Inside the box, the reel labeled “Tape 2” contains the earliest-known analog recording of Allen Ginsberg reading his groundbreaking poem “Howl.” (Where is Tape 1 and what does it contain? We didn’t know until a Reed alumnus walked into the archives following news reports of this story. He had a cassette copy of the original reel-to-reel tape, containing Snyder reading his poetry in February 1956.) Tape 2 also includes pristine early recordings of several other shorter Ginsberg poems. The tape—of superb clarity and sound quality—was made at a poetry reading given on campus in mid-February 1956, when Ginsberg and fellow poet Snyder passed through Portland in the course of a three-week hitchhiking trip from Berkeley to the Pacific Northwest.

“Howl” exploded like a year-long double starburst over the cultural landscape of the Bay Area in 1955 and 1956. The first pop sounded at a now-famous public reading in October 1955 at the Six Gallery, a hole-in-the-wall art space in San Francisco; the second and much louder blast came a year later when Howl & Other Poems was published in book form by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights press, and was subsequently busted for obscenity, becoming a literary cause célèbre and spreading Ginsberg’s fame worldwide.

But all that was further down the road when Snyder and Ginsberg blew into Portland in mid-February 1956 for a reading at Anna Mann Cottage. Ginsberg was still a complete unknown outside the small poetry world of the Bay Area. That winter’s jaunt was very much Snyder’s trip, with Ginsberg along for the ride. After years of wily subsistence and dogged self-preparation, Snyder had just landed an $85-per-month stipend from the First Zen Institute of America to go to Kyoto, Japan, for a year of translation work and introductory Zen training, with an eye toward a much longer stay if all worked out. He had gotten his passport, and would soon buy a one-way steamship ticket for Kobe.

At age 25, it was the beginning of a new life, but it was also the end of a long chain of effort that went straight back to Reed. The hitchhiking trip with Ginsberg was for Snyder a restless farewell tour of sorts—a chance to visit scattered Reed friends and take in old haunts and beloved Northwest landscapes that he would not see again for some time. For exactly how long, he wasn’t sure—as it turned out, he would spend most of the next 12 years in Japan.

For Ginsberg, who’d only been on the West Coast a bit more than a year, this was his first trip to the Pacific Northwest—and the first of many journeys with Snyder in years to come. At that time Ginsberg knew little of the West, or of Snyder, for that matter. They’d met in Berkeley just four months before at the urging of Kenneth Rexroth—Snyder’s poetry mentor at the time—who also knew Ginsberg and suggested that they meet. The two young poets hit it off from the start, and together organized the Six Gallery event, assembling a potent quintet of readers that in addition to themselves included the surrealist poet Philip Lamantia, the dashing Michael McClure, and Snyder’s old friend and former Reed housemate, Philip Whalen ’51.

Ginsberg’s explosive reading of “Howl” had been the pièce de résistance of the Six Gallery event, but he was not the final reader. Snyder, it turned out, had been the last of the poets on the night of the Six, taking the stage in the cathartic wake of “Howl.” No mean feat, and one that Snyder pulled off masterfully, by all accounts, guiding the riled-up audience from Ginsberg’s Passaic and Harlem river lamentations, to the songs and myths of the Deschutes and Willamette in “A Berry Feast” (see page 15) and other lyrics of logging and lookouting. Ginsberg had been enormously impressed by Snyder, both before and after the reading.

“Allen had respect for Gary in a way that he didn’t for some other people,” observed mutual friend and fellow Six-poet Michael McClure. “He wanted to learn from Gary—about nature, hitchhiking, mountain ways. These Eastern boys like Allen and Jack [Kerouac] finally got out here and got past North Beach, and discovered that there were forests and mountains and deserts and wildflowers…”

Allen Ginsberg, June 1956 ©Allen Ginsberg Estate, photo by Peter Orlovsky