Viku Zen and Dark Star Howl

The crack of doom on the hydrogen juke box. Eyeball kicks. This is the Howl for the 21st century, a meandering back track of Tangerian bone grindings with the thick diction'd text of brilliance chanting into eternity.

Viku Zen's Howl

What reading of Howl is this? Late Howl. Ginsberg is adamant! Certain. Full of the poem. Fully realized. A masterpiece delivery. The soundtrack's atmospheric sketches compliment instead of overlay the text. The whole forceful incantation fully audible.

Resting briefly in catatonia

Contrast that with this wholly different collaboration, one across time. Howl, an early reading, certainly the 1950s, back by an ethereal "Dark Star" by the Grateful Dead from February 24, 1974.

We are all great writers on the same dreadful typewriter.

Rare Howl Discovered

It's not often that a rare howl is heard or a rare Howl discovered, but ... so one has been. An extraordinary surfacing at the Rauner Library of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire - a copy of the mimeographed true first edition (of 25 purportedly produced) that Ginsberg sent to Richard Eberhart, fellow poet (and, at the time, soon to be chronicler of the San Francisco Poetry scene 1956).

Read this extraordinary account of its discovery at the Rauner Library Blog.