Pictures of the Gone World by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

No illustration, just type set starkly against a colored or in some cases white square framed by a contrasting border. “He liked their size and shape.” Instantly iconic, their bold, minimalist covers telegraphed the hard-blowing truth of poetry whose rants and revelations jittered to the beat of bop jazz. Ginsberg, who had read Pictures of the Gone World, had been drawn to City Lights partly because he “liked the way the Pocket Poets books looked,” writes Ferlinghetti’s biographer, Neeli Cherkovski. Not many would hear them, but they would, finally, hear each other.” All the people who, like me, had hidden and skulked, writing down what they knew for a small handful of friends… would now step forward and say their piece.

“For I sensed that Allen was only, could only be, the vanguard of a much larger thing. “The phrase ‘breaking ground’ kept coming into my head,” she recalls. “The priestly ex-book-thief arrived and thrust a small black and white book into my hand, saying, ‘I think this might interest you.’ I took it and flipped it open idly, still intent on dishing out beef stew, and found myself in the middle of ‘Howl’… Put down the ladle and turned to the beginning and was caught up immediately in that sad, powerful opening: ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…’” In a trance, she handed the ladle to a friend and wandered off to pore over the poem and make sense of its impact. In Memoirs of a Beatnik, the poet Diane DiPrima describes her first encounter with Ginsberg’s manic, breathless incantations against ‘50s America in all its buzz-cut, beehived, pinko-baiting, fairy-bashing, lynching, lobotomizing grotesquerie.

Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg was a succès de scandale. Ferlinghetti’s opening salvo was a love tap compared to Pocket Poets Number Four, published exactly a year later, in August 1956. “Oh the world is a beautiful place/ to be born into/ if you don’t mind/ a few dead minds/ in the higher places/ or a bomb or two/ now and then/ in your upturned faces/ or such other improprieties/ as our Name Brand society/ is prey to,” wrote Ferlinghetti, in Poem #25. In the gray-flannel conservatism of the times, the syncopated, sardonic Beat poetry between the book’s paper covers made an even more jarring noise in the head.

Pictures of the Gone World by Lawrence Ferlinghetti