To follow up on yesterday's post on "The American Scream" - Ginsberg's poem "Howl" - the recently discovered first recording of Ginsberg reading Part I of the poem (the famous 6 Gallery reading in October '55 was not recorded) has now been made available to the general public...
To listen, go to the Reed College - a Portland, OR undergraduate college - Multimedia website. After you hear the readings, look at John Suiter's fascinating account (wonderfully illustrated on 6 HTML-pages)(this link opens the article as a PDF-file if you just want text - but the photos should not be missed) of finding the tape and describing the events in February 1956 when Gary Snyder and Ginsberg came to Reed and gave poetry readings to a small student audience...
Suiter's story begins:
Suiter's story begins:
In a plain gray archival box in the basement of Reed’s Hauser Library there lies a single reel of audiotape that captures a moment in the early life of one of the anthemic poems of the 20th century. The aging brown acetate clarifies an author’s voice, hints at a spirit, adds to the myth of two poets, and tells of a part Reed College played in the early days of the Beat Generation—before it was Beat, or yet a generation.
Later in the piece Suiter quotes Ginsberg's introductory remarks before launching into the incomplete version of "Howl":
Ginsberg pauses to briefly prime his listeners for what’s to come. “The line length,” he says. “You’ll notice that they’re all built on bop— You might think of them as built on a bop refrain—chorus after chorus after chorus—the ideal being, say, Lester Young in Kansas City in 1938, blowing 72 choruses of ‘The Man I Love’ ’til everyone in the hall was out of his head—and Young was also...” (This was pure Kerouac, straight from the prefatory note to Mexico City Blues, wherein Kerouac states his notion of the poet as jazz saxophonist, “blowing” his poetic ideas in breath lines “from chorus to chorus.”)
