Craft Recordings will commemorate the centennial of one of the most influential literary figures of the 20th century with a special vinyl reissue of Allen Ginsberg’s landmark spoken-word album, Howl and Other Poems. Originally released by Fantasy Records in 1959, the recording captures Ginsberg performing many of his most celebrated works, including the era-defining title poem Howl.

Arriving September 4, 2026, on eco-friendly green blend vinyl, the limited-edition reissue [available here] faithfully replicates the original 1959 package design. The album will also be streamed across digital platforms.

The set combines recordings from the Big Table Reading at Chicago’s Shaw Festival with additional sessions recorded at Fantasy Studios in San Francisco. Alongside Howl, selections include Ginsberg’s celebrated works America, Sunflower Sutra, A Supermarket in California and “ootnote to Howl, capturing the radical candor, urgency, humor and musicality of Ginsberg’s early performances.

The release arrives as part of a broader centennial celebration honoring Ginsberg’s life and legacy. Additional events, exhibitions, performances and commemorative programs will take place throughout the year.

Born June 3, 1926, in Newark, N.J., Ginsberg emerged as one of the defining literary voices of the 20th century. For Ginsberg, the second half of the 1950s marked a transformative period. Following the first public reading of Howl at San Francisco’s legendary Six Gallery in October 1955 and the publication of Howl and Other Poems by City Lights the following year, he found himself at the center of one of the most consequential literary controversies in American history.

Published as part of City Lights’ Pocket Poets Series, Howl and Other Poems challenged prevailing cultural norms through its candid explorations of identity, spirituality and modern life. The resulting 1957 obscenity trial and the court’s decision affirming the poem’s literary importance became a landmark victory for free expression in the United States.

Three years after the book’s publication, Fantasy Records issued Howl and Other Poems, preserving Ginsberg’s own readings of the collection at a pivotal cultural moment.

The continued publication of Howl and Other Poems helped establish the Beat Generation as a major cultural movement and solidified the work’s place in the American literary canon. Alongside writers including Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure and Philip Whalen, Ginsberg helped shape a movement whose influence extended far beyond literature and into the music, politics and countercultural currents that followed. In 2019, Ginsberg’s recording of Howl was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress in recognition of its enduring cultural, historical and aesthetic importance.

Over the decades, Ginsberg’s influence has extended across generations of writers, musicians and artists. His friendships and collaborations with figures including Bob Dylan, Philip Glass, Patti Smith and Paul McCartney helped forge lasting connections between poetry and popular music, while his activism and advocacy made him an enduring voice for artistic freedom and social change.

Today, his work continues to resonate around the world, speaking to enduring questions of identity, free expression, dissent, spirituality and the search for human connection.

This special edition of Howl and Other Poems celebrates the timeless power of a work that continues to challenge, inspire and resonate seventy years after its publication.

Ginsberg was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, was awarded the medal of Chevalier de l’Ordre des art et Letters by the French Minister of Culture in 1993, and was co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute, in Boulder, Colo., the first accredited Buddhist college in the West.

During 1982, I arranged for Ginsberg to read poetry at music venues around Southern California, including his debut booking at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica.

In 1996, I talked to Ginsberg one late afternoon in Rhino Records’ conference room in Westwood, Calif., where poet Gregory Corso sat in with us, and the following year, we conducted another extensive interview by phone from his New York City apartment.

Ginsberg died on April 5, 1997, in New York City at his East Village loft of liver cancer and hepatitis, at age 70. That evening, Bob Dylan was playing a concert in the Midlands at the Moncton Coliseum in Moncton, New Brunswick, and dedicated “Desolation Row” to Ginsberg. Dylan had not been including the song in his recent repertoire.

Allen Ginsberg and Harvey Kubernik, 1996 interview

HK: FM radio was coming into its own around the time you were first being published. What impact did it have on you as a writer?

AG: By the time I got around to getting on the radio, it was actually an AM station in Chicago, with Studs Terkel; I recorded the complete reading of Howl in Chicago, later used for the Fantasy record. It was broadcast censored in 1959. KPFA in the Bay Area then started broadcasting my stuff in San Francisco, a Pacifica station. Fantasy put out Howl, and that got around. Also in San Francisco, in the mid-’50s, there was a music and poetry scene. Charles Mingus was involved with Kenneth Rexroth and Kenneth Patchen, and Fantasy Records documented some of that. I didn’t know how to handle it, so I never did much of that myself, because I was more funky, old- fashioned blues. I couldn’t cut the mustard with free jazz. Then, Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records put out Kaddish. It was a radio broadcast from Brandeis University.

