Recording discovered: famed poet live at Reed College
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/1226634918296810.xml&coll=7
A tape of Gary Snyder surfaces; he appeared at the college for a 1956
reading along with Allen Ginsberg
November 14, 2008
JEFF BAKER
The Oregonian Staff
When the news broke in February that Reed College had the earliest
known recording of Allen Ginsberg reading his famous poem "Howl,"
there was a missing piece to the puzzle.
The box containing the Ginsberg recording from Feb. 14, 1956, was
marked "Tape 2," but there was no Tape 1. Gary Snyder, who read with
Ginsberg that night and went on to become one of the greatest
American poets of the 20th century, said in February he thought the
missing tape was from his half of the reading.
Snyder was right, and thanks to a Portland photographer who made a
copy of Tape 1 and kept it for more than 20 years, another important
literary find has been uncovered and preserved. The new tape is the
first recording of Snyder reading his poems. It contains the earliest
known working version of his long poem "Myths & Texts," numerous
other poems that later appeared in his books "Riprap," "The Back
Country," and "Left Out in the Rain," and unpublished poems.
The sound quality is excellent, and Snyder, then 25, is bursting with
creative energy. He gives a long introduction to a version of "Myths
& Texts" that is considerably different than the one published four
years later, jokes about how he wrote "these shaman songs high on
peyote -- I don't know what they mean," and reads for more than one
hour before giving way to Ginsberg. Snyder graduated from Lincoln
High School and Reed, and it's clear from his voice that he's
enjoying a homecoming.
Snyder, 78, has heard the tape. In an e-mail, 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."
There's plenty of good augury in the way the tape was discovered.
Steve Halpern, a Portland photographer and a Reed graduate, read
about the "Howl" tape in The Oregonian in February and remembered a
cassette tape he'd made in 1985. At the time, Halpern was researching
another Reed poet, Lew Welch, and heard about a crawl space in the
Reed library from Dorothy Johansen, a beloved history professor at
the college.
"There were about 500 reel-to-reel tapes, scattered around in this
dusty space," Halpern said.
Halpern was told he could check out anything he wanted for three
days. He quickly found the lecture by Welch he was looking for and
also found 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.
Pristine condition
When Halpern called Reed and said he had a copy of the Snyder tape,
he offered to mail it to the college. No, no, was the response, we'll
come get it. Halpern delivered the tape 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. Not only was the cassette in
pristine condition -- Halpern thinks he only listened to it a couple
of times in 23 years -- but he'd copied down all the notes from the
original recording, which confirmed the date and that Snyder's
reading was before Ginsberg read "Howl."
The winter and spring of 1956 was a formative time in Snyder's life.
He and Ginsberg hitchhiked their way through Portland, a trip that
was described in "The Dharma Bums," a 1958 novel by Jack Kerouac that
contains lightly fictionalized versions of Snyder ("Japhy Ryder") and
Ginsberg ("Alvah Goldbook"). Snyder returned to California after the
hitchhiking trip and immediately set to work finishing "Myths &
Texts" before departing for several years of study in Japan. He was
aware that one phase of his life was ending. With a new adventure
about to begin, he dug into "Myths & Texts," the long set of poems
that has its roots in his thesis at Reed.
"Still working it out"
"I surely was still working it out," he said in an e-mail, and that
work is apparent from the tape.
"Myths & Texts" is organized into three main sections: "Logging,"
"Hunting" and "Burning." Snyder called them "Groves," "Beasts" and
"Changes" on the tape and said they are a progression "from trees and
plants through sentient animal life to the highly variable,
changeable, transformable life of human beings . . . so that the
final idea of 'Changes' is the final big Apocalyptic snap of the mind
which makes one a Buddha, an enlightened being."
The sequence of the poems is very different than the published
version, and some of the poems Snyder read at Reed were not published
for almost 30 years. By contrast, the shorter poems that appeared
later in "Riprap" and "The Back Country" were complete in 1956 and
are identical to the published versions.
John Suiter, who discovered the "Howl" tape and is working on a
biography of Snyder, pointed out that while there are recordings of
Ginsberg reading his poems from as early as 1949, every poem on the
Snyder tape from Reed is a first. The Snyder who told the small
audience the poetry he wrote as an undergraduate "no longer amuses
me" was a different man than the one who returned from Japan many
years later. This was before the Beat Generation became famous after
"Howl" and Kerouac's "On the Road" were published, before Snyder
became a Zen scholar and environmental activist, before there was
anything but two poets hitchhiking down the coast and stopping in at
Reed College on a night when a tape recorder happened to be rolling.
"Not that many people had tape recorders in those days, they were big
and bulky, and we didn't go around giving readings much -- that came
later," Snyder wrote.
--
Jeff Baker: 503-221-8165; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Jeff Baker's
blog is at blog.oregonlive.com/books
.
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