Watershed Foundation

The Black Box, the cassette-tape poetry magazine, undertook an ambitious documentary project in 1975 to record all the working poets in the Washington area. The editors estimated that this amounted to between two and three hundred poets. A representative spectrum was chosen for a special D.C. issue of Black Box and to air on several radio programs. The staff of the D.C. project included writers, editors, teachers of poetry and communtiy activists. The project was designed to be multi-racial and multi-cultural. An issue of Black Box consisted of two 90-minute cassettes and included between 18 and 20 poets. Black Box was funded through a grant from the National Edowement for the Arts. This special D.C. issue dated 1976 was the eighth issue of Black Box and was devoted exclusively to Washington, D.C. poetry. The editor, Alan Austin, remarked on the project that "an unusually large number of Washington poets --both black and white-- seem to be writing 'story' poems, narrative or dramatic poems which focus on character development; such poems are frequently concerned with encounters across barriers of class and race. . . . Another interesting discovery was that many of the poems we recorded were either influenced by or directly related to music."