Does the vision change once the work leaves the paper and becomes a listening experience?

No. It doesn’t make much difference. As far as the choice of what to write down or not, the slogan is vividness, which is self-selecting. So, in a sense, the method is impervious to influence by the audience because I’m just thinking to myself in the bathtub.

What about poetry readings with musicians next to you or people sharing the stage?

I have to focus on my text. I’m still pointing toward the tornado.

Do you ever read from memory?

I rarely read from memory. I sing from “Father Death Blues,” and can sing “Amazing Grace” from memory, but I don’t know what lines are coming, so I have to refresh myself. I’m not particularly interested in memorizing perfectly, ’cause I think it’s distracting from interpreting the text differently each time. I think you have to have all the dimensions at once, the book thing, the poetry thing, plus the performance, plus the musical accompaniment, and if you have all of them, and they’re all in a good place, that’s fine. But the reason I don’t try to memorize is that I guess I could, but I’m too busy, and I like to re-interpret the poem each time. Certain cadences are recurrent, and certain intonations are recurrent, but on the other hand, if I don’t memorize it, there’s always the chance that somebody noticing something, and empathizing, puts it a little differently, and brings out meaning that I didn’t realize before. So, I prefer to have the score in front of me and interpret it anew each time.

Watch Ginsberg on David Letterman, 1982

Artists from new generations, including alternative rock bands, still keep discovering your work and acknowledging your influence.

It’s fun. You always learn from younger people. I learned a lot from William Carlos Williams and the elders of my generation, people who were much older than me when I was young. And that inter-generational amity is really important because it spreads myths from one generation to another of what you know, and all the techniques and the history. All of a sudden, with the phalanx of younger people following Williams’ lead, he became the sage that he was. And I think it gave him a lot of gratification to realize he had been on the right track, and that it wasn’t in vain. And I get the same thing whenever I get to work with younger people. And I learn from them. I don’t think I would have been singing if it weren’t for younger Dylan. I mean, he turned me on to actually singing. I remember the moment it was. It was a concert by Happy Traum that I went to and saw in Greenwich Village. I suddenly started to write my own lyrics, instead of Blake. Dylan’s words were so beautiful. The first time I heard them, I wept.

Watch: Ginsberg made a cameo in Dylan’s famous “Subterranean Homesick Blues” video

Roger McGuinn of the Byrds told me in an interview, “Dylan’s stuff is brilliant. I coined the term that he was the ‘Shakespeare of our time.’ It was like knowing Shakespeare here. Dylan was carrying on Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. The baton had been passed. I remember Ginsberg said, ‘I think we’re in good hands.”

I had come back from India, and Charlie Plymell, a poet I liked a lot in Bolinas, at a “Welcome Home Party” played me Dylan singing “Masters of War” from Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and I actually burst into tears. It was a sense that the torch had been passed to another generation. And somebody had the self-empowerment of saying, “I’ll Know My Song Well Before I Start Singing It.” Dylan said that Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues had inspired him to be a poet. That was his poetic inspiration. We were being more candid and truthful than most other public figures or writers at the time. We were switched over to writing a spoken idiomatic vernacular, actual American English, which turned on many generations later. It happens every 100 or 150 years. It did in the days of Wordsworth, who, in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, suggested that poets begin writing in the words and diction of men of intelligence, or talk to each other intelligently, instead of imitating another century’s literary style. So, I think what happened is that we followed an older tradition, a lineage, of the modernists of the turn of the century who continued their work into idiomatic talk and musical cadences and returned poetry to its sources and actual communication between people. We wrote, and we were in the tradition of William Carlos Williams and Walt Whitman, spoken vernacular, a comprehensible common language that anyone could understand. We were built for it.”

Are you aware there’s sort of a re-evaluation of Dylan’s film, Renaldo and Clara? You were in the Rolling Thunder Revue tour and in the movie

Dylan delivers. It’s going to be a marvelous picture when people begin appreciating it. Well, first of all, it’s Dylan extending himself to the extreme, and including all his friends and all his inspirers, and all his workable companions in a big circus going through America. A musical circus. His mother was along at one point. His kids were along at one point. His wife was along. Joan Baez’s kid was along. So, it was this great family outing trying to hit all the small towns, originally, like the traveling circus in Kafka’s America. For me, it was great, and to hear Dylan so often, I was able to hear backstage, in the audience, from the side, in the wings, and go out to the furthest seats with a pass. He was at the peak of musicality, energy and inspiration. Like “One More Cup of Coffee” and “Idiot Wind,” which is one of my favorite lyrics. A national lyric with its great “Circles around your skull…” Really quite manic. It was great to see a band on a rock and roll tour, Rolling Thunder Revue on a grand tour, and see all the work that went into it. Renaldo & Clara is Dylan exploring the nature of identity and pointing out that there is no fixed identity.

