The discovery of the Reed Ginsberg tape by Omnivore Recordings’ cofounder Cheryl Pawelski was serendipitous. Title calligraphy by Reed College's Gregory MacNaughton.Ĭourtesy of Omnivore Recordings / Courtesy of Omnivore Recordings The album cover of Omnivore Recordings' Allen Ginsberg - At Reed College: The First Recorded Reading of Howl and Other Poems. The release’s liner notes, written by Savery, calls the recording “Allen’s Valentine” and begins, “what you are holding in your hands is a piece of American literary history.” This month, a restored version of the archival recording was released on multiple formats - including on vinyl - by Omnivore Recordings. That’s until author John Suiter stumbled upon it in a box at Reed’s Hauser Memorial Library in 2007 in the course of his research into Gary Snyder. 14 - the second of two nights Ginsberg read at Reed - was long forgotten. “And so, it was a natural place for Snyder to take Ginsberg on their journey through the Northwest,” Savery said. Snyder, along with fellow Beat poets Philip Whalen and Lew Welch, were all Reed College alumni. Related: Literary Arts: The Archive ProjectĪfter the Six Gallery reading in 1955, Snyder and Ginsberg decided to take a road trip together up the West Coast to the Pacific Northwest.
But it turns out that the first recording took place a month earlier, on Valentine’s Day, in the lounge of a dormitory at Portland’s Reed College. But the reading, sadly, went unrecorded.įor many years, it was thought that the first time Ginsberg was recorded reading “Howl” was March 1956 in nearby Berkeley. Other writers in attendance that night included Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The first time Ginsberg ever publicly read “Howl” was at Six Gallery in San Francisco, a city at the heart of the Beat movement, in October 1955. “And it is simultaneously a lament for the people who have suffered under those politics.” “The poem is very political, and it is an attack on the conformism of ’50s Eisenhower McCarthyism,” said Pancho Savery, a Reed College professor of English and humanities.
Once the subject of an obscenity trial, it’s now regarded as a seminal work in American literature. So begins one of the most famous poems of the Beat literary movement: Allen Ginsberg’s epic, “Howl.” Written in the mid-1950s, the poem is dedicated to fellow writer Carl Solomon, who Ginsberg met at a psychiatric institution. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked….”
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