Airwaves & Liberty

A special 90 minute program featuring Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” is now available at Pacifica.org. It features a classic reading and roundtable discussion about the poem and Ginsberg.

Pacifica is “airing” this program on its website, pacifica.org, because the FCC still considers HOWL too obscene to play on the radio more than a half century after its writing.

***Would you be willing to run an online and/or on-air promotion for Pacifica’s HOWL special at your station or website? Download an audio promo from Audioport.org; a 60-second promo is in the “Specials” section. Or put together an online promo using text from this email and this graphic.

The show is available at http://www.pacifica.org/ or directly at this page.

HOWL AGAINST CENSORSHIP

Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Fifty years ago, on October 3, Judge Clayton Horn ruled that Allen Ginsberg’s great epic poem HOWL was a work of literary and social merit and not obscene, freeing its publication from censorship and its publisher, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, from jail. Fifty years later, with draconian FCC fines for language infractions, you still can’t hear HOWL on the radio. That’s something to howl about.

This October 3, WBAI and Pacifica invite you to join us on the internet where you can hear Allen Ginsberg read the unadulterated HOWL and our commemoration of the HOWL verdict (and its relevance to language censorship in broadcast media today) with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet Bob Holman of the Bowery Poetry Club, first amendment lawyer Ron Collins, Beat Generation scholar and filmmaker Regina Weinreich, WBAI’s Program Director Bernard White and WBAI Arts Director Janet Coleman. In the memory of the great language liberator, Allen Ginsberg, let’s HOWL against censorship.