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Howl

When

Event Status

Monday 25 July 6.30pm-7.15pm and 8.30pm-9.15pm

Hallucinatory, chaotic and confronting, Allen Ginsberg’s 1955 poem Howl sits with On the Road by Jack Kerouac and Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs at the very centre of the Beat literary canon.

With its wild, visceral depictions of sex, drugs and madness, Ginsberg’s poem is perhaps as famous for the obscenity trial that followed its publication as for its disturbing and much-parodied opening lines. Like the other Beat writers, Ginsberg was influenced by jazz music and aimed to capture in his writing something of the rhythms, spontaneity and subversive undercurrents inherent in jazz traditions.

At two very special performances at the Toff, Maxine Beneba Clarke will read Howl to modern music by jazz composer Darrin Archer. Archer’s composition, called Drunken Taxicabs of Absolute Reality: Howl to Music, features a seven-piece jazz band and aims to create a sonic landscape that accompanies and interacts with Ginsberg’s seminal poem.

Ginsberg himself described Howl as a ‘tragic custard-pie of wild phrasing’. Join Archer and Beneba Clarke as they bring that wild phrasing to life, more than 60 years after Ginsberg’s first reading.

Featuring

Darrin Archer

Darrin Archer studied Composition and Theory at Latrobe University, and Jazz Piano at The Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Since then, he has been performing in Sydney and Melbourne with various bands, touring, recording, composing and teaching. He has released 3 albums of original music as a bandlea... Read more

Maxine Beneba Clarke

Maxine Beneba Clarke is the author of the acclaimed memoir The Hate Race, the award-winning short fiction collection Foreign Soil, the poetry collections Carrying The World and How Decent Folk Behave, and many other books for adults and children. Her forthcoming poetry collection is It’s The S... Read more

Location

The Toff in Town

Level 2, Curtin House, 252 Swanston Street, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

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The Wheeler Centre acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Centre stands. We acknowledge and pay our respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their Elders, past and present, as the custodians of the world’s oldest continuous living culture.