I’ve always loved it, the title of Black Box 8 published in 1976, an all-Washington issue of the first
poetry magazine in audiocassette tape format.
For me, these words, Love &
Death in Demon City, speak of the heat and turmoil of the period; of
possibility, ferment, passion in the face of danger. This was a heady time to be young, it was
easy to live on little money, undertake projects on a shoe-string and make them
happen with hard work, the support of friends, little sleep and seemingly
boundless energy.
Black Box was the
brainchild of Alan Austin, poet, son of a Southern preacher, who in the late
1960’s was poetry editor for Motive
magazine, a radical publication of the Methodist Church (this could happen in
the ‘60’s). He came to Washington, DC
from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, where he was working on a graduate
degree and became a fellow at the Institute for Policy Study (the left-wing
think-tank) thinking about the uses of technology in democratizing
education. At some point, according to
Alan, IPS wanted him gone (although the reason always remained vague) and he
was given a small grant to start some enterprise of his own. So, in 1970, he did what any true activist
worthy of his salt would do—incorporate as a non-profit, educational foundation
which he called first “The New Classroom,” and later changed the name to “The
Watershed Foundation.”
Alan’s thinking, his visions, were always expansive and
inclusive. His idea of using technology,
specifically technology to record and
broadcast the human voice, in order to cross distances, to provoke thought, to
inform debate, to evoke emotions, to promote deep understanding was at the core of all the projects he initiated. Alan was determined that they should all be
multi-racial, multicultural and represent a balance between woman and men’s
voices. Poetry seemed the natural vessel for these ventures. As his first
co-editor. Alan enlisted Etheridge Knight who was followed by Ahmos Zu-Bolton
III. And most of the managing editors of
Black Box, and producers of Watershed Tapes were women, notably Julie Huff,
Elizabeth Wray, Katherine Mattern, and me
What Alan did best was articulate his ideas, create and
maintain structures to embody them and attract other poets with lively,
discerning minds, good humor, energy and love of the craft, who would transform
his ideas and bring them to fruition. Black
Box/Watershed became a hub, a node of poetry activity in the Washington
area.
Black Box 8 began
as the Washington DC Poetry Tapes Documentation Project. With a $5,000 grant from the DC Commission on
the Arts and Humanities, Alan’s goal was to record “all of the working poets in
the Washington, D.C., which we have tentatively estimated as being between two
to three hundred people.” In spring
1975, an invitation was sent out for opening recording sessions at the Black Box office, then at the Dupont
Circle Building, on Thursday evenings and Sunday mornings. During a sixteen-month period, Julie Huff, then
managing editor of the magazine, and Alan recorded over three hundred local
poets. Ahmos Zu Bolton, Co-editor for
Blackpoetry, E. Ethelbert Miller, Mac Wellman and Robert Hinton assisted,
identifying poets to be recorded, getting them into the studio, and then
helping to make the selection of 37 poets whose work would be used in the
issue. In addition, Alan recorded a number of reading series around town, and
material from those readings was included.
Sterling Brown was recorded as part of the series Betty Parry organized
at the Textile Museum in 1973. Others were recorded at the Martin Luther King
Public Library, thanks to Octave Stevenson, at Columbia Station, a
bar/coffeehouse, whose series was hosted by Ira Brukner, and at Ethelbert’s Ascension
Series.
Highlights of “The Washington Sound: Love and Death in Demon
City” are performances by Adesanya Alakoye, Jane Flanders, May Miller, Patricia
Garfinkel, Ann Darr, Sterling Brown (who introduces his Slim Greer poems, “ I
do not often read these to a mixed audience, but now that I am growing old I am
less cautious and I do not think I will set back the cause of race relations by
this tall tale . . .”), Myra Sklarew, sounding young and carefree at Columbia
Station, reading “The Reason I Can’t Invite You in for a Drink” and “Walking
into Fire,” and an always exuberant Grace Cavalieri ends the show with “The
Good Life,” “ . . . a library card in bed with me in Washington
D.C., the poetry capital of the world.”
Finding it difficult
to distribute Black Box, Alan researched
how other producers of “spoken word” recordings sold their cassettes. Out of this research he identified most of
the poetry recordings commercially available in the U.S. as well as number in
Europe, and proceeded to develop The Poet’s Audio Center, with a comprehensive
mail-order catalogue. And, understanding
that magazines are congenitally hard to sell, added Watershed Tapes, individual
cassette albums of nationally and internationally known poets. The first titles in this series came from the
special issues of Black Box which presented
two poets, with national reputations, each reading for an hour: Sonia Sanchez,
Robert Bly, Julius Lester and Muriel Rukeyser. Finally, bringing in Louise
Cleveland, an independent producer to supervise the project, we expanded into
public radio as The North American Poetry Network, developing two literary
series, “The Poem that Never Ends, using material from the Watershed archives,
and “A Kind of Hearth,” featuring interviews with small press and magazine
publishers, and readings by the poets they published. The first program in TPTNE series, featuring
William Meredith, Philip Levine, Carolyn Kizer, Lou Lipsitz, David Ignatow,
Lucille Clifton, Siv Sedering Fox, and Charles Simic, was the first poetry to
be broadcast by satellite, in 1980.