Related: Our review of the Rolling Thunder Revue boxed set

You did a 1995 poetry reading in England with Paul McCartney.

In the late ’60s, 1967, I visited McCartney in London. I was on TV that day, a “Pro Pot” rally in Hyde Park, and the cops had stopped me from playing a harmonium or talking on a microphone. So, I came down from my ladder from where I was talking and gave the cop a flower. That was kind of a knockout for everybody in London at that time, rather than getting mad. And I was watching that on TV with Mick Jagger at McCartney’s house. And Paul was painting a satin shirt, and he gave it to me as a “performance shirt.” We talked a little. I had a gig in 1995 at the Royal Albert Hall in London, a reading. I had been talking quite a bit to McCartney, visiting him and bringing him poetry and haiku, and looking at Linda McCartney’s photographs and giving him some photos I’d taken of them. So, McCartney liked it and filmed me doing Skeletons in a little 8-millimeter home thing. And then I had this reading at Albert Hall, and I asked McCartney if he could recommend a young guitarist who was a quick study. So, he gave me a few names, but he said, “If you’re not fixed up with a guitarist, why don’t you try me? I love the poem.” So, I said, “It’s a date.” We went to Paul’s house and spent an afternoon rehearsing. He came to one soundcheck, and we did a little rehearsal there, again. And then he went up to his box with his family. It was a benefit for literary things. There were 15 other poets. We didn’t tell anybody that McCartney was going to play. And we developed that riff really nicely. In fact, Linda made a little tape of our rehearsal. So, then, we went onstage and knocked it out. There’s a photo of us on the CD. It was very lively, and he was into it. We met each other over the years, and then we met again when he did Saturday Night Live, and he greeted me like an old lost buddy.

Didn’t you see the Beatles play, and there’s a poem you wrote about the event?

Yes! I saw them in Portland, Maine, 1965. I was up there with Gary Snyder, and I was with a couple of little children. I had gotten tickets and was sitting way out in the bleachers, and John Lennon came out and said, “We understand that Allen Ginsberg is in the audience. So, three cheers. So now we’ll have our show.” He saluted me from the stage, which amazed me and made me feel very proud with all these young kids at my side. Then I knew Lennon and Yoko Ono lived in New York and visited on and off.

What happens when the beat or the music collides with your words and voice?

Elvin [Jones] has a very interesting attitude. He feels that he’s not there to beat out the vocalist. He’s there to put a floor under them. He’s there to support and encourage, and give a place for the vocal to come in, not to compete with the vocal, but to provide a ground for it. He’s very intelligent as a musician. We did it once together in 1969 on the Blake album; there was a military-type drum, and then this recent rap song. I’ve rarely found opposition to the music because the musicians were very sensitive and built their music around the dynamics of my voice.

Listen: Ginsberg sat in with the Clash during a New York City appearance by the band

You write something on a piece of paper. Does the original intention change once there is music and other elements involved?

Well, it widens it into a slightly different trip, but the words are pretty stable, and they mean what they mean, so there is no problem. The interesting thing is adjusting the rhythmic pattern and the intonation to the musician’s idea of what is there. That’s pretty good, because I’m good as an improviser where I can take a long line or a short line and fit in sixteen bars without worrying about spaces and closed places.

I’m amazed by your paper trail, book catalogs, albums, first edition printings, out of print classics people want signed. It’s sort of like “This Is Your Life” on parade.

Not quite. It’s my mind on parade. That’s what the mind is for: to show other people.

It’s fairly obvious to me that many people, including musicians, want to be writers again. I actually feel that.

They want to express themselves. Not just to be a writer to be a writer, but they want to be able to say what they really think.

Listen to Ginsberg read Howl in 1959

Books by and about Ginsberg are available in the U.S. here, in Canada here and in the U.K. here.

Author and music journalist Harvey Kubernik’s books are available in the U.S. here, in Canada here and in the U.K. here.