Catalog Audio

ARCHIVES | AUDIO CASSETTES | VIDEO CASSETTES

AUDIO CASSETTES from The Poetry Center's American Poetry Archives collection represent a small but very significant portion of the total available recordings listed here. We've gone back to our earliest, most fragile reel-to-reel tapes and selected a number of highlights from the collection, from the 1950s, '60s and '70s. From these rare masters, we created digital submasters. This lets us copy the recording onto a standard cassette without wear and damage to the fragile master tape. These early audiotapes are indicated in the catalog by a bullet preceding the listing. Among these tapes, you'll find original recordings by William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, Muriel Rukeyser, Louis Zukofsky; some of the earliest recordings in existence from the Black Mountain poets, the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, and the Beats, including Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, and Michael McClure together at the notorious Six Gallery reading in October 1955, where Allen Ginsberg first read Howl in public. The tape of Ginsberg's Six Gallery reading is conspicuously missing, though we do have another reading of Howl from one year later, as well as what's possibly the first public reading of his astounding poem Kaddish, from April 1959. Most of these older tapes have not been heard in years. More will be made available in the future.



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