The Poetry Project

Name: The Poetry Project
Address: 131 E 10th Street, New York, NY, 10003, US
Telephone: +12126740910
Price range: $
Rating: 4.5

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The Poetry Project

The Poetry Project is based at St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery, a vibrant artistic and community space which includes the St.
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Through its live programming, workshops, publications, website and special events, The Poetry Project promotes, fosters and inspires the reading and writing of contemporary poetry by presenting contemporary poetry to diverse audiences. Through its live programming, workshops, publications, website and special events, The Poetry Project promotes, fosters and inspires the reading and writing of cont

emporary poetry by (a) presenting contemporary poetry to diverse audiences, (b) increasing public recognition, awareness and appreciation of poetry and other arts, (c) providing a community setting in which poets and artists can exchange ideas and information, and (d) encouraging the participation and development of new poets from a broad range of styles. Since 1966, The Poetry Project has expanded access to literature, education, and opportunities for sharing one's creative work in a counter-hierarchical, radically open space and community. Premised on the vision that cultural action at the local level can inspire broader shifts in public consciousness, The Project is committed to developing and collaborating on replicable program models that challenge persistent social narratives, especially through the verbal reframing made possible in poetry. We do this work through a combination of live readings, performances, lectures, events, and workshops, in addition to literary and critical publications and an emerging writers program. Mark's Church congregation, Danspace Project, and New York Theatre Ballet.

08/29/2024

The deadline to apply to the Poetry Project's 2024–2025 Emerge—Surface—Be Fellowship for Emerging Poets has been extended. Applications will close Sunday, September 8, at 11:59PM ET!

The Poetry Project is grateful for the Jerome Foundation's generous support, which makes it possible to host five Mentor/Fellow pairings in 2024–2025. Mentors will each select an emerging poet to work with over the course of nine months. This year's mentors are Amelia Bande, Morgan Bassichis, t'ai freedom ford, Rainer Diana Hamilton, and Marwa Helal.

In addition to a $2,500 award and an invitation to read in the Project's Spring 2025 Season, ESB Fellows will be provided with the opportunity to work one-on-one with their Mentor to develop their craft; explore publication and performance opportunities; and reflect on the professional and community-based dimensions of a writing life. Meetings between Fellows and Mentors can take place both in-person and virtually.

Learn more about the Fellowship and this year's Mentors @ poetryproject.org/emerge-surface-be-fellowship

08/22/2024

THE POETRY PROJECT PRESENTS

ALIEN AND ORDINARY: A POETS THEATER SYMPOSIUM

Sept 18-20, 2024
St. Mark’s Church
131 E. 10th St

Curated by Ethan Philbrick

Building on decades of engagement between experimental literature and performance, The Poetry Project presents ALIEN AND ORDINARY: A POETS THEATER SYMPOSIUM. Our title recalls Bertolt Brecht’s understanding of how making everyday life productively strange, a technique Brecht referred to as alienation, opens up possibilities for ordinary people to transform the world around us in profound ways. Over five events and three days, this symposium engages the past and future of Poets Theater, exploring how community-oriented, anti-professional performance makes new sense of changing everything.

The symposium will feature performances and plays by Nile Harris, Bassem Saad, Sanja Grozdanić, Amelia Bande, and Charlene Incarnate, plus a poets theater variety show hosted by Morgan Bassichis featuring Jess Barbagallo, Mónica de la Torre, Nazareth Hassan, Stephen Ira, Kite, The Illustrious Pearl, Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, and Tony Torn. Tickets to each performance are $15 in advance, or $20 at the door. Attendees can also purchase a pass to all five events for $40.

Alien and Ordinary: A Poets Theater Symposium is generously supported and made possible by funding from the Axe-Houghton Foundation.

Event posters by Jeremy Schipper

More information and tickets @ poetryproject.org/events

08/19/2024

The Poetry Project is thrilled to announce our new Program Director, Mirene Arsanios!

Mirene is a poet, writer, editor, educator, and Poetry Project community member who served as a co-coordinator of the Project's Friday Reading Series (with Rachel Valinsky) from 2017 to 2019. Please join us in welcoming her to our team!

