahl, a Chronicle writer. Several years ago, when I was fighting
to carry on Jan Kerouac's lawsuit, to recover and preserve her
father's papers (as her appointed literary executor), Boulware wrote
a viciously lying piece about me, full of false claims, such as that I
collected ten percent of Jan's Kerouac royalties, that I had made up
the story of a legal fight against U Mass Lowell to reopen the
MEMORY BABE archive, which had been closed by Sampas's
threats (a lawsuit, by the way, which I finally won, via legal
settlement, two weeks ago), etc. He and his paper never retracted
any of their lies. I saw then that he was an opportunist of the first
order. Hence I have been suspicious of Litquake from the start,
especially since 1) I saw that they were getting very large grants
from some of the richest funders in the area, like the City Hotel Tax
Fund, the Zellerbach Foundation, the Hewlitt Packard Foundation,
etc.; 2) they were ignoring and rebuffing a lot of respected writers in
the area, like Joanne Kyger and A.D. Winans; and 3) they were not
actually paying their performers anything. I.e., if you organized a
little cafe reading, they would "let" you use their name Litquake for
publicity, but they didn't pay your readers. It made me wonder
where all those tens of thousands of dollars in grant money were
going.
When I first approached Michael McClure to be part of my people's
HOWL fest, he was nasty to me, said I didn't approach him
respectfully enough, etc. I only learned later that Litquake had
already signed him up to do THEIR HOWL tribute for tickets
ranging from $20-$100 each. Gradually the Litquake, Boulware-
cum-Ganahl HOWL event became like a juggernaut knocking us off
the road. Through Ganahl's apparent influence, the CHRONICLE
initially refused to give us any publicity at all, though the Litquake
event was getting massive writeups, in Leah Garchik's column, in a
Heidi Benson article, etc. etc. Only after strenous pressure,
including the fact that Litquake needed the public library for
several of their events, did the CHRONICLE deign to give us a very
short piece (a couple of paragraphs) two or three days before the
event.
We had a nice, black-and-white poster (small) paid for by the
Friends of the Library and printed by the wonderful arts printer
Trillium Press. But when I went around the city trying to put it up, I
was instructed that places who were linked to Litquake, like Dave
Eggers' storefront on Valencia, ostensibly a literacy center for poor
Latino kids, were not allowed to put up my poster (for a free event)--
beside the four-foot-high, eight-color poster for the expensive
Litquake event. Even City Lights put up the Litquake poster in
preference to ours, and only after I strenuously protested to Nancy
Peters was our library poster allowed to go up in a City Lights side
window, but not the main window by the door that held the gigantic
Litquake poster. Incidentally, for their poster Litquake actually
stole the photo of Allen Ginsberg in Uncle Sam tophat taken by Fred
McDarrah, a famous Sixties photographer, and gave him no credit
nor any money for it. McDarrah told me he complained about this,
but I don't know if they ever did pay him.
The final irony, of course, was that while we presented a thoroughly
contextualized HOWL, plus a FULL JAZZ READING of the poem with
some of the best readers available--Neeli Cherkovski, Sharon
Doubiago, Daisy Zamora, Phil Cousineau, et al., they and their
celebrity A-list presented a bowdlerized HOWL. What I heard from
friends who went was that their HOWL "had all the dirty words
taken out."
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Gerald Nicosia is a journalist and poet. His most recent book is
Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veteran’s Movement. Other
books include the Kerouac biography Memory Babe, Memories of
Gregory Corso and Lunatics, Lovers, Poets, Vets & Bargirls, a
collection of poetry. His website is www.geraldnicosia.com
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