Through this Banned Book Writing Prompts series, Teachers & Writers Magazine aims to push back against the growing movement to censor what students can read and to show what happens when we enthusiastically embrace banned works rather than fear them. You can read an introduction to this series by Susan Karwoska here, and you can find more Banned Book Writing Prompts here.

In the summer of 1957, two undercover police officers entered City Lights Books in San Francisco and purchased a copy of Howl and Other Poems, a slim volume of poetry by Allen Ginsberg. They promptly arrested the clerk who sold them the book, the legendary bookstore manager Shig Murao. Soon after, the State of California turned its sights from Murao to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the owner of City Lights, arguing that as publisher of the book, he was the one ultimately responsible for disseminating “obscene and indecent writings.”

The ensuing trial, The People vs. Ferlinghetti, sparked a national debate. In 1957, the repression of the Second Red Scare was only beginning to ease, and the Supreme Court’s clarifying Miller judgement, which created the legal test for obscenity, was still decades away. The Howl Trial, as it came to be known, became a reckoning on whether the government had the right to censor poetry. 

Ferlinghetti had been preparing for the fight for months, since copies of Howl and Other Poems had been seized by U.S. customs. He was defended by The American Civil Liberties Union, and “expert witnesses in the literary field” testified on his behalf. Ultimately, Judge Clayton W. Horn found Ferlinghetti not guilty. “I conclude,” Horn wrote, “the book ‘Howl and Other Poems’ does have some redeeming social importance, and I find the book is not obscene.” 

“No one had heard poetry like that before.”

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The book had been published the year before as the fourth installment in City Lights’ Pocket Poets Series, after Ferlinghetti heard Ginsberg read the title poem at the infamous Six Gallery Reading. “No one had heard poetry like that before,” Ferlinghetti told an interviewer decades later. 

“Howl” is dedicated to Carl Solomon, a writer Ginsberg met while the two men were locked up together in a psychiatric institution. The poem consists of three parts: The most famous section is Part I, in which Ginsberg recounts what “the best minds of my generation” have suffered. Part II widens its field of view from Ginsberg’s immediate circle to American society as a whole. In this section, the quasi-rabbinic Ginsberg invokes the pre-Judaic Semitic deity of Moloch, associated with child sacrifice. Part III narrows again, addressing Solomon directly. 

The City Lights edition of Howl also featured a “footnote” to the poem, in which Ginsberg offers a vision of consecration that is both expansive and subversive: “The world is holy!” Ginsberg writes. “The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!” This juxtaposition of the sacred and profane is part of what made “Howl” so striking and controversial in the 1950s. Ginsberg not only speaks openly about sex, queerness, drug use, and mental illness, but insists on placing these topics within the realm of the sacred. 

Alongside “Howl” and its footnote, the City Lights book includes a handful of other poems, such as “A Supermarket in California” and “America.” In the book’s introduction, William Carlos Williams, speaking on behalf of an older generation of American poets, writes that Ginsberg “proves to us, in spite of the most debasing experiences that life can offer a man, the spirit of love survives to ennoble our lives if we have the wit and the courage and the faith—and the art! to persist.” At the end of his intro, Williams warns readers about what they are getting into: “we are going through hell.”

By the time Ginsberg died, four decades after the Howl Trial, his vision no longer seemed so hellish and controversial. The New York Times hailed him as a “master poet.” His Collected Poems (first the edition covering 1947–1980 and then, after his death, the career-spanning 1947–1997 edition) became a staple of library bookshelves across the United States. Like many people my age, my early experiences with reading poetry are inseparable from the big, red hardcover edition of Collected Poems 1947–1980, which featured his iconic three-fish-one-head symbol on the front cover, and Ginsberg’s zeyde/monk visage on the back. Ginsberg had claimed his place in the canon of American literature, alongside his spiritual ancestor, Walt Whitman. 

Juxtaposition of the sacred and profane is part of what made “Howl” so striking and controversial in the 1950s.

In recent years, however, Ginsberg has once again become the target of censors. PEN America reports that in the 2024–2025 school year alone, three school districts in Texas and Florida banned Allen Ginsberg’s Collected Poems 1947–1997. Ginsberg’s poetry clearly still has the power to challenge and unsettle authority. Because Collected Poems contains the entirety of Howl and Other Poems, this means that that book is now banned again, almost 70 years after Judge Horn declared it “not obscene.” 

At the same time, the poem has enduring relevance for students. I recently taught Howl and Other Poems in an interdisciplinary freshman seminar about creativity and censorship, alongside more-recent banned books like Maia Kobabe’s graphic memoir, Gender Queer. The Pocket Poets edition (still in print!) is an ideal textbook: The small book is a tactile poetic document, and the accompanying texts, like Ginsberg’s dedication and Williams’ intro, place it in context. The book is also very affordable for students; you can still buy it new for seven bucks and find it used online for two or three. 