I left Beirut for New York almost 10 years ago, drawn to the pull of the city’s artistic and literary scenes, the conversations it had to offer, the ripple of its experimental legacies in the present. My fantasy was soon checked by the reality of what it means to live and write in one of the most expensive cities in the world. I still don’t know how to make it work but have found a sense of camaraderie and possibility in community of poets, teachers, and activists, as well as a home in the The Poetry Project, which, nearly 60 years after its founding, persits as a historical anomaly: an “institution” programmed and run by poets. Which means that the ethos governing the creation of the forms we craft against the brutality of the world–and in celebration of its beauty–is also present in the production of writing itself.

The Project’s organizational endorsement of PACBI in the past year has set a principled model for cultural spaces in the city, attesting to the ways culture can become a site of renewed struggle. It is a huge honor to work for an organization whose ethical and political convictions don’t come at the cost of artistic freedom, where, in fact, their proximity is embraced as the very matter of poetic life.

It is with deep admiration for the Project and its communities, past and present, that I step into the role of Program Director following Laura Henriksen’s extraordinary tenure (heart heart). I’m eager to contribute to the collective labor of shaping a program equally committed to the stakes of the present tense as it is to the necessity of artistic expression. Thanks for reading & see you at the church!

- - -

Mirene Arsanios is the author of the short story collection, The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan, 2015), Notes on Mother Tongues (UDP, 2019), and The Autobiography of a Language (Futurepoem, 2022). She has contributed essays and short stories to e-flux journal, Hyperallergic, Vida, The Brooklyn Rail, LitHub, and Guernica, among others. Her writing was featured collaboratively at the Sharjah Biennial (2017) and Venice Biennial (2017), as well as in various artist books and projects. Arsanios co-founded the collective 98weeks Research Project in Beirut and is the founding editor of Makhzin, a bilingual English/Arabic magazine for innovative writing.

She teaches at Pratt Institute and holds an MFA in Writing from the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College. Arsanios currently lives in New York where she was a 2016 LMCC Workspace fellow, and an ART OMI resident in fall 2017. With Rachel Valinsky, she coordinated the Friday nights reading series at the Poetry Project from 2017–19. She lives and works in Brooklyn.

08/07/2024

Announcing Fall 2024 Learning at The Poetry Project!

This fall, Morgan Võ and Tess Brown-Lavoie will lead workshops on the figures and presence, on distance and the epistolary; and Saretta Morgan and Bo Hwang will lead a Deep Study Session on the encounters and events that order our everyday.

A limited number of scholarships are available. The deadline to apply is Tuesday, August 13.

poetryproject.org/learning

08/01/2024

Applications are now open for the Poetry Project's Emerge—Surface—Be Fellowship for Emerging Poets! We are thrilled to share this year's mentors: Amelia Bande, Morgan Bassichis, t'ai freedom ford, Rainer Diana Hamilton, and Marwa Helal. Read more about the Fellowship and about this year's mentors below.

Emerge—Surface—Be is a natural extension of The Poetry Project’s program offerings. It formalizes the distinct yet unspoken pedagogical aspect of The Poetry Project’s programs while providing a unique opportunity to support, develop, and present emerging NYC based poets of promise.

The Poetry Project is grateful for the Jerome Foundation's generous support, which makes it possible to host five Mentor/Fellow pairings in 2024–25. This year we are thrilled to partner with Mentors who are working across a broad range of modes—including poetry, but also crossing into nonfiction, criticism, and performance. Mentors will each select an emerging poet to work with over the course of nine months.

Throughout the Fellowship, ESB Fellows will be provided with the opportunity to work one-on-one with their Mentor to develop their craft; explore publication and performance opportunities; and reflect on the professional and community-based dimensions of a writing life. Meetings between Fellows and Mentors can take place both in-person and virtually.

Ideal Fellows will have a project they are working on (or want to embark upon) and/or are working towards new ways of envisioning and bringing forth their writing practice and feel that they would benefit from guidance and support. Each Fellow will receive an award of $2,500. In adherence with US tax requirements, ESB Fellows will be issued an IRS 1099 Form.

For more information and to apply, head to poetryproject.org/emerge-surface-be-fellowship

06/06/2024

The Poetry Project is very pleased to share our Summer 2024 Learning programming.

