Comments on: Poetry by Radio: Paul Blackburn and WBAI

By: Paul Blackburn Poetry Radio Recordings

Paul Blackburn Poetry Radio Recordings — Thu, 25 Dec 2014 01:25:04 +0000

When poetry was enjoying a real renaissance through readings at coffee houses, lofts and bars. Paul Blackburn brought his tape recorder to virtually every reading he attended (and he attended many) and could usually be found setting up chairs, adjusting the microphone and preparing an introduction for those readings which he organized. The series at Le Métro, Les Deux Magots, Dr. Generosity’s and St. Mark’s Church were all formed out of Blackburn’s generous enthusiasm, and his poetry show on WBAI radio brought the new writing out of the clubs and bars of the lower East Side and made it available to a wider audience. The tapes made of these readings constitute a virtual oral history of artistic activity during an exciting period in New York’s history, and some investigation of the contents of this collection will suggest a variety of scholarly and critical uses of the tapes

By: Archiving Acoustics and WBAI | Objects in Culture

Archiving Acoustics and WBAI | Objects in Culture — Fri, 12 Dec 2014 00:46:32 +0000

[…] She wrote on her experience tuning into a WBAI recording in 1961, ” Listening through the layers of mediation that stand in for Blackburn’s own listening ear, I catch an interview with Allen Ginsberg, a broadcast of Blackburn reading translations of medieval Provençal poetry, a Mozart piano concerto, and a BBC production of King Lear. At one point Blackburn reads directly into the tape recorder from Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems before the next recorded broadcast cuts in. During the Mozart, I can hear a typewriter in the background, and suddenly I’m placed in a room with dimensions. I wonder, though there’s no way to know, if he’s working on a poem.” […]

By: Radio Poetry and the Archiving of Acoustic Space - Radio Survivor

Radio Poetry and the Archiving of Acoustic Space - Radio Survivor — Tue, 09 Dec 2014 23:51:19 +0000

[…] Hollenbach is a literary scholar interested in poetry broadcasts from the 1950s to the 1970s. In her recent post for Antenna Blog‘s Radio Preservation Task Force series she describes her work as dealing with “several neglected cultural fronts at once, examining […]