I wasn’t sure how my students would relate to Ginsberg’s mid-century visions, but they found their way in immediately. We spent one entire class taking turns reading out loud from “Howl,” hearing how the words sounded in our mouths and the room. I had only intended to read the first few pocket-sized pages together, but the class became possessed with Ginsberg’s prophetic voice, and I didn’t want to stop. 

What surprised me, in fact, was how intensely relevant the poems were to many students. I had to remind them several times that “my generation” meant their great-grandparents’ generation, not Gen Z. Reading along with them, I saw how contemporary some of the images felt. On first glance, a line like, “who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,” might seem obscure. I teach right outside Philadelphia, though, a city famous for the visible and widespread drug use that takes place directly under the Market-Frankford El train tracks. Philadelphia is also a holy city—founded by Quaker William Penn as a “holy experiment” for religious freedom—where Islamic and other religious imagery can be commonly seen. More broadly, the questions Ginsberg poses about the direction of American society feel more urgent now than ever. As Ferlinghetti put it, “Poetry must be capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this means sounding apocalyptic.”

The following prompts don’t ask students to respond to Ginsberg’s vision of his world, but rather, to use his poems as models to explore their own vision of the world they live in today. James Dickey attacked Ginsberg for making it seem as if anybody could “try the Allen Ginsberg method and find out that, after all, they are poets.” There is some truth in this claim, but as an educator I believe it’s a good thing. 

Writing Prompt 1: “A Supermarket in California”

In the poem “A Supermarket in California,” Ginsberg follows a vision of Walt Whitman “into the neon fruit supermarket.” He addresses Whitman, writing: “I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans, following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.” 

When Ginsberg wrote this poem, the proliferation of supermarkets was still a relatively new aspect of post-WWII prosperity. Now supermarkets and big box stores are a ubiquitous part of our lives. We often interact with these places as consumers, but in this exercise, we will interact with them as writers. 

Go into a large store, such as a Walmart, Target, or grocery store and wander around for 15 or 20 minutes. Even if you have been there a hundred times before, approach the space as if it is your first visit. Watch people. Ask yourself how your body feels in the space. Pick products up and put them down. Look up at the overhead lights. Look down each aisle.

As you do this, make notes of your observations, as well as of any thought that comes into your head. Write each new fragment on a new line. Writing in a small notebook is ideal, but a notes app on your cell phone will work fine. Writing in a public space can feel strange but just pretend that you are writing a shopping list instead of a list poem, and no one will think twice.

Writing Prompt 2: “Howl Part I”

In the famous opening line of “Howl,” Ginsberg writes: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked. . . . ” By “best minds,” he means his closest friends. This includes Carl Solomon and Beat Generation figures like Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Lucien Carr, and Tuli Kupferberg, all of whom are referenced directly or indirectly in the text. 

Our experiences are intertwined with those of our friends. Think about the friends who have played an important role in your life. These may be childhood friends you haven’t seen in a long time. These may be lifelong neighborhood friends you see every day. These may be lost friends who are no longer with us. These may be brand new friends, whom you met only recently. 

Write the phrase “I saw my friends . . .” at the top of the page. Start a new line with “Who,” and describe the experience of a friend (or friends). In the spirit of Ginsburg’s long, enjambed lines, keep writing until the description is done. When it feels like it is done, start a new line with a new “Who,” and tell us about another friend’s experience. Let the reader see your friends as you see them. 

Writing Prompt 3: “America”

Aside from “Howl” itself, the most famous poem in Howl and Other Poems is probably “America.” In this poem, Ginsberg addresses the nation directly, beginning:

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.   
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.

The explicit language and references, along with statements of political dissent, make the lines of “America” some of the most controversial in the book. Ginsberg is responding to a specific historical moment, defined by the ongoing Cold War, the growing Civil Rights movement, and an emerging counterculture movement. “America,” Ginsberg states defiantly, “I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry. / I smoke marijuana every chance I get.” 

Nonetheless, “America” is not a one-dimensional protest polemic. Throughout the poem, Ginsberg expresses his conflicted feelings, including both his anger toward and his love for America. In the last line, he states his desire to help improve the country by “putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.” 

We all have different relationships with the country we live in, based on our experiences and our families’ and communities’ experiences. Some of us have very overt relationships to the state, through being policed or serving in the military reserve or ROTC. Some of us don’t. We have different feelings of belonging and nonbelonging. We have different geographies and images of America, based on where and how we have lived. 

Whether you were born in America to parents who were born here, were born in America to parents born elsewhere, came to America as a child, or just arrived a month ago, your view is valid and worth sharing. 

Write “America,” at the top of the page, as if you are writing a letter. Address America directly in the second person and tell them how you feel. You have something to say to America.