First known recording of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” is from Portland’s Reed College

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked….”

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. Once the subject of an obscenity trial, it’s now regarded as a seminal work in American literature.

“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. “And it is simultaneously a lament for the people who have suffered under those politics.”

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. Other writers in attendance that night included Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. But the reading, sadly, went unrecorded.

For many years, it was thought that the first time Ginsberg was recorded reading “Howl” was March 1956 in nearby Berkeley. 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.