By: DL

DL — Mon, 21 Mar 2016 15:01:26 +0000

Um. What came of Miles’s offer, Jed? Do tell.

By: Barry Miles

Barry Miles — Mon, 29 Feb 2016 19:58:41 +0000

Good choice, sir. I’ve always liked the St. Valentine’s Day Reading program. Of course all Bill was doing was repeating the many multi-media performances, many of which were far more experimental and daring, that he had done at the Beat Hotel (the invisibility project) and the Domaine Poetique (sound poems and mix-media) in Paris from 1960 onwards, and in London and Cambridge during the same period at the ICA and other venues (I organised one of the ICA ones which featured tape recordings, film stills and Brion Gysin painting a six foot painting behind Bill which he then destroyed). The ATforP was his first performance in the USA, interesting but that hardly makes it the most important of his public appearances as you say some people think. (That is like the assertion on Saturday Night Live that this was Bill’s first appearance on television; not so, he did a full length TV programme with Dan Farsons and Alex Trocchi years before. It was his first appearance on American television.) The silver flecked mimeo-paper was often used by the Poets Press, which is what I always associate it with, rather than the Warhol factory and the Malanga flyers. What I really responded to your column for was to send you a scan of my copy of the American Theater for Poets program which was ‘decorated’ by Burroughs. Even though the roller-grid was cut by Gysin, you can tell immediately it’s by Bill, it is sloppy and assertive and somehow very Burroughsian. I doubt it will fit in this dialogue box, however, so I’ll have to send it as an attachment.

Comments on: #7: St. Valentine’s Day Reading Program

By: DL

By: Barry Miles