This will only be news to certain devoted, and many will smirk ’so what’ as you read, but it just might add a little poetry to your day. Double interest to me, as it was discovered at Reed College, many of whose trustifarian students used to annoy me at parties when I lived out there. From the Reed press release

Portland, OR (February 11, 2008) – On a February night in 1956, Allen Ginsberg stood in front of a group of students in a dormitory lounge at Reed College and read from a manuscript that a few months later would be published as Howl and Other Poems. “Howl” is Ginsberg’s most famous and controversial poem, and a seminal work of the Beat Generation. The book sparked censorship debates that are credited with broadening First Amendment protections.

The February 1956 recording at Reed was duly labeled, cataloged, and then overlooked in the college’s library for more than 50 years. Literary scholar John Suiter rediscovered the tape last summer while researching a biography of poet Gary Snyder (Reed Class of 1951, winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry); Snyder and Ginsberg were on a hitch-hiking trip to the Pacific Northwest at the time the tape was made and spent February 13-14 on campus giving poetry readings. Suiter concludes in a forthcoming article in the Reed alumni magazine that this is the earliest-known recording of Ginsberg reading “Howl.” On the recording, Ginsberg reads to the conclusion of Part I, but ends before completing Part II, saying, “I don’t really feel like reading any more. I just sorta’ haven’t got any kind of steam.”

The pristine recording of “Howl” caught on tape that night at Reed differs in numerous ways from the legendary first public reading of the poem at San Francisco’s Six Gallery in October 1955. It predates by approximately five weeks the previous earliest-known recording of “Howl,” made at the Town Hall Theatre in Berkeley on March 18, 1956.

And the recording. It’s strange to me when these things are discovered after half a century: unknown sketches from great painters, previously unheard demos from famous rock bands etc. hidden and decaying in “archives”. But then I’m someone often with too much time on his hands who would relish access to certain caches.