Hear the “Howl” — Ginsberg reading Ginsberg, 1956
So, Allen Ginsberg comes to Portland in 1956 with his friend Gary Snyder and they spend a couple of days at Reed College. He’s 29 and just about as full of desire as a human can be. He wants to touch the firmament and he wants to savor the most exotic pleasures of the flesh, he wants to be the greatest poet ever and he wants everyone to know it, he wants to drink with the gods and use the hangover to prove that he’s caroused with them. And what separates him from just about every other ambition-drenched artist out there is that in 1956 he is carrying “Howl” in his pocket, and all the contradictions, the spirit and the flesh, the yearning for desirelessness, the hunger to be both participant and observer at the same time, have been resolved, temporarily, on the page. After reading several shorter poems on the second night, he turns to “Howl.” And, well, you should check it out.
Reed College has now posted the audio tape of Ginsberg’s reading of “Howl” at the college in 1956. It’s offering a range of options (from the master tape unedited including several other poems and Ginsberg’s intro to “Howl” to an edited version of “Howl”). For the most concentrated dose, go straight to the edited “Howl.” He starts out slowly, deliberately, in a youthful version of the nasal tones that only became nosier as he aged. It picks up. Faster. Higher pitched. More intense. This isn’t the final published version of “Howl” (which wasn’t finally reached until 1986): If you follow along with the printed page, he skips around, changes the order, drops some phrases and adds others. But, after rather lackadaisically making his way through the other poems that preceded “Howl” that night (and available at the site, too), he is fully engaged with the text. He KNOWS it’s good, and tries to live up to it with his reading, even though the crowd is small (though responsive, laughing at some of the more delightfully over-the-top moments in the poem). And I was laughing too.
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Great blog and great piece on Howl. “…about as full of desire as a human can be.” Also, the contradictions in Howl: the flesh and spirit…that’s Howl in a nutshell. Well done!
Comment by tom alkire — February 19, 2008 @ 7:32 pm
There’s at least one recording of an earlier reading of “Howl” that took place in October 1955.
Sort of.
Jack Kerouac’s loosely-fact-based novel “The Dharma Bums” is set in and around San Francisco in October 1955. Ray Smith (Kerouac) meets up with Japhy Ryder (Gary Snyder) and Alvah Goldbook (Allen Ginsberg) for the famous reading at Gallery Six on “the night of the birth of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance.” In 1991 Allen Ginsberg recorded “The Dharma Bums” for Audio Literature.
So we have Ginsberg reading Kerouac writing about Ginsberg reading “Howl.”
Smith describes Goldbook as “the hornrimmed intellectual hepcat with wild black hair.” On that historic night Smith follows Goldbook and the “whole gang of howling poets” to the reading. “Everyone was there. It was a mad night.” Smith claims he was “the one who got things jumping” by collecting coins from “the rather stiff audience” to buy big jugs of wine that got them “all piffed so that by eleven o’clock when Alvah Goldbook was reading his, wailing his poem ‘Wail’ drunk with arms outspread everybody was yelling ‘Go! Go! Go!’ (like a jam session).”
And that’s it! Smith spends another half page describing Ryder reading his Coyote poems, which made the audience “howl with joy.” But Ginsberg’s “Howl” is transformed by Kerouac’s art into something called “Wail.” On the audio book version, Ginsberg reads the passage with a deep clear resonant merry voice perfect for the anarchistic all-is-possible spirit of the book. So he must not have minded much that Kerouac thought his great poem a “Wail.”
Comment by Seefeldt — February 19, 2008 @ 10:23 pm
[...] missing. Recall back in February of this year Scatter commented on Reed’s release of the tape of Allen Ginsberg reading “Howl” that same night and the likelihood that a second tape had captured Snyder’s [...]
Pingback by Art Scatter » Live from Reed, it’s Gary Snyder 52 years ago — November 14, 2008 @ 2:51 pm