Early Beat poet recording found

PORTLAND – A recording of Beat Generation poet Gary Snyder reading his work 52 years ago at his alma mater, Reed College, has surfaced.

It is a cassette copy of a reel-to-reel tape of a reading on Feb. 14, 1956. It is believed that the original recording was the earliest of Snyder’s work.

It includes an early version of his long poem “Myths & Texts.”

Other poems on the recording appeared in his books “Riprap,” “The Back Country” and “Left Out in the Rain.”

Snyder, 78, graduated from Lincoln High School in Portland and Reed.

Snyder has heard the tape. In an e-mail to The Oregonian newspaper, he said he reacted most strongly to the portion involving “Myths & Texts.”

“If anything, I was surprised (a bit) by how thoroughly I was trying to think through the future shape of the ‘Myths and Texts’ manuscript,” Snyder wrote. “Good augury.”

The cassette turned up as a result of an Oregonian story about the discovery of a “Tape 2” from the 1956 reading that had Allen Ginsberg in the earliest known reading his famous poem “Howl.”

At the time Snyder said the missing “Tape 1” was from his half of the reading.

Portland photographer Steve Halpern called Reed to say he remembered rummaging among about 500 reel-to-reel tapes in a dusty crawl space at the Reed library as he was researching another Reed poet, Lew Welch.

He checked out a Welch lecture, the Snyder reading and recordings by blues legends Muddy Waters and the Rev. Gary Davis. He found a reel-to-reel tape recorder, connected it to a cassette recorder and made copies before returning the tapes to the library.

He said he delivered the cassette to Reed, listening to Davis sing “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” on the way across town, and got a grateful response when he arrived. The tape is in pristine condition – Halpern said he listened to it only a few times in 23 years.

He had copied all the notes from the original recording, which confirmed the date and that Snyder’s reading was before Ginsberg read “Howl.”