Boulder – Naropa University received a collection of literary recordings Sunday including the 1956 first recording of beat poet Allen Ginsberg reading his work “Howl.”
The school also received donated recordings of writers such as Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas and James Baldwin.
“The poem ‘Howl’ is important in that it made a major impact on American poetics of its time,” Steven Taylor, director of Naropa’s audio archive, said in a release.
Ginsberg, who died in 1997, was a co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa, and he was famous for his meticulous documentation.
“He recorded everything,” Naropa archivist Tim Hawkins said at the presentation of the donated recordings Sunday. “It’s a fantastic addition to the collection we have here.”
The school already houses an audio archive that The New York Times has called one of the three most important literary collections.
The Naropa gifts are part of a nationwide tour for California-based Pacifica Radio Archives called “Save Our Sound” (S.O.S.).
Parts of the radio network’s 50,000-item archives, dating to the 1950s, are deteriorating. A group of audiophiles is driving across the country to promote their preservation.
Brian DeShazor, the Pacifica archives director, said the recordings are of significant figures talking on free-form radio that largely no longer exists.
“They weren’t just filling a time slot,” DeShazor said. “The conversation continues until it is done.”
The format allowed for “just unbelievable” discussions between Baldwin – known for such books as “Go Tell It on the Mountain” – and Langston Hughes – the Harlem Renaissance poet. Or between Baldwin and Malcolm X.
“You feel like you’re at a dinner table with them,” DeShazor said of the recordings. “The intonation. The rhythm. The vernacular. It’s just unbelievable.”
Sonali Kolhatkar, host of a Los Angeles radio program called Uprising who visited Naropa for the presentation, said she uses Pacifica’s digitally restored archives all the time.
“It is so different to actually hear, say, Malcolm X,” she said. “To hear the anger of his conviction and his fist pounding on the podium. … That can’t be captured in print.”
Staff writer George Merritt can be reached at 303-247-9948 or gmerritt@denverpost.com.