Allen Ginsberg’s howl from the grave

The tape recording of an historic moment in American cultural history has been discovered in the archives of an Oregon college. It is the first ever recording of the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg reading his epic poem Howl. "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn," wrote Ginsberg more then 50 years ago.

With its many references to sex and drugs, Howl was the subject of an obscenity trial in 1957 after US customs officials were outraged by passages about gay sex being performed by "saintly motorcyclists" and references to "flashing buttocks" and Turkish baths. An action was brought against the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, which published and sold the poem, but it was eventually thrown out by the judge.

Among academics, it had always been thought that Ginsberg first recorded a reading of Howl in Berkeley, California, in March 1956. But it now appears a recording was made a month earlier at a student hostel on the campus of Reed College when Ginsberg hitchhiked up the Pacific coast to Portland, Oregon with Gary Snyder, a fellow poet who had graduated from Reed. Snyder persuaded his friend to read Howl to a small audience and it was recorded on a reel-to-reel tape machine on February 14, 1956.

According to the Oregonian newspaper, the tape was discovered by John Suiter, an academic researching college archives for a Snyder biography.
Suiter came across a box marked "Snyder Ginsberg 1956" which contained a good quality tape of Ginsberg reading just the first section of the lengthy Howl. "I don't really feel like reading any more," Ginsberg tells his audience. "I just sorta haven't got any kind of steam."

"It was completely serendipitous," Suiter said of the discovery. "I had no idea there was a tape." Pancho Savery, an English professor at Reed, said: "This is absolutely a very significant deal." The recordings are to be posted at www.reed.edu.