Poets & Writers Theater

In this episode of Public Access Poetry, a cable television show produced for two seasons during 1977 and 1978, Eileen Myles and Alice Notley read a selection of their work. The full archive of half-hour episodes featuring poets from the downtown New York City poetry scene can be found on PennSound, an archival project affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania.

“‘In a dark cave, I saw’ ‘an apparition:’ ‘almost real, almost there—’...” In this video, Alice Notley reads from her feminist epic The Descent of Alette (Penguin Books, 1996) at the Lab in San Francisco. The two-night program included a reading of the entire book-length poem and was cosponsored by the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University.

“Poetry is mere reality. No proof, just be here,” reads Alice Notley, author most recently of For the Ride (Penguin Books, 2020), in this reading held at the Poetry Project in New York City.