Speech Is Not Free celebrates the liberating gift of poetry.

Henry Miller Memorial Library is a good place to explore the real force that words wield in the world. Last year, that happened in Los Angeles with the 50th anniversary celebration of the obscenity trial of Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. This weekend, the library celebrates words with Speech Is Not Free, the 60th anniversary of the publication of Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl.

Two events are planned, Friday and Saturday, different but complementary.

Friday’s events comprise dinner, readings from the library’s literary journal Ping-Pong, a group reading of Howl, poetry by Anne Waldman (author of more than 40 collections of poetry) and Ambrose Bye (audio engineer), a screening of the film Howl starring James Franco and a Q&A with its co-directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. It’s free and nearly full.

Saturday’s events – workshops conducted by Ping-Pong Editor-in-Chief Maria Garcia Teutsch, Waldman and Bye, and an informal talk about free speech by HMML Executive Director Magnus Toren – are more participant-centric.

Waldman and Bye will workshop the musicality of poetry performance, its voice, composition and timing as applied to “sprechstimme (speak-singing), monologue, duets, curses, spells, lullabies, blues, poem-as-libretto.

“Poetry can refine our experience through expressive, heightened, rhythmic and shifting tonal structures of language,” Waldman writes in an email. “It can wake us up.”

In 2007, Teutsch revived Ping-Pong after 10 years of dormancy and exploded its focus out to the international literary and artistic community. She will lead a workshop that use idioms of Chicano/a, feminist, Palestinian, Jewish, Russian and Syrian works to generate poems, called Riot Writing – Poems to Start a Revolution.

“Poetry has done just that,” she says in an email. “The free speech we enjoy can be linked to a little book of poems called Howl by Allen Ginsberg (and to a book by an expat named Henry Miller).”

Ginsberg’s poem, central to the celebrations, busted through convention with liberated content, musical rhythm, innovative form (referred to as “breath-length”) and political daring. It was a battle cry against repression. Friday’s program and Saturday’s workshops are an affirmative echo of that spirit, 60 years after its noisy and auspicious birth.

SPEECH IS NOT FREE 7-10pm Fri, 10am-4:30pm Sat (RSVP for both) at Henry Miller Library, 48603 Highway 1, Big Sur. Free/Fri; $25-$75 suggested donation/Sat workshops. 667-2574, www.HenryMiller.org