Swiss TV Documents The Poetry Project

I recently started to read The Poetry Project Newsletter as a complete run, starting with the first issue—published December 1, 1972—with the goal of reading them all chronologically over the month of August, at least up through the 1990s (or about 175 issues). As the (mostly) monthly news supplement of The Poetry Project, the Newsletter is full of all kinds of information, like publication info for new books and magazines, calls for work, event announcements, local New York City and national poetry news, reviews, commentary, strong doses of gossip, and a consistent undercurrent of lively resistance to the genre of the “official” newsletter. The various editorial voices are always up to something and the poetry news comes, as it should, a little slant. The Newsletter offers an incredible set of lenses on the history of the Project, and as an enormous stockpile of information that’s gone mostly untouched by literary scholars (the full run from issue #1 to the most recent, #261, is probably somewhere between 2,000 to 2,500 total pages), there’s a lot of great stuff buried in there.

Front page of The Poetry Project Newsletter No. 81, March 1981.

As I was printing and stapling copies of the Newsletter gathered from the Project website (they have about half the full run available to read and download; the other half I’ve been making copies of at Emory University’s Rose Library archive), I happened to read a note written by Greg Masters in Newsletter No. 81, from March 1981. Masters, who was then the editor of the Newsletter, is filling in the Project community on why a TV crew has been filming recent events at the Church. As he writes, “they’ve been filming in 16mm what must now be a few hours of Poetry Project events for what will eventually be cut down to a 15-20 minute segment for the Swiss TV show ‘Schauplatz’ which Mr. Suter [the director] described as a sort of cultural ‘60 Minutes.’” Of course, the Project is no stranger to a documentary attitude toward its programming. Since at least Paul Blackburn’s heroic lugging of a reel-to-reel recorder around the New York City poetry readings that were the immediate precursor of The Poetry Project events, the Project has consciously documented its existence in multiple forms, an activity that the Newsletter is very much a part of. As Masters suggests though, that doesn’t mean that a professional camera crew at the readings isn’t evidence of a new energy around the Project: “[T]he fact that a pro group with camera needing tripod has been showing up occasionally to document what encourages us further to feel is worth documenting, adds to the already exciting sense of ‘something’ happening this year, as continuous as past years, at St. Mark’s Church.” The events that Masters describes them filming—Ted Berrigan and Steve Carey at a United Artists book party, a reading by Elio Schneeman, a mimeograph machine in the Project office—sound like an interesting cross-section of the Project’s activities, from showing the community’s generational range (Berrigan to the young Schneeman), documenting social literary events like a book party (of which, unlike most readings at the Church, there are not audio recordings), and in terms of seeing the Project’s inner workings. “I think we’re all hoping to be able to someday see all the footage they’ve shot here,” writes Masters.

Excerpt from The Poetry Project Newsletter No. 81, March 1981.

Unfortunately, it seems that no one ever saw any of the footage, nor did anyone get to see—and perhaps this isn’t surprising in the early ‘80s—the actual episode of the Swiss TV show “Schauplatz,” which translates roughly, I think (?), as “Location” or “The Place.” But this note by Masters was enough to get me looking for some trace of this footage. Surprisingly, it didn’t take long to find all 10 years of Schauplatz, which ran on Swiss TV from 1980 to 1990, digitized on the contemporary station’s website. A few searches later and I’d found it, the episode of “Schauplatz” titled “New York Poetry Project,” which aired on February 9, 1982, about a year after the initial filming in New York. However, the episode isn’t viewable outside Switzerland due to geoblocking. After some circuitous VPN work, I managed to access and make a copy of the episode—now shown here for the first time. (See below.) Even for a literary community that so thoroughly documented itself, the “Schauplatz” episode is an incredible living document that exists as the only known audiovisual recording of the Project of its kind from this era.

Bernadette Mayer recording Wednesday night reading by Elio Schneeman and Rebecca Wright on January 28, 1981.

