Allen Ginsberg would have turned 100 this month, and his own voice reading "Howl" is coming back to vinyl. Craft Recordings is reissuing Howl and Other Poems — the spoken-word album Fantasy Records first released in 1959 — on September 4, reproducing the original package design on "eco-friendly green blend vinyl."
The record catches Ginsberg performing the title poem alongside "America," "Sunflower Sutra," "A Supermarket in California," and "Footnote to Howl," drawn from his Big Table reading in Chicago and sessions at Fantasy Studios in San Francisco. It arrived three years after the 1957 obscenity trial that ended with a court affirming the poem's literary value — a free-speech victory City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti was arrested to win. In 2019, the Library of Congress added Ginsberg's "Howl" to its National Recording Registry.
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