Fifty-five years ago, On Oct. 6, 1955, a young man in horn-rimmed glasses stood nervously in front of a small audience and proceeded to read a strange poem he’d recently written. By the time he was through reading, the entire room was in tears.

The young man’s name was Allen Ginsberg.

A year and a half later, when plainclothes cops entered the City Lights Bookstore in June 1957, bought a copy of “Howl and Other Poems,” and busted the store manager for selling obscene material, the country was still in the throes of Cold War fever.

“Howl” defeated censorship — it was found “not obscene” in court — and went on to become one of the most widely read poems of the century. It’s been translated into dozens of languages, and is a model for younger generations of poets from East to West.

“Howl” has haunted me since the first time I read it as a young man. The poem’s images crept up on me:

“Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!”

This was not the world I’d seen on television:

“Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! . . . Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!”

Nor the world I learned about in school:

“Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! . . . Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks!”

These lines still creep up on me today, with their vivid description of our acquisitive society on a downward spiral.

A few months after reading the poem, I actually bumped into the bearded poet in a corner bodega on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. When he realized that I was the street artist responsible for so many of the protest posters in the neighborhood, he suggested we collaborate on a street poster.

In time, we collaborated on numerous projects, bouncing his words off my pictures. He suggested I try illustrating the Moloch chapter of “Howl,” with its visions of a metropolis “whose eyes are thousand blind windows.”

We published a book together, “Illuminated Poems,” a pairing of Ginsberg’s poems and my paintings, and I’ve tried to use my art to complement “Howl” in other ways.

When “Howl and Other Poems” was busted for obscenity in 1957, its publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, faced serious jail time. By 1965, Ginsberg was placed on the FBI’s dangerous securities list.

In 2010, fifty-five years after the poem’s first public performance, the Federal Communications Commission continues to ban “Howl” from public broadcast.

The Pentagon budget is currently at an all-time high — even higher under President Obama than under President Bush.

Wall Street bankers are bailed out, school programs are axed.

Now that’s obscene.

Eric Drooker is a painter, illustrator, and graphic novelist. He is the illustrator of “Howl: A Graphic Novel” (Harper Perennial) and designed the animation for the film about the poem, starring James Franco as Allen Ginsberg. His website is www.drooker.com. He can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org

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