We are delighted to welcome workshop and reading group leaders Anna Moschovakis, Jackie Ess, and Lou Cornum. Throughout their courses, Moschovakis will explore when/where/how to work with risk, discomfort, and unresolved in our writing; Ess will investigate what holds us together, and why it doesn't make us stick; and Cornum will consider counter imaginaries of the moon.

To keep our workshops accessible to as many people as possible, we reserve two spots for members for each workshop, three for scholarship recipients, and the rest for general registration. If you miss one of the member spots, you'll have another chance to register on Sunday during general registration.

A limited number of full-tuition scholarships are available. The deadline to apply is Friday, June 14.

poetryproject.org/learning

05/31/2024

Dear poets and friends,

I'm writing to share an update — after ten indescribable years, this spring is my last season working at The Poetry Project.

I'm so grateful for every evening and New Year's Day I spent listening to poetry in your company, I'm so grateful for every poem we heard together. Over the past decade I have watched this community evolve into an ever more vibrant and necessary locus of experimentation, solidarity, fun, and courage, and I'm so grateful for all the ways your participation has made that possible. It has been my most profound honor and lasting source of inspiration to be a part of it.

I'm thrilled to share the excellent news that Mirene Arsanios will be joining the Project this fall as our new Program Director. Mirene worked as a curator at the Project from 2017–2019, she is an incredibly capacious reader and thinker, an imaginative and generous curator and host, a brilliant writer, and her understanding of the Project's importance is clear and deep. I truly cannot wait to see how she guides the programming here in the years ahead.

Thank you so much to the Project staff and crew who have filled these ten years of my life with radical and abundant joy — Stacy Szymaszek, Nicole Wallace, Simone White, Kyle Dacuyan, Will Farris, Roberto Montes, Kay Gabriel, Anna Cataldo, Andrea Abi-Karam, Sasha Banks, Ethan Philbrick, Mel Elberg, Ayaz Muratoglu, Noa Mendoza, James Barickman, Matt Proctor, Matty D'Angelo, Dave Morse, Ariel Goldberg, Judah Rubin, Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, Rachel Valinsky, Mirene Arsanios, Matt Longabucco, and Morgan Võ.

And thank you all for everything you've taught me about poetry and friendship and magic. If by any chance you feel any impulse to say thank you back to me, know that you can do so any time by either writing a poem, or sending a donation to The Poetry Project

05/30/2024

The spring issue of the Poetry Project Newsletter: interviews with Dennis Cooper and the late, beloved Cecilia Gentili, poems by Bruce Boone and ESB fellow Sahar Khraibani, reviews of Julian Talamantez Brolaski and Peter Gizzi, remembrances for Lyn Hejinian and Tyrone Williams, and more, more, more.

Get into it at poetryproject.org/publications/newsletter or at the link in our bio. Pick up a free print copy at our events.

+ Cover art by Walter Scott
+ Editor’s Note by Kay Gabriel

+ Niko Hallikainen interviews Dennis Cooper
+ Harron Walker interviews Cecilia Gentili—a transcript from 2022
+ Kyle Carrero Lopez interviews Vanessa Angélica Villareal
+ Bianca Rae Messinger interviews León Muñoz Santini
+ Kirby Chen Mages interviews Amy Ching-Yan Lam

+ Poems by Naomi Heron, Sahar Khraibani, Michael Cavuto, Bruce Boone
+ Reviews: John Steen on Peter Gizzi, Ken Walker on Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Bianca Rae Messinger on Wendy Lotterman, Shira Abramovich and Lénaïg Cariou on Liliane Giraudon
+ “Protocol” by Grayson Scott

05/22/2024

Please join us on Wednesday, June 5, for our final event of the season: the annual Volunteer & Intern Potluck and Reading!

At the annual Volunteer & Intern Potluck and Reading, the secret rockstars of the Poetry Project take the podium. Please join us for an end-of-the-season celebration of the volunteers, interns, and support staff and technicians who make every event of ours more possible. It's one of our most beloved traditions, they're some of our most beloved poets.

