Poetry Project

The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church was founded in 1966 at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery in the East Village of Manhattan by, among others, the poet and translator Paul Blackburn.[1] It has been a crucial venue for new and experimental poetry for more than five decades.

The Project offers a number of reading series, writing workshops, a quarterly newsletter, a website, and audio and document archives, and the church has been the site of memorial readings for poets Paul Blackburn, Allen Ginsberg, W.H. Auden, Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan, and others.

The Project is staffed completely by poets. Artistic Directors and coordinators of the project have included Joel Oppenheimer, Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer, Bob Holman. Ron Padgett, Eileen Myles, Patricia Spears Jones, Jessica Hagedorn, Ed Friedman – whose term from 1986 to 2003 was the longest[2] – Anselm Berrigan, Stacy Szymaszek, Simone White, Kyle Dacuyan, and the incumbent director Nicole Wallace.

The Poetry Project's archive was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2007, and the library is still in the process of cataloguing and digitizing the wealth of material.[3] The archive contains around 40,000 hours of audio and visual recordings, as well as ephemera including posters, correspondence, financial information, and other material.[3] As of 2024, 419 recordings have been digitized and are available to listen to, open-access, on the Library's website.[4] The Library has also digitized Bernadette Mayer's notebooks from her tenure as director of the project.[5]

  1. ^ "Literary Organization Detail: Poetry Project at Saint Mark's Church". New York State Literary Tree. Retrieved 2016-04-20.
  2. ^ Diggory, Terence (2009). Encyclopedia of the New York School Poets. Infobase Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4381-1905-2.
  3. ^ a b "About this Collection | St. Mark's Poetry Project Audio Archive | Digital Collections | Library of Congress". Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA. Retrieved 2024-07-11.
  4. ^ "Search results from St. Mark's Poetry Project Audio Archive, Available Online". Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA. Retrieved 2024-07-11.
  5. ^ https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/rbc/rbc0001/2015/2015stmarks59017/2015stmarks59017.pdf. See also Nick Sturm's response to the documents at Crystal Set, https://www.nicksturm.com/crystalset/2018/4/2/we-work-at-the-poetry-project-bernadette-mayers-working-notebook-1980-81.