With Peter Wehrli as host, and as Masters’s description suggests, the 16-minute segment documents a stunning range of the Project’s vibrant community in the early 1980s. Here’s a detailed (and half-rushed) accounting of what the episodes takes us through: opening shots of the IBM electric typewriter and Gestetner mimeograph machine in the upstairs Project office; Elinor Nauen voting—likely for Project Board Members—with Ed Friedman in the red plaid shirt; Allen Ginsberg at his two-day special lecture/workshop on the history of metrics, which we see more of later; a shot of a crowd with Rochelle Kraut passing by looking directly at the camera, which then settles on George Schneeman in a brown sweater; the inimitable Barbara Barg playing with Mike Sappol and Joel Chassler as the all-poet band Avant Squares; some incredible shots of the intersection at E. 10th Street and Second Avenue as well as the scaffolding and construction on the Church, which had been severely damaged by a fire in July 1978; Assistant Director Bob Holman, who compiled the "Oral History of the Poetry Project” in 1978, describing the Project’s history; an absolutely amazing shot of Nauen next to Bernadette Mayer, then the Project’s Director, with a baby on her back, at the table with Friedman and Ted Berrigan; Gary Lenhart placing his vote; Holman—with Lewis Warsh in the shot behind him—overseeing a Community Meeting in the Parish Hall (we see Steve Levine, Ron Padgett, Lenhart, Regina Beck, Barg, Cliff Fyman, Susan Cataldo, and others). What else? There’s an incredible warm-light scene of Padgett and Maureen Owen in the Project office as the Gestetner runs off copies, Padgett cuts some paper, and Owen answers the phone while spinning back across the room to manage the mimeo—not easy!; Mayer discusses Project funding as we jump through a montage of shots around the Project offices—flyers and posters, stacks of paper, big sheets of paper where it looks like the names of everyone who has recently read at the Project are listed, and Holman at the typewriter with the reel-to-reel running in the background. The full multimodal behind-the-scenes environment of the Project at work. We also get 19-year old Elio Schneeman and Rebecca Wright giving a Wednesday night reading on January 28, 1981, complete with Mayer managing the recorder with Kim Jones, Gerard Malanga, Pat Padgett, and Katie Schneeman in the audience. Then an incredible crescendo, for me at least, in Ted Berrigan’s interview. I’ve never seen a video recording of him speaking outside of giving a reading. The vividness of his voice and facial expressions is really astounding to me, especially the expressiveness of his eyes. Before the dubbing sets in, we can hear Berrigan say “I taught the first poetry workshop here [in 1966]. One year I set up the chairs for the readings every week, for which I was paid five dollars, which I needed very much.” As Berrigan speaks we see Rene Ricard holding a copy of Jim Brodey’s new Judyism and then Steve Carey signing a copy of his new The California Papers for Daniel Krakauer. It’s amazing to see Brodey signing a copy of Judyism with two pens simultaneously: “For Mike, Eternal Love.” And there’s more! But you’re going to watch it anyway. The segment closes with Wehrli back in the studio showing the audience a set of German translations of Ginsberg’s books as well as a copy of Guillaume Apollinaire is Tot, a compilation of Berrigan’s work translated and edited by R.D. Brinkmann that was published in 1970. This places the “Schauplatz” episode in a lineage of German-language interest in the aesthetics of the New York School that reaches back to German translations of O’Hara from the late 1960s.

So here’s the full segment below. The audio is a little wonky and of course the Swiss German dubbing covers up much of what some of the writers say, but I’m hoping to be able to translate everything back to English to add subtitles and to make a complete transcript available. Just today the video made it around to many of the poets you’ll see here. An initial chorus of responses via email: “What a thrill. Holy Moly.”—Greg Masters; “OH OH OH. WOW WOW WOW.”—Elinor Nauen; “This is so fabulous!”—Maureen Owen; “I was pleasantly stunned.”—Ron Padgett; “How amazing to see ‘us’ so long ago.”—Steve Levine; “Unfuckingbelievable.”—Bob Holman. I agree with everyone. The Poetry Project has been running for 54 years. Here we get a view into the Project when it was just 15 years old and being led by Mayer—one of the most revered avant-garde American poets of our contemporary moment—out of the crisis of the 1978 fire. The early ‘80s were the end of an era at The Poetry Project and within the community of New York School poets on the Lower East Side. This video documents those changes vibrantly and with renewed material specificity.

