Lisa Hollenbach is Assistant Professor of English at Oklahoma State University. Her research studies the recording and broadcasting of American poetry in the twentieth century, and she is currently working on a book project about poetry and radio culture in the post-1945 United States.
Lisa Hollenbach
Contributions
Broadcasting “Howl”
On a late December evening in 1956, public radio station KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California, broadcast a poetry reading by a young writer whose first book, Howl and Other Poems, had just appeared that fall from local publisher City Lights Books. Allen Ginsberg, who had recorded the tape in KPFA’s studios a few months earlier, performed three poems from the book, including the long poem “Howl.”[1] The broadcast was Ginsberg’s first appearance on radio and the first sound recording of “Howl” to reach a public audience.