During the 1950s, the American poet Cid Corman began to experiment with what he called oral poetry. This involved spontaneously composing poems into a tape recorder. Allen Ginsberg was to take up this practice in the 1960s. David Antin, who heard some of Corman's tapes, took the process one step further. He composed his "talk-poems" by improvising in front of an audience. These performances were recorded and the tapes were later transcribed to be published in book form. Around the same time, Jerome Rothenberg was drawing on his ethnopoetic researches to create poems for ritual performances as happenings.