NYC PUBLIC ACCESS CABLE POETRY SHOW FROM AUGUST 1977

This is a trip. Steve Hamilton and me reading on a half hour public access cable show in Manhattan in 1977 that included over the course of its run a lot of good young New York poets of that era. (It's pretty much split in half, Steve the first fifteen minutes, me the last fifteen). I'm not crazy about some of what I read, though I think the selection improves as I go along and there's a couple of old favorites on it.

The camera work is sometimes distracting and sometimes fascinating in that slow student film detail oriented way that was so popular in avant-garde movies of the late 1950s and early '60s. But the first thing that struck me was the hair! And the last was my quietly aggressive arrogance (unintentional, just the way I was and often still am, from my youth and background and experiences in the service and jazz world and whatever etc.) especially criticizing the hardworking fellow poets putting the show on (Gary Lenhart I think it was, the final credit was too complex for me to get, I guess I should have paused it there) almost always thinking I knew better (sorry Gary and others over three decades too late).

This was a couple of years before I started acting professionally in movies and on TV. Folks used to ask me if I was an actor or tell me I should be in movies and there's a few angles where I can see why they did that then. At any rate, see what you think. (And thanks to PENNSOUND for getting it online and making it available, no matter how embarrassing.)

[By the way, among the few folks who were in the studio watching the woman is Eileen Myles and I think that's Alfred Milanese on one side of her and Tom Carey on the other and Gary Lenhart up on the ladder, or whatever he's perched on.]