Many thanks to Greg Masters for his ongoing generosity in pointing out the full cast of characters here and for writing the original Newsletter post that led to all this. Thanks, too, to everyone who responded to and shared the video so far.

What study is about: On "What is Poetry? (Just Kidding, I Know You Know): Interviews from The Poetry Project Newsletter (1983-2009)"

The following review first appeared in The Georgia Review Spring 2018, Volume LXXII, Number 1.

Wave Books, edited by Anselm Berrigan

As an archive of over a quarter century of artists speaking together, What is Poetry? (Just Kidding, I Know You Know) is a successful embodiment of the generative talk and surprising lineages that have defined the Poetry Project since its establishment in the 1960s. Even the book’s interrogative, doubly-animated title, lifted from a questionnaire by Charles North that begins the collection, marks the performative, independent, and witty consciousness of the Project itself—as an arts institution on the border of institutions, run by poets, that’s been home to fifty years of fierce, cherished conversational momentum. As the title suggests, it’s not really what “you know” but that you and I are here to share an inquisitiveness, to exchange a little of the question’s serious shapeliness.

That is, the question “What is poetry?” is only asked half-jokingly until it isn’t. Readers familiar with The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery will recognize how and why asking what poetry is (or what a Poetry Project is) might be necessary to the poets who populate it, and The Poetry Project Newsletter has helped articulate the feeling and thinking fabrics of the space. With 251 issues, the newsletter is a long social song to which the Project’s overlapping aesthetic, political, and cross-generational communities all contribute by echoing off one another. Among more monolithic or short-lived arts institutions, rarely have any been associated for so long with so many aesthetic formations that, as editor Anselm Berrigan notes, “are variously highlighted, fleshed out, made ambiguous, undermined, and otherwise reformed in the interviews found herein.” Like the Project itself, What is Poetry? is a record of oscillating, idiosyncratic correspondences rather than a monument to a cohesive aesthetic center.

As a happy result, this book is no anthology. No conversation quite settles. There are disagreements, digressions, problems, and leaps forward. This multiplicity makes the 440-page collection of interviews a good book, a good place to gather.

Featuring conversations with poets and artists as various and luminously idiosyncratic as Alice Notley, Fred Moten, Ed Sanders, and Renee Gladman, whose interviews are conducted by a range of young(er) writers—many of whom are now aesthetic leaders in their own right— such as Lisa Jarnot, Magdalena Zurawski, and erica kaufman, the collection emphasizes that cross-generational voices are always already happening together. But this togetherness is a sign of oscillation rather than cohesion. The interviews stick together because they all emerged intended for The Poetry Project Newsletter, though their movements with and against one another produce new scenes and ideas entirely, evidence of Berrigan’s astute editorial positionings.

Consider the opening three pieces in the book. The first is a playful questionnaire by Charles North that juggles the interview as a social and aesthetic form whose initial question “Why are we doing this?” echoes the book’s title as a refusal of assumptions and expectations. Following North’s playful self-reflexivity is an interview with artist Red Grooms by poet Anne Waldman that is punctuated with pronouncements such as “The ocean to me looks very nineteenth century. It was probably painted best in that century.” Next is an interview with translator Paul Schmidt by Tim Dlugos in which translation becomes more about enmeshing your thinking in a poet’s work than executing a translation with precision and clarity. As Schmidt says, “Your responsibility is to transform it.” A reader can find, or at least sense, an answer to “What is poetry?” in this sequence of collaborative, cross-genre voices where poets, prose writers, artists, translators, filmmakers, activists, musicians, scholars, and every collaged, wayward combination of these practices settle together in the space of the book. Everyone is furiously interested in what everyone else is doing, and this active participation in and attention to other artists’ work and thinking acts as a sub-narrative across What is Poetry?—the trace of an interdisciplinary aesthetic imagination that the programming at The Poetry Project continues to embody.