Featuring readings by Emerald Rose Anastasia, Magdalena Arias, Brennan Bogert, Bee Brown-Sparks, Sofia C, Miguel Coronado, Canon Crummey, Qingyuan Deng, Ashley Escobar, Andy Huang, Alexander Loukopoulos, Dea Thatcher Maglione, Katie Vogel, Mer Wade, and more TBA!

This event is free-to-attend, no registration required. The celebration will begin at 7pm, readings at 8. We hope to see you there!

05/20/2024

Please join us Monday, June 3 at 7 pm for the Spring 2024 Workshop Reading.

Like cosmic radio stations, Poetry Project workshops broadcast out immense creative energy, inviting in sweet and wild opportunities for collaboration, experimentation, and play. Please join us in celebrating the work of the poets and writers who make this exceptional community so vibrant and irresistible!

Featuring readings from participants of Ama Birch; Mayra Rodríguez Castro; Chia-Lun Chang; Corina Copp; Rachel James; and Nora Treatbaby and Rosie Stockton’s workshops — Ana Cecilia Alvarez; Jamondria Harris; Samantha Hinds; Tatum Howey; Sarah Ingle; mace dent johnson; Ivetta Sunyoung Kang; Anika M. Kowalik; Ryan Nowlin; Kendra Sullivan; alma valdez-garcia & imogen xtian smith; and others TBA

This event will take place virtually // poetryproject.org/events

05/09/2024

The Poetry Project is honored to welcome longtime friends (of the Project and each other) Peter Gizzi and John Yau to close out our regular Spring 2024 season. In their new books, Fierce Elegy and Tell it Slant, Gizzi and Yau look both forward and backward, channeling difficult truths with lyric's bright, refracted clarity.

Wednesday 5/29, 8pm @ St Mark's

poetryproject.org/events

This event will also be livestreamed for free on the Poetry Project's YouTube.

05/08/2024

Please join us on Friday, May 24, for Anelise Chen & Ben Fama!

Anelise Chen and Ben Fama are painters of present architectures — parking lots, interstates, gyms — with all their grand and subtle voids, thick with longing and alienation. They remind us that stress and desire both ask for release. What might come next is more of a mystery.

Ben will be screening work made in collaboration with artist and filmmaker Mara Mckevitt.

Featuring a guest introduction by Eugene Lim.

poetryproject.org/events

This event will also be livestreamed for free on The Poetry Project's YouTube channel.

05/03/2024

Please join us on Wednesday, May 22 for Carolyn Lazard, Geelia Ronkina and Constantina Zavitsanos!

This evening, like every evening day or nighttime, is gathered in our shared and irrefutable incapacity. Who do we arrive with, and what does it mean to never arrive alone? Carolyn Lazard, Geelia Ronkina and Constantina Zavitsanos meet outside for a series of experiments in un/solicited advice, crip foresight, among other improvisational forms toward being together.

Accessibility Information:

Outdoor, ASL, CART, amplification, seating, and wheelchair accessible, all gender, bathroom provided. The yard is not ADA accessible and may not work for all wheelchair users.

This reading will take place outdoors in the East Yard at St. Mark's Church around dusk. Seating is provided (but feel free to BYOBlanket if you like). ASL interpretation, CART, and open amplification will be provided. The readers will conduct their own Audio Description as integral to the reading. A wheelchair accessible bathroom is located inside St. Mark’s Church.

The wheelchair accessible ramp to the East Yard is on 10th St and 2nd Avenue. The East Yard is primarily densely packed dirt with some patches of grass, marked occasionally by flat stone grave ledgers that protrude an inch or two above ground. The yard itself is not ADA wheelchair accessible but some wheelchair users may choose to use the plywood path over the uneven ground beyond the ramp and sidewalk at their own discretion. Access Doula, Alex Dolores Salerno and Poetry Project volunteers will be available to support in wayfinding and navigation as desired.

Please feel free to email us at [email protected] with any questions or for more information on access to this event.

The event costs $8 but no one will be turned away for lack of funds.

poetryproject.org/events

05/02/2024

Please join The Poetry Project and Wendy’s Subway for a Mother’s Day marathon reading of the anti-Zionist guidebook, Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah.

This event will be hosted by Morgan Bassichis, Jay Saper, and Rachel Valinsky, editors to the book, and feature readings by contributors, including including Gregg Bordowitz, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Dan Fishback, Nicole Eisenman, Tariq Luthun, Tiffany Malakooti, Collier Meyerson, Dori Midnight, Una Aya Osato, Dylan Saba, Mahdi Sabbagh, and more!

This event will be livestreamed, and include live ASL interpretation.

Bring the young people in your life!

poetryproject.org/events

**

Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah invites 38 writers, artists, scholars, and activists to offer accessible reflections on 36 questions to help young Jews—and anyone else who picks up this book—feel grounded in the Jewish radical tradition, unlearn Zionism, and deepen their solidarity with Palestinians, offering the B’nai Mitzvah as an opportunity for political awakening open to all. Edited by comedic performance artist and activist Morgan Bassichis with artist and educator Jay Saper and writer Rachel Valinsky, with a foreword by seminal scholar-activist Angela Y. Davis, and illustrations by the artist Nicole Eisenman, this essential volume offers an accessible and challenging set of personal and collective responses to critical questions for our time.

Questions included range from “What even is a Bat Mitzvah?” and “I’m queer/nonbinary/secular/old/not even Jewish—are Bat Mitzvahs for me?” to “Why are there Israeli and American flags in my synagogue?” and “Why do people plant trees in Israel as a Bat Mitzvah gift?” and “What does the olive tree symbolize to Palestinians?” and “What does the watermelon symbolize to Palestinians?” and “What do Palestinian kids do when they turn thirteen?” and “How do I talk to my family about this stuff?”

Contributors: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Imani Altemus-Williams, Sumaya Awad, Shirly Bahar, Kholoud Balata, Morgan Bassichis, Bazeed, Gregg Bordowitz, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Ilise Cohen, Jonah Aline Daniel, Maya Edery, Esther Farmer, Dan Fishback, Aitan Groener, Rabbi Miriam Grossman, Noah Habeeb, Olivia Katbi, Aurora Levins Morales, Brooke Lober, Tariq Luthun, Collier Meyerson, Dori Midnight, Izzy Mustafa, Aidan Orly and Jonathan Brenneman, Una Aya Osato, Khury Petersen-Smith, Rabbi Brant Rosen, Dylan Saba, Mahdi Sabbagh, Jay Saper, Ita Segev, Dean Spade, Elena Stein, Sandra Tamari, Kendra Watkins, and Satya Zamudio.

04/29/2024

Please join us on Monday, May 20, for Kaur Alia Ahmed & Gia Gonzales!

In the poetry of Kaur Alia Ahmed and Gia Gonzales, we are reminded that a self is always situated, and in any situation also permeable, mercurial, extended. Meanwhile, syntax disintegrates into sound, and sense transforms into a deeper pleasure in music.

Featuring guest introductions by Andrea Abi-Karam and Rissa Hochberger.

This event will also be livestreamed for free on The Poetry Project's YouTube channel.

poetryproject.org/events

04/25/2024

Join Palestinian writer and organizer Kaleem Hawa for a workshop investigating the poetics and politics of anti-imperialist resistance and prisons. At the center of the workshop will be an opportunity for participants to read texts and watch media about Palestinian prisoners and critically consider the relationship between incarceration and colonial occupation.

RSVPs are free but limited.

poetryproject.org/events

04/24/2024

The poems in Joyelle McSweeney and Eleni Sikelianos's new books, Death Styles and Your Kingdom, echo and vibrate the psychic and material conditions of survival, guided by complicated interconnections that exceed solace or comfort, that bind us to living and dying histories, to histories of living and dying.

poetryproject.org/events

04/19/2024

Emily Johnson and Cuthwulf Eileen Myles are two multi-hypenate artist powerhouses and dear Poetry Project friends whose works and lives and working lives think through the knot of desire, connection, futurity, relationships, the land, time, life, memory, death, just about everything else.

Wednesday 5/8, 8pm @ St Marks

poetryproject.org/events

This event will also be livestreamed for free on The Poetry Project's YouTube channel.

04/18/2024

In their new books, Who Loves the Sun and Object 7 ( ,a spirit loosely, ,bundled in a frame, ), Fulla Abdul-Jabbar and Tilghman Alexander Goldsborough travel through epistemological inquiries with both skepticism and clarity to face the sublime, then come back with slanted and fragmented stories about it.

Monday 5/6, 8pm @ St Marks

This event will also be livestreamed for free on The Poetry Project's YouTube channel.

poetryproject.org/events

04/15/2024

Please join The Poetry Project and Wendy’s Subway to celebrate the release of She Follows No Progression: A Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Reader.

The event will be hosted by Juwon Jun and Rachel Valinsky, and feature readings and performances by contributors to the book, including Marian Chudnovsky, Anton Haugen, Irene Hsu, Sunny Iyer, Valentina Jager, Youbin Kang, Andrew Yong Hoon Lee, Flo Li, Serubiri Moses, Jed Munson, and Teline Trần.

We hope you can join us at 7:30 for a pre-event reception!

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/she-follows-no-progression-a-theresa-hak-kyung-cha-reader-tickets-810675451097?aff=oddtdtcreator

This event will also be livestreamed for free on The Poetry Project's YouTube channel.

***

She Follows No Progression reflects on the plurality of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982)’s work and legacy, collecting essays, personal narratives, poems, conversations, letters, and the extratextual in a reader that attests to Cha’s genre-bending vision and political imagination. The writers, artists, scholars, organizers, and educators collected here, each unique in their voice and method, multiply approaches to language, colonial history, migration, and time in dialogue with Cha’s unequivocally interdisciplinary practice. Their contributions traverse subjects from Asian American studies to literary history, translation, film theory, and experimental poetics, while attending to the gaps between these fields and the intractable entanglements of race, class, and gender that underlie them. She Follows No Progression echoes Cha’s appeal for a liberatory horizon emergent from all that we are affixed to in the present.

She Follows No Progression is published on the occasion of the 2022 program, The Quick and the Dead: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Edition. The Quick and the Dead is a yearlong, multiphase project that highlights the life, work, and legacy of a deceased writer by bridging their work to that of contemporary practitioners. In its third year, the program focused on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

04/11/2024

On Wednesday, May 1, please join us in celebrating the long-anticipated publication of Breathlehem: The Selected Poetry of Jim Brodey!

Why did Jim Brodey appear among us? What do his life and his poetry tell us? That language has mechanisms designed to trigger ecstacy. He hunted for the transcendent, but at the cost of his own body. The thrill of the syllables’ heartbeat, the multiple dimensions of their music. Jim made his own music as he went along, it was the wings that lifted him, and was more than a comfort to him. It was his reason for being. The music he made was also a sexual excitement, a power he had been given and developed, a power he received. His being was and remains a celebration of this fact, whether you understand it or him or whether he understood it himself. Jim was his own musical instrument, a fantastic contraption that he did not always know which end to pick up or which of his mouths to put it in. After all his books being out of print for years, with the publication of Breathlehem: The Selected Poetry of Jim Brodey (Local Knowledge Press) edited by Peter Valente and with an introduction by Bill Zavatsky, Brodey’s work is back in circulation for readers to discover. Look out! Look out! – here comes the irrepressible Jim Brodey! Read him, think of him, remember him.

Hosted by Peter Valente, with readings by Ama Birch, John Godfrey, Samuel Espíndola Hernández, Vincent Katz, Rochelle Kraut, Murat Nemet-Nejat, Jenn Pelly, Bob Rosenthal, Harris Schiff, and Bill Zavatsky.

8 pm @ St Marks. We hope you can join us at 7:30 for a pre-event reception!

This event will also be livestreamed for free on The Poetry Project's YouTube channel.

poetryproject.org/events

04/05/2024

Language is a knife's edge against which we hone our attention, around which we compass our ways of being in a world not made for being. Join us for an evening of readings from Cody-Rose Clevidence and Sahar Khraibani, two poets whose works demand we be sharper sharper sharper yet.

Featuring guest introductions by Kimberly Alidio and Mel Elberg.

Friday, April 25 @ 8pm at St. Mark's Church

eventbrite.com/e/cody-rose-clevidence-sahar-khraibani-tickets-810762200567?aff=oddtdtcreator

This event will also be livestreamed for free on The Poetry Project's YouTube channel.

04/04/2024

The Poetry Project is very pleased to share our April-May 2024 Learning programming.

We are delighted to welcome workshop leaders Chia-Lun Chang, Arielle Twist, and Rachel James. Throughout their workshops, Chang will explore the possibilities of hybridity and untranslatability; Twist will honor the complex omnipresence of poetry; and James will trace opacity and defamiliarization in an exterior and interior public.

A limited number of full-tuition scholarships are available. The deadline to apply is Thursday, April 11.

More information @ poetryproject.org/learning

We hope to welcome you to one of these classes, and to see you at The Poetry Project soon!

04/04/2024

New York Arab Festival and Poetry Project are pleased to announce their first partnership, coming together to honor Arab American Heritage Month, a yearly month celebrated each April. Recognizing the power of language at times of political strife, this event brings poets, writers and public speakers from Arab and Arab American backgrounds to share with their communities issues or urgency. Dedicated to the memory of beloved Palestinian poet, writer and philosopher Refaat Alareer, who was killed in Gaza in 2023.

Featuring readings by Farah Barqawi, Zeinab Ftes, Sophia Gutchinov, Andrew Riad, Hind Shoufani, and Issam Zeibak.

New York Arab Festival is a yearly platform dedicated to Arab, and Arab American artists, scholars and cultural organizers. It showcases the work of a community that continues to battle racism and prejudice, in a city that Arabs have called home for centuries; New York. Established, curated and produced by Wizara, HaRaKa Platform and a network of Arab, American and Arab American cultural workers, artists and curators.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/848763192557?aff=oddtdtcreator

04/03/2024

The desert is a myth that’s also real. An intrinsically strange geography, an accordion of both time and distance, a channel for both love and violence, it offers changed language for devastation and birth. Saretta Morgan and Jared Stanley are two great poets of the desert’s radiant and impossible abundance, and the void that abundance betrays.

Featuring a guest introduction by Benjamin Krusling.

Wednesday, April 24 @ 8pm at St. Mark's Church

eventbrite.com/e/saretta-morgan-jared-stanley-tickets-810758629887?aff=oddtdtcreator

This event will also be livestreamed for free on The Poetry Project's YouTube channel.

03/29/2024

Please join us for an evening of readings from two poets whose work thinks through desire, the body, and the messy beauty of relating to/through others from within the body, within desire.

Featuring guest introductions by Alan Felsenthal and Shiv Kotecha.

Friday, April 19 @ 8pm at St. Mark's

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/joshua-garcia-charles-theonia-tickets-810753534647?aff=oddtdtcreator

This event will also be livestreamed for free on The Poetry Project's YouTube channel.

03/28/2024

Psychoanalysis and poetry share a significant conceptual and practical terrain: both are committed to saying the unsayable and thinking the unthought; both pay excited attention to slips of the tongue and linguistic breakdown; both have a persistent investment in sustained listening and spaces of co-presence; and both generate contentious frictions between theory and practice. This evening assembles two writers who work within both poetry and psychoanalysis — Nuar Alsadir and Claire Donato — for a conversation, reading, and improvisational investigation into the psychoanalytic dimensions of poetry and the poetics of psychoanalysis.

Anyone with a relationship to poetry and psychoanalysis is encouraged to attend: analysts, analysands, poets, readers, the broadly curious, the hesitantly skeptical, all are welcome. There will most likely be opportunities for attendees to participate in the inquiry if they are moved to do so.

Thursday 4/18 @ 8pm at St. Mark's

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/nuar-alsadir-and-claire-donato-psychoanalysis-and-poetry-tickets-810747767397?aff=oddtdtcreator

This event will also be livestreamed for free on The Poetry Project's YouTube channel

03/22/2024

The dancer and writer Tara Aisha Willis and the visual and sound artist Damon Locks are making and being together. They are working across sound, movement, and text; meeting at their edges and experimenting in their overlaps. For this evening, Willis and Locks bring a new duo work called Step Step Step to The Poetry Project. Of this piece, and of their collaborative practice more