The Guardian fortæller, at man har fundet en optagelse af beat-poeten Allen Ginsbergs formodentlig første oplæsning af Beat-generationens ærke-poem “Howl”. Hidtil er den første
oplæsning blevet dateret til marts 1956, hvor Ginsberg læste digtet op i Berkley. Men den genopdagede og -fundne oplæsning er en måned ældre og foregik under private forhold i en studenterhybel i Portland. Oplæsningen blev optaget på bånd den 14. februar 56 og “forsvandt” derefter i arkiverne på Reed College, indtil John Suiter under research til en biografi om digteren Gary Snider (ven til Ginsberg) faldt over båndet. Båndet, der i mere end 50 år har ligget uberørt bærer indskriften “Snyder Ginsberg 1956” og rummer 35 minutter, hvor Ginsberg læser op at Howl og andre digte. I Amerika er beatomaner selvfølgelig gået i selvsving over opdagelsen. Og vi andre kan blot vente på en offentliggørelse, så vi kan høre de (dengang) provokerende poetiske linjer…
HOWL
For Carl Solomon
I
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
ment roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-
cohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook-
lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and ….
Hele digtet kan læses her.