During this period of expansion, Watershed staff included Elizabeth
Wray, managing editor of Black Box and first producer of Watershed Tapes; Mary
Ann Larkin, assisted by Chris Llewellyn, was our development director; Frank
Bullard, engineer and producer; Liam Rector and Steve Waldhorn, sales reps
concentrating on college and university libraries, book stores and other
institutions; Steve also was program host for TPNE; Sheila Crider, production
assistant; Elizabeth Brunazzi organized a series of summer workshops. Heather Banks, Karen Greene contributed, and
Sue Goodwin served as an intern. In the
early 1980’s Katherine Mattern started as an intern and later became production
manager of Watershed Tapes. Frances Lang
and Verna Gillis produced some of the tapes, as well.
****
After graduating from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins,
in 1977, I began volunteering at Watershed while looking for a “real” writing
job. When the CETA program Arts DC began subsidizing employment for artists,
Alan was able to hire me as Director of the Poet’s Audio Center. A good part of my time was spent as a mail
clerk, packing and shipping the orders, or preparing mass mailings, sticking
address labels on the catalogues, bundling them by zip code. But I also had to listen to the tapes in
order to write descriptions of new ones, and to be able to advise customers to
make sure they got what they wanted.
“Poetry must be heard!” the catalogue exhorted. I had grown up in a family where we all read
out loud to each other; I was probably seven when my father decided to read the
Bible (the King James version, of course) to my siblings and me—not as
religious instruction but as great poetry; my brother and I taught our younger
sister to recite Sara Teasdale’s “The Falling Star” so she wouldn’t embarrass
the family when she went to kindergarten.
And had listened to the Caedmon recordings of Dylan Thomas, Gertrude
Stein, Albert Camus—I’d listen over and over to particular lines that
physically touched me.
For a poem to be recited to a living audience
is its big break in show business. A poem in the air is not the same poem as it
was on the page—the drama and charm of its unfolding is completely,
particularly alive and intimate as it passes from one body into another. ~Tony Hoagland
Some days I listened to poetry for 8 hours straight. This
was my true education in poetry. This
was my dream job. Alan was a difficult
boss, but perhaps the best kind of teacher. With a minimum of guidance, which
also allowed for a lot of freedom—the old “sink or swim” theory of pedagogy—I was
given tasks and learned by doing. I progressed to producer of Watershed Tapes,
then Associate Director of Watershed.
The last issue of Black
Box was released in 1978, but Alan had always wanted to do another
all-Washington issue. So in the early 80’s we began planning a two-cassette
anthology of area poets who had never been included in the magazine. Listening
to “Natives, Tourists and other Mysteries” twenty years later, I am again moved
by the voices of Marguerite Beck-Rex, Robert Sargent, Katharine Zadravec,
Michelle Parkerson, Bill Holland, Jacklyn Potter, Kathy Elaine Anderson, Chris
Lllewellyn reading from “Fragments from the Fire”, Ken Forde, Russell Spicer,
Rhea Cohen, Essex Hemphill, Charlise Lyles, Jean Nordhaus, who reads from two
haunting poems, “Under the Sign of the Palm” and “Peter Above the Mines,” David
McAleavey, Garth Tate, Candida Fraze, Greg Orfalea, Rick Peabody, Barbara
Lefcowitz, Jonetta Barras, Judith Hall, Joan Retallack, Sheila Crider, Michael
Collier, Jim Beall.
***
Over a more than thirty-year period, Watershed released
about fifteen issues of Black Box, approximately 130 Watershed Tapes, and two
series of poetry programs broadcast on 250 public radio stations. Our cassettes
were purchased by individuals and institutions all over the world. But, in the mid-1990’s,
when a major portion of the archives was destroyed in a flood, Alan’s
wonderful, stubborn, perseverance reach its limit.
He did make sure, however, that the master recordings of
Black Box, and all of the archive of
Washington poets (1973-1986) found a secure home in the Special Collections
division of Gelman Library at George Washington University.
https://library.gwu.edu/ead/ms2172.xml will take you to a finding aid to access this archive. In addition, Jennifer King tells me that
Special Collections has a complete set of masters and cassettes of all issues
of
Black Box, and that there are
plans to digitize this material. The
masters of Watershed Tapes Alan deposited at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda,
MD. While there are no current plans,
Sunil Freeman, the Associate Director there, would like to find the funds to
digitize these recordings.
I have tried to acknowledge and honor the many people who
contributed to this enterprise but I know I’ve left many out. I want to prepare a comprehensive history of
the Watershed Foundation, and would love to hear from those I missed in this preliminary
essay. If you have more information and
anecdotes please contact me at
annebeck48@gmail.com.
Anne Becker, September 2014