And really, it’s rare to get in one tome so much varied talk about innovative contemporary poetry. The only recent comparison I can make is to Andy Fitch’s Sixty Morning Talks (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014), a collection of 2012 interviews that produce a snapshot of innovative poetry practices that year via Fitch’s sharp, generous conversations. The comparison doesn’t constitute a model, though, because What is Poetry? not only chronicles the histories and personalities that have sustained the Project but also reinterrogates those trajectories, leaving them up in the air and newly able to be traced by the poets who arrive next. As if to interrogate why such a collection might be assembled in the first place, North’s questionnaire asks, “The question is, to what extent does commenting on a poetry scene produce that scene which, until that point, didn’t quite exist?” If these interviews are a site of production, a section of the news for a community always being made new, they are also an invitation to come next, to mix up and get mixed up in another lineage without cementing a trajectory or submitting to the social and historical demands of the scene. “I think everybody must already know this,” says Bernadette Mayer in a 1992 interview, “—I hope they do—that one person can write in many different ways.” The same flexibility applies to the Project itself, which is an institution and a historical center with a lineage of publications and, more important, people—the poets themselves speaking “on this high frequency,” as Kenneth Koch describes it, all of whom have been thriving, arguing, living (and sometimes dying), performing, and writing for over half a century.

Perspectives on community and lineage permeate these interviews. Asked about learning from such a seemingly disparate array of writers, the great Lorenzo Thomas offers a reply that describes an ethos of the Project itself: “Everybody was very much interested in knowing who came before us regardless of what their nationality or race might have been, though we might have been more interested in some people than others, individually. But that was the thing, we wanted to know who came before us. What, if anything, did we have in common in terms of the situations that we faced and the situations they faced, which is, I think, what study is about.”

It wouldn’t take much to convince me that “what study is about” is as good an answer as any to “what is poetry?” if answers are what one is looking for. Thomas’s description of studying is of a shared yet idiosyncratic looking around and falling into, an inquiry into common feeling and recurring confrontation—studying as ethics and politics, which is to say, a poetics. I’m buoyed by interviews like this one with Thomas, which apart from this collection would have taken a trip to a university special collections or unofficial residency in The Poetry Project offices to read. The original newsletters—often fragile, ephemeral documents—are housed now in this thick, perfect bound shed of a book, with a different historical light on them. I’m wondering where else we might find this many hit singles framed together that’s more than just a best of, as this book is. There’s a rough, critical pleasure in the accumulation across these conversations, one in which the reader is able to exist on both sides of each interview, speaking and listening. As Waldman says in conversation with Marcella Durand, “I remember Edwin Denby saying that St. Mark’s cultivated an exquisite ear for poetry. People learned how to LISTEN there.” Building on Thomas, listening also seems to be what study is about – personal, radical, and made of voices.

As the Project and Newsletter continue to stage a variety of overlapping contemporary communities of artists, the ongoing heritage of the Project also continues to garner scholarly interest and editorial projects that collect and frame the work of the communities and artists that grew in and through organizations like the Church. Those familiar with the Lost and Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative will find What is Poetry? to be an expanded companion to that invaluable archival pamphlet series, cousin to a growing list of projects and narratives that document the poetry and poetics of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, including Out of This World: An Anthology of the St. Marks Poetry Project 1966-1991 edited by Waldman, All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s by Daniel Kane (whose interviews with Koch and Larry Fagin appear in What is Poetry?), and St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America’s Hippest Street by Ada Calhoun. It is exciting that Wave Books, the publisher of What is Poetry?, will continue this necessary archival and historical work with its new Interview book series, the first of which, There You Are: Interviews, Journals, and Ephemera, edited by Cedar Sigo, traces the life, work, and legacy of Joanne Kyger. One can imagine other books similar to What is Poetry? about Woodland Pattern, for example, or the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, whose rich histories would benefit from such a project by a contemporary poetry press like Wave. For now, What is Poetry?, with its smart, chatty, and ongoing exchanges, furnishes us a chance to look back at a quarter century of work, attitude, and vision in The Poetry Project Newsletter, and to generate future conversations with as much urgency and devotion as the ones collected therein. As Thomas says, “I don’t think attention to the past destroys the poet’s ability to say something new, or to be innovative.” It’s old news, but What is Poetry? is all new.