About this collection

The Poetry Center's 1970s audio-only collection reaches from the start of the decade to the advent of early video recordings, starting in 1973. In that year programs started to be recorded to black-and-white open-reel video, with the occasional program still being recorded as audio-only. The decade follows on the 1968–69 San Francisco State Student Strike (and supporting Faculty Strike) with some evident opening up of the scope of Poetry Center programming. Under director Mark Linenthal and assistant Stan Rice, highlights of these recorded programs include an early Gay Rights Reading and a Women's Liberation Reading, and various younger poets associated with the newly-founded College of Ethnic Studies, which was the first of its kind in the US, and direct result from demands of student strikers. Most of the recorded programs of this era have not been publicly available for many years, and account for all the audio-only recordings centering on The Poetry Center reading series, 1970–73.