---

In his essay on the tennis player Roger Federer’s image on television, David Foster Wallace quickly remarks, after a couple of introductory lines, that “TV tennis is to live tennis pretty much as video porn is to the felt reality of human love.”¹ The writer then underlines that the visual apparatuses deployed during the broadcasting of a tennis match (aerial point of view, slow-motion replays, details, graphs, loss of three-dimensionality and of speed, theatricality) impoverish the beauty of game and player alike, or more precisely the entire kinetics of his game: “It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.” This may appear as a commonplace depreciative argument, however, as it is sustained by the power of Wallace’s descriptions and analyses, it also allows the discovery of a mysterious corporeal and metaphysical energy attached to Federer, completely oriented towards movement and its possible perceptions and representations. Seen from the terraces, inside the court, the player and his feats acquire a status linked to visual experience that is at best communicated in a lessened form through audio-visual broadcasting, despite the fact that the viewer’s remoteness and disengagement from any direct perception allows the discerning of a certain “subtlety of the game.”

In our experience of the contemporary world, often perceived through a single and almost identical transmission channelled by audio-visual means, one finds the same dichotomy in myriad contexts, from political discourses to cooking competitions to heated debates on any social topic. While some of these filmed representations seemingly display visual and theatrical solutions in order to dramatise a speech or the preparation of a fish, the representation we are focused on here, namely poetical performance, or more specifically the public poetry reading, seems at first seldom exposed to cameras. Circulated in the form of sound recordings as soon as the tape recorder was invented, its televised broadcast has been and is still mainly a matter of discussion between specialists intertwined with emphatic readings neutralised by audio-visual devices. There, the body of the poet seems an inexistent notion, as much as the representation of poetic discourse and life is often summarised by the smart tones of a voice singularised through its utterance alone.

Offering a counterpoint to such propositions is doubtless what makes for the uniqueness of Public Access Poetry (PAP), a weekly television show broadcast on a more or less regular basis between 1977 and 1978 on the Public Access Cable Television of New York. Indeed, PAP offered readings from poets whose representation clearly illustrated an atmosphere that could be equally qualified as a literary, communal and performative. Every week, during two seasons, the production team² rented a studio for half an hour—the duration of the show³—, using one, then two cameras to record about eighty contemporary poets (among them Ted Berrigan, Eileen Myles, Alice Notley, Jim Brodey, John Yau). Most of them lived in New York, others were just visiting the city. Some were confirmed poets, others where still students, and all came from very different backgrounds. They were usually introduced by a host with a factual, humorous presentation.⁴

By showcasing generational and stylistic exchanges, by refusing to establish a particular hierarchy or staging that would signify the authority of a specific poet (as the show’s layout is more or less always the same: one desk with a microphone, and a couple of chairs), PAP draws the portrait of a loosely-knit community whose boundaries are unclear, typical of the 1970s downtown scene of New York. A scene composed of poets, of course, but also of artists and musicians.⁵ Thanks to the digital transfer of the tapes by the Poetry Project,⁶ the show now forms a documentary corpus that brings to life literary performances that would otherwise have remained hidden in rare sound recordings or in the silent readings of the journals and poetry collections published at the time.⁷

---

POLITICS OF RECORDING

At the time PAP was created, recording poetry readings had already been an identified practice for a number of years—more particularly through sound recordings on magnetic tape. The birth of this technique, its democratization during the 1940s and 1950s, and the appropriation and exploitation of its characteristics had already been explored in various ways and in different artistic fields—we might think of authors such as N. Katherine Hayles and Michael Davidson.⁸ Among a number of significant applications, one may mention the use of de-synchronisation effects in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape in 1958,⁹ literary creations based on recording scripts in Jack Kerouac’s Visions of Cody in 1960¹⁰, or in Allen Ginsberg’s The Fall of America in 1973,¹¹ Alvin Lucier's late-1960s sonic experiments, in particular I Am Sitting in a Room in 1969¹², various pieces by Robert Morris such as Box with the Sound of its Own Making (1961), 21,3 (1964), or Hearing (1972),¹³ David Antin’s recordings of improvised speeches around 1972, using the tape recorder for theorizing a shift in poetic performance, or even the possibilities induced by recordings for building a dialogue with oneself through the machine such as in Laurie Anderson's 1974 performance As: If.

Some of these works use recording techniques as a medium for sonic production mainly to allow for the exploration of the supposed synchrony between voice and its utterance. They thus play on modes of temporal and phenomenological disturbances inducing both a sense of closeness and of distance with the performer delivering the oral message. While these instances relate to a number of the aesthetic and performative characteristics that defined a large part of 1960s and 1970s artistic practices, which sought to reinvent the performers’ subjectivities through the use of a technical medium, many of the aforementioned experiments simply involved the possibility of recording a present event with the view—consciously or not—of its subsequent communication and modification.

Besides examples drawn from the Beat Generation and from conceptual practices, the capacity of PAP as a medium for recording contemporary poetry, and therefore the instant archiving it offered, formed the basis of several poets’ practice. Paul Blackburn, for instance, would take his recorder with him to readings in New York cafés such as Le Metro, Les Deux Mégots, Dr. Generosity and at Saint Mark’s Church, as well as turning it on during informal discussions and for the occurrence of significant events (the moon landing, John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and so on), then create sound collages from his complete recording collection.¹⁴ One may also note Bernadette Mayer’s media and time-based experiments: for her exhibition Memory, she broadcast an 8-hour soundtrack corresponding to her July 1971 journal entry, with 1116 slides (36 pictures taken each day).¹⁵ Even though Blackburn and Mayer had very different poetical agendas, both used the recorder as a tool for capturing a poetic flux that took the form of oral, spontaneous and daily speech acts.¹⁶

---

---

Sound recording was thus a crucial issue in the art world in the 1960s and 1970s, an issue that coincided with artists appropriating another technical medium: video. Without providing its entire history, we need to distinguish the use of the filmic medium, the use of portable video, and the use of television from the onset. The latter pertains to somewhat different issues than the first two. While it is rooted in the field of an already omnipresent and commercial media, television allowed for a number of counter-cultural and experimental creations. The dialectic belonging to this use is what makes PAP interesting, for its recording and broadcasting on the New York cable TV network.

As we are reminded by Laura R. Linder,¹⁷ the roots of what is today known as Public Access Television were implemented after 1967, following the creation of the Public Broadcasting Laboratory. Its goal was to implement an effective public recording and broadcasting service. Freed from the market concerns of their mainstream counterparts, these programs were mainly linked to American counter-culture: free speech, anti-war or antiracist movements. The author remarks that this State funding and technical support generated a “natural tension … between the desire of some PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) producers to create challenging and provocative programs on the one hand and the direct sponsorship by the government on the other.”¹⁸ In the early 1970s, as Nixon and the White House tried to assert their influence and have greater control over the network, this led to less innovation and experimentation in a great deal of programs. The freer of them left the airwaves in the middle of the decade, and Public Access Television had to make a detour through Canada in order to reinvent itself in the United States thanks to, among others, the Alternate Media Center at New York University, founded in 1971. The center quickly became “a hub of the public access television movement in the United States, formulating policy, acting as a clearing house for information, and producing public access cable television programming.”¹⁹ The public format experienced nationwide growth during the 1970s, thanks to the support of various organizations such as Raindance, Videofreex, People’s Communication Network, Video Free America, Ant Farm, Global Village, The May Day Collective and People’s Video Theater. Already located at the crossroads between government actions, commercial endeavors and technical activism such as Michael Shamberg’s Guerrilla Television,²⁰ Public Access Television experienced a newfound significance in the late 1970s, as cable companies s ought to prove they were able to provide an important public service and support the public cable network in order assert their position as producers of a socially responsible medium.

---

---

When Public Access Poetry appeared in 1977, the show was thus already inscribed in a historical, technical and critical movement, in an era when counter-cultural concerns were already on their way to becoming widespread and diffusely normalized. While the issue of counter-culture is undoubtedly present in PAP, it is not linked to a particular form of protest as such. The show has no critical vocation, but rather intends to reach a larger audience with an obscure literary practice that is barely accessible except within a network of journals and publishing houses such as Dodgems, Roof, 432 Review, Out There, Angel Hair, Jim Brodey Books, Vehicle Editions, and so on.²¹ The issue of creating a new aesthetic and technical way of thinking is therefore absent from PAP, at least in its implementation. The expression of dissent is to be found in the texts themselves, or in a number of propositions illustrating the critical and political change occurring in the late 1970s. What was unprecedented—in a literary tradition heretofore almost exclusively dominated by men—was the way the show was, for instance, a relay for feminine and feminist poetry, a sign of the liberation of poetic, sexual and political speech, of which some poets are today key figures in contemporary American poetry: Alice Notley, Eileen Myles or Bernadette Mayer.

---

---

As for the issue of the archive that Paul Blackburn linked to an attachment to editing in a context of avant- and neo-avant-garde practices, it seems once again devoid of any critical preoccupation. What most of the program conveys is closer to the affirmation of a communal feeling that is not strictly theorized and defined, apart from its sole inscription in a territory. More than a political media critique, the stakes of PAP only seem to stem from the possibility of an audio-visual, anthological and spontaneous archive linked to an at once literary and friendly network. The show may therefore be considered as much as functioning on literary affinities linked to new encounters as well as to a certain heterogeneous, stimulating community where biographical presentations and encounters between poets mark a generational complicity looking to position itself in literary history. This aspect is clearly exemplified in the show dated from July 14th, 1977, when Eileen Myles introduces Gary Lenhart through a series of alphabetical and historical transpositions: “Who is Gary Lenhart anyhow? He’s another regional poet, from Albany, New York, the State’s Capital. And Gary’s a capital poet, as in A is for Allen Ginsberg, T is for Ted Berrigan, F.T. as in F.T. Prince. It used to be G as in Gary Snyder, but now it’s G as in Gary Lenhart.”

CLOSED-CIRCUIT PERFORMANCE

As documents archived, digitalized, and displayed online by the Poetry Project, the tapes from Public Access Poetry create a snapshot, captured on video, of a true community whose on-screen interactions may be considered a sign of a politics of friendship. In the show, the representational space of poetry readings has left the cafés, the galleries, the lofts and the apartments to enter the recording studio. Not unlike a filmed afterglow of public readings, Public Access Poetry bears witness to a joyous, smoky atmosphere in which the guests indulge in various games and jokes, while proposing experimentations of all kinds, both in front of the cameras and behind them.

These configurations may be further explained through three examples: the first one, taken from the October 13th, 1977 show, engages, in a quite classical way, Eileen Myles and Alice Notley, who take turns to read behind a desk: Myles reads a series of poems, then Notley takes her place; in the second example, on July 21st, 1977, John Yau and Jeff Wright take turns one poem after the other, throughout the show—one poem, through its style or its subject, forces the other poet to look for the best-suited poem in his own selection for the show, as if they were taking part in a relaxed rhetoric contest, both precise, humorous and unusual; in the third example, taken form the June 9th, 1977 show, Bob Rosenthal and Paul Violi launch into an impromptu arm-wrestling contest, with a 50-dollar prize, at the end of their respective readings.

---

---

In these three shows, the atmosphere is equally informal and conditioned by the usual framework of poetry readings. This is probably one of the most enduring impressions left by PAP: the ambient rawness of the show is reinforced by poets trying for the first time to reproduce a reading inside a television studio, in front of cameras and a limited audience mostly made up of friends and fellow poets. One should add the implicit notion, present throughout the two years of broadcast, that the audience attending the performance would be the only spectators of the show anyway. The hosts frequently ask any potential viewers to write to the production team, apparently to no avail. Thus, on October 13th, 1977, after reminding viewers that PAP is broadcast on the D channel, Didi Bubelyew asks them to send their comments as the program ends with a fade to black and a lost call in the middle of the cable network: “We really would like to know if you are watching!” The poet regularly acts as a host to the show, and asks the same question on several occasions, provoking a outburst of laughter in the audience when, in front of the camera, on the August 25th, 1977 show, she remarks, “It would be really silly to keep on doing this if nobody watches this.” This was a time when cable network coverage was only partial in New York, limited to the Upper West Side, according to Greg Masters, who admitted in an interview that the producers of the show were following the “fantasy of an exterior audience.”²² While only a handful of the featured poets had enough money to buy a television set, most of them living in the cheap, rundown Lower East Side. When Greg Masters linked Public Access Poetry’s initiative to the desire to promote his poet friends, we get a glimpse on a somewhat paradoxical dimension of the show, intent on showcasing a literary community open in its poetical approaches and its will to broadcast various experiences, while remaining extremely confidential.

---

---

A number of more incisive interventions by poets highlight this somewhat absurd impression. During the show of May 19th, 1977, Steve Levine asks Susie Timmons: “Do you find your poetry readings to be a satisfying form of making your works known to the general public, or do you have to rely on cable TV?” Despite the irony of Levine’s tone, his question uncovers an essential issue linked to broadcasting and circulation. The poet thus proposes the idea of possible audience creation without the agency of televised mediation, a stance that eventually asks what television could bring to an already well established network of readings and poets in New York.²³ Here is asserted a potency proper to poetry readings that defines performance as one of the instances of the “long biography of poems,” one, according to Peter Middleton, that may create a community within a “public network.”²⁴

However, this ambiguity more often takes comical turns, as when, for instance, Robert Meyers, when asking for water and eventually receiving a soda, reacts as if he was on the set of a major television show, asking, “Probably couldn’t put that on television.” “—No, it’s fine, it’s cable TV” “—Oh really?” There is a constant indefiniteness attached to the site where the poets sit and talk, an indefiniteness that produces moments of genuine interaction between the various people involved in the show. It is as if a kind of self-conscious failed attempt at reaching a larger audience allowed a certain form of relaxed experimentalism, where the very fact of belonging to a close-knit community allowed both the bringing together of various groups of poets to read in front of a privileged audience and succeeding in making a number of televisual discoveries with the same naivety. “This is like home movies!” Didi Dubelyew exclaims while commenting on the film crew’s rather unorthodox camera moves, alternating playful shots on the various guests of the show. What is more symptomatic is the show’s tendency to do more than providing shots of the readers’ mouth, hands or printed sheets of paper; in addition to that, there are frequently long background shots, as well as seemingly uncontrolled camera movements, creating genuine visual abstractions that could be assimilated to a canvas for the poetic utterance. We may then consider the environment of the poetic discourse in PAP as potentially linked to the performance and the very life of poetry readings and, more generally, of oral speech. As Erving Goffman wrote about the “analysis of the framework” of discourse in a series of books published in the 1960s and 1970s²⁵, “a communication system can be seen as a layered, composite structure—electronic, physical, biological, and so forth; and that effective communication is vulnerable to noise sources from different layerings in the structure of the system that sustains it.”²⁶ The close-up frame on Jim Brodey’s foot beating time as he reads his poem “Comrades in Bed,” Tim Dlugos’ awkward silence and smile as, at the end of his intervention, the PAP team has a hard time switching to the next reading, the laughter in the studio, the heckling by the audience, the haphazard video effects or the various technical problems—all of these examples, be they conscious or not, may be considered as “noise” in the transmission apparatus. Far from disrupting the understanding of the poetic message, all these examples participate in the reading of the performed poem, as they are linked to its televised representational system. For both the spectator and the performer, this “noise” may be compared to “voices” through the prism of which the poems are apprehended.

---

---

While these examples may be simultaneously touching for their candidness and puzzling for their lack of preparation, they all illustrate the way the show functions as a symbolic closed-circuit, to use the cybernetic term employed by their militant predecessors. Here, however, there is no apparent research on a potential redefinition of self-image through the medium of video, but only the absence of an exterior audience producing a form of self-performativity, a reversal of the potential poetic and television performativity against itself and within itself.²⁷ The fact that the members of the audience are named at the end of a show—like on the December 1st 1977 show—while only seconds earlier the camerawoman was herself being filmed, and therefore incorporated in the show, draws the circle within which producers, authors, technicians and audience are eventually interchangeable members within a television apparatus functioning as a structure and as a mediating agent between audience and performers, producers, poets, and so forth.

---

---

The curious and fascinating singularity of the show, its indecision regarding the private and the public beyond the mere anthology of poetry readings, is therefore both rooted in the history of video experiment and in the history of poetry readings and friendly relationships. However, the show as a whole also expresses a host of television genres, each of which illustrates, in an exaggerated, critical or simply mimetic manner, certain types of artistic, poetic, and cultural entertainment shows of its time. Through the flexibility of its editorial policy—from the readings themselves, Tom Johnson’s musical performance,²⁸ Ed Friedman and Robert Kushner’s absurdist sketches,²⁹ or David Herz and Rebecca Klinger’s fake news broadcast³⁰—PAP addresses the boundaries of a whole set of televised propositions bound with oral utterance and its performance. In that respect, the show is both indebted to the framework of stand-up comedy shows from the 1950s-1960s, to the historical context from which originated a series of underground cable-access shows such as TV Party (1978-1982), If I Can’t Dance, You Can Keep Your Revolution (1977-1995), or Paper Tiger TV’s productions (starting in 1981), which heralded the emergence of poetry videos in the 1980s. If TV Party and If I Can’t Dance… were more explicitly referring to existing media formats, specifically the talk show, the live readings offered by Paper Tiger TV saw artists, poets and theorists scrutinizing the American national press through the angle of media criticism (for instance, the episodes “Tuli Kupferberg Reads Rolling Stone” 1981; “Herb Schiller Reads The New York Times” 1981; “Martha Rosler Reads Vogue” 1982 and so forth). While this type of television program developed a new performative regimen of reading, relying like PAP on editorial sources, but incorporating the distance brought by a critical discourse, at the turn of the 1980s, the poetical field became in turn the site for a reconfiguration of formats, integrating among other things elements of staging and of production close to the music video format. Performance and experiments seemed to be played down in favor of a recited and calibrated utterance, fed by illustrative images, and at times overproduced. Thus, in 1982, “Uh Oh Plutonium” is a video in which Anne Waldman recites the eponymous poem over a new-wave soundtrack, and appropriates the garish universe of MTV, created one year earlier. Similarly, from 1987 to 1995, Bob Holman pursued a promotional logic similar to PAP, with about fifty editions of Poetry Spots.³¹ Through this more explicit use of the broadcasting tool and network, poetry is here no longer presented through its reading and its filmed performance, but through its integration within a visual economy of brevity and of fragmentation, while seemingly trying to combine it with a broadcast medium that seems alien to it at first.

---