Balsam Flex: Cassette Culture and Poetry

Abstract

The cassette label Balsam Flex, run by the artist Erik Vonna-Michell in the late 1970s and early 1980s, is evidence of a relatively overlooked moment when a number of London-based British poets were producing work that was influenced by performance art, conceptual art, sound art, text-sound composition, Fluxus, and situationism. The material issued by Balsam Flex is quite singular. However, it is hard to find. Cataloguing and archiving procedures for cassettes have never been on a par with those for small press books and little magazines. The National Sound Archive at the British Library and the Poetry Library at London’s South Bank Centre each has a few Balsam Flex cassettes but no archive has substantial holdings of this material.¹There is no mention of Balsam Flex in such accounts of British-Poetry-Revival-era poetry as Peter Barry’s Poetry Wars and Robert Sheppard’s The Poetry of Saying or When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry, and none either in the essays collected in New British Poetries 1970–1990: The Scope of the Possible, edited by Barry and Robert Hampson.²Dozens of cassettes were issued by Balsam Flex, yet these have since all but disappeared, the victims of technological obsolescence on one hand and changing priorities in poetry on the other.