In a high-profile writing career of more than four decades, Allen Ginsberg was among the most acclaimed American poets both in the US and internationally. Born on June 3, 1926, he spent his childhood in Paterson, New Jersey. When he attended Columbia University, he met Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and others who became the core of the Beat Generation. In the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid-1950s, he composed his first major publication, Howl, a long poem on the joys and ravages he had known, which included being gay in a violently heteronormative society and hospitalization for mental illness. By the time he died in 1997, he had published several dozen books, mostly poetry but also memoir, essay, and photography. For his entire adult life he was a political activist, opposing the Vietnam War and supporting gay rights, civil rights, and women’s rights. In the centennial year of his birth, this panel will address the importance of Ginsberg’s writing as political interventions on censorship and queer life, in addition to the effects it continues to have in its afterlives. The four presenters are scholars at different career stages.

The first presenter, Jericho Williams, will speak of the ways that Ginsberg’s 1990 statement on censorship is especially pertinent to the current US political situation. Drawing on his own experience with censorship, Ginsberg paints a picture of the ways that authoritarian forces attack creative writing and remove the wealth of human expression from public and school libraries. Williams will discuss Ginsberg’s call to an inclusive patriotism, which entails constantly challenging the ways that censors appropriate particular words—such as motherhood, liberty, or American—in order to silence large portions of the US population. Williams will suggest ways that Ginsberg’s proposals may be brought to bear on the current systems of information distribution and publication platforms.

The second presenter, Deborah R. Geis, will discuss the afterlives of Ginsberg’s Howl in the form of parodies that testify to the poem’s enduring presence. Geis will survey the more high-profile parodies and focus on two by women writers, Tiffany Shlain’s “Yelp” (2011) and Amy Newman’s “Howl” (2015). Though Shlain and Newman both seem to stray far from Ginsberg’s poem, Geis will argue that their reinterpretations through the lenses of postmodernism and feminism lead to a richer understanding of the imagery, impact, and audience of the original. Shlain’s title both plays on Ginsberg’s and refers to the consumer rating website; Amy Newman rewrites Ginsberg’s poem as a powerful feminist parody.

The third presenter, Eric Keenaghan, will open with a commentary on a 1972 interview that Allen Ginsberg gave to the magazine Gay Sunshine. Ginsberg explains that such activism as the Stonewall uprising of three years earlier had led him to use the word “gay,” which he’d previously rejected: “And that’s important when you change somebody’s language.” Ginsberg and other poets close to the Beat Generation, Keenaghan will argue, not only were changed by LGBTQ+ liberationists’ language but also changed activists’ and the broader culture’s language about queer life, love, oppression, and freedom. Keenaghan will explore how recurring traits of Beat poetics—such as open form, the centering of the poet’s person and experience, spontaneity, and cultivation of intimacies—informed gay sensibility in ways that continue to influence radical queer sensibilities today.

The presentations will conclude with John Whalen-Bridge’s discussion of Ginsberg’s queer temporality, specifically the changes that an aging queer body undergoes. Because Ginsberg’s most famous poem is still Howl, Whalen-Bridge will explain, scholarly focus on its explicit descriptions of sex has led to a neglect of Ginsberg’s meditations on aging and on time as measured by the impermanent human body. Whalen-Bridge will explore Ginsberg’s queer temporality in which, in his particular case, he sang not just the body electric (after Whitman), but specifically the “cock” and the “asshole,” expressing the hope that his aging nether orifice would suffice in coming days of decline. Whalen-Bridge will proceed to examine less discussed poems such as “Sphincter,” “Sweet Boy, Gimme Yr Ass,” and “Ego Confession.”

The presider will give one-minute introductions per presenter; each presenter will speak for thirteen minutes. The presider will then open the session to discussion with the audience. At recent MLA sessions on the Beat Generation, audiences have been numerous and energetic; the response to this panel will likely be as strong.