January, 1959 - The Big Table Howl

[Irving Rosenthal & staff at Chicago Review]




[Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Carroll, Peter Orlovsky, Chicago, 1959 
- Photograph  courtesy Allen Ginsberg Collection]

[The first issue of Big Table]




The 1959 Big Table Chicago reading of "Howl" is our special feature this weekend. 

A recording of this historic reading is available here

("Footnote to  Howl" is here)

Also read on that occasion were "Sunflower Sutra", "A Supermarket in California", "Transcription of Organ Music", "America", "In Back of the Real", "A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley", "Europe! Europe!" and "Kaddish, part 1"

The whole reading (Allen's reading in its entirety) may be listened to here

The event, you may recall, was a benefit for a newly-established magazine, Big Table (born as a result of the flagrant censorship of the student magazine, the Chicago Review)

 - fearful of Kerouac, Dahlberg, and Naked Lunch?
fearful of the Beats?

For two detailed accounts of these events see here (the Chicago Reader) 
or here (The Village Voice).

Here's a note from Paul Carroll (almost fifty years later)  

"Big Table" - that was Jack Kerouac's suggestion.

See also other readings of "Howl" on the Allen Ginsberg Project - here, here and here 

- and see also here and  here. 



[Allen Ginsberg - in San Francisco  Photograph by Harry Redl]

[Allen Ginsberg, Irving Rosenthal, and  Peter Orlovsky, 1959  - Photograph courtesy Allen Ginsberg Collection]

Scribd Beats

[Paul Carroll with Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg,
and Peter Orlovsky at the time of the Big Table benefit
reading, Chicago, January 1959 (photo-booth image -
Photo c. Allen Ginsberg Estate]

[Allen Ginsberg, Irving Rosenthal (once Chicago Review editor & founder of Big Table)  Peter Orlovsky, 1959. courtesy Allen Ginsberg Collection]

Presuming that folks are familiar with Scribd - "a digital documents library that allows users to publish, discover and discuss original writings and documents in various languages" - Allen and William Burroughs' classic 1953 correspondence, The Yage Letters, for instance - and two brief letters, five years later, from Allen to Paul Carroll at the Chicago Review - (Allen on the Naked Lunch pages he sent Carroll - "I also enclose some final poison for your pot - Burroughs" - this is the initiative which would later transmute into the Paul Carroll-Irving Rosenthal-edited, Big Table).  

Other Ginsberg-related documents, that we've mentioned before, include the definitive document on Allen's 1965 expulsion from Czechoslovakia - "Final Report on the Activities of the American Poet Allen Ginsberg and his Deportation from Czechoslovakia"  that appeared in the Summer 1998 issue of the Massachusetts Review, not to mention various secondary articles - Tim Brown's analysis of a late (June 1994) Chicago reading, for instance & Jonathan Katz's "Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Marcuse, and the Politics of Eros".   

Here's a curious one -  Pesnici Bit Generacije - Vladislav Bajaci and Vojo Sindolic's 1979 Eastern European Beat translations.