Stan Phillips Poetry Project Recordings Collection, 1962-1970 (MSS 819)

In 1953 Stan Phillips was a motion picture and audio-visual consultant at Western Cine, a film laboratory and sound recording and editing studio in Denver, Colorado. He was also the cinematographer for Interim, an experimental short film directed by his childhood friend, poet and filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who had become friends with Robert Creeley and James Broughton. After Black Mountain College closed its doors in 1957, Phillips and Brakhage proposed the idea of recording poets reading their own work and then making these recordings available to the public in the form of long-playing records. This concept was influenced by Black Mountain poet Charles Olson, who believed poetry should be read aloud in order for listeners to hear its rhythm, breath and nuances.

1962 Phillips and Western Cine were able to record, using studio reel-to-reel audio equipment, six poets reading poetry of their choice: James Broughton, Jess Collins, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Charles Olson and Louis Zukofsky. Phillips also sought to collect photographs of the poets and their background materials for the album cover and liner notes of the LP record.

After a decade at Western Cine, Phillips became an adjunct professor at the University of Denver in filmmaking and television in 1962-1963, and subsequently started a business teaching screenwriting. When Phillips left Western Cine, the Poet Record Project was without a manager to move the project forward, and eventually the tapes were sent to Phillips in the hopes that he would complete the project on his own. A logo and the name Quest Records was draw up, but Charles Olson and Robert Duncan never sent the final materials needed for the album cover, and although Phillips worked out an advertising plan, edited tapes to length, and prepared them to be pressed, he was not able to raise enough funds to complete the project and LPs were never produced.

Source material for this note is primarily from Judith Phillips's (spouse of Stan Phillips) account entitled "How Quest Records Never Came to Be," which is in Box 2 of the collection.