Our neighborhoods are not only places where great literature was written. It’s also where great literature was published, sometimes at great legal peril, and where tectonic-shifting battles against censorship were led and won. Nowhere is that more true than in the area South of Union Square, where art, commerce, and activism collided. And perhaps no […]
In the years following World War I, Americans feared communist infiltration of our country following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. As we continue to see today, when fear outweighs rational debate, civil liberties pay the price.
The Beat poets, inextricably linked with the Village and East Village, materialized in the post-WWII American of white picket fences to celebrate all things messy, countercultural, drug-addled, disenfranchised, and unstoppably vital. East Villager Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” was an anthem of this movement, with its power, breathlessness, and breadth of content. And on October 7, 1955, Ginsberg […]
Over the past six months, GVSHP has participated in the CUNY Corp service-learning program that places students in paid internships throughout the City. GVSHP’s intern, Oluwaseun Eleyinafe, a Lehman College Senior, wrote the post below on Allen Ginsberg and his poem ‘Kaddish.’ As one of the writers at the heart of the Beat Generation, Allen Ginsberg […]
