Then one evening - it was an evening like many others, there were some twelve or fourteen people eating supper, including Pete and Don and some Studio people, Betty McPeters and her entourage, people were milling about, drinking wine, talking emphatically in small groups while Beatrice Harmon and I were getting the meal together - the priestly ex-book-thief arrived and thrust a small black and 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 by Allen Ginsberg.  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…”

I was too turned on to concern myself with the stew.  I handed it over to Beatrice and, without even thanking Bradley, walked out the from door with his new book.  Walked the few blocks to the pier on Sixtieth Street and sat down by the Hudson River to read and to come to terms with what was happening.  the phrase “breaking ground” kept coming into my head.  I knew that this Allen Ginsberg, whoever he was, had broken ground for all of us - all few hundred of us - simply by getting this published.  i had no idea yet what that meant, how far it would take us.

The poem put a certain heaviness in me, too.  It followed that if there was one Allen there must be more, other people besides my few buddies writing what they spoke, what they heard, living, however obscurely and shamefully, what they knew, hiding out here and there as it were - and now suddenly, about to speak out.  For I senses that Allen was only, could only be, the vanguard of a much larger thing.  All the people who, like me, had hidden and skulked, writing down what they knew for a small handful of friends - and even those friends claiming it “couldn’t be published” - waiting with only a slight bitterness for the thing to end, for man’s era to draw to a close in a blaze of radiation - all these would now step forward and say their piece. 

Not many would hear them, but they would, finally, hear each other.

I was about to meet my brothers and sisters.

We had come of age.  I was frightened and a little sad.  I already clung instinctively to the easy, unself-conscious Bohemianism we had maintained at the pad, our unspoken sense that we were alone in a strange world, a sense that kept us proud and bound to each other.  But for the moment regret for what we might be losing was buried under a sweeping sense of exhiliration, of glee; someone was speaking for all of us, and the poem was good.  I was high and delighted. 

I made my way back to the house and to supper, and we read Howl together, I read it aloud to everyone. 

A new era had begun.

- Diane di Prima, Memoirs of a Beatnik