Reed College Howls With Landmark Recording by Beat Poet
Reed College’s archives have turned up a true gem of 20th-century poetry history, a high-quality recording of Allen Ginsberg reading his epochal long poem, “Howl,” that was taped a few months before it was published and became the subject of a landmark obscenity trial.
The recording was made on reel-to-reel tape in front of a group of students in a Reed dormitory lounge in February 1956, during Ginsberg’s visit to the college on a hitchhiking trip with a fellow poet, Gary Snyder, a 1951 Reed graduate.
Mark Kuestner, a special-collections librarian at Reed, and John Suiter, a Boston-based literary scholar, discovered the tape last summer in Reed’s archives while Mr. Suiter was preparing a biography of Mr. Snyder, who is an emeritus professor of English at the University of California at Davis. Ginsberg died in 1997.
Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Ed
The recording was made on reel-to-reel tape in front of a group of students in a Reed dormitory lounge in February 1956, during Ginsberg’s visit to the college on a hitchhiking trip with a fellow poet, Gary Snyder, a 1951 Reed graduate.
Mark Kuestner, a special-collections librarian at Reed, and John Suiter, a Boston-based literary scholar, discovered the tape last summer in Reed’s archives while Mr. Suiter was preparing a biography of Mr. Snyder, who is an emeritus professor of English at the University of California at Davis. Ginsberg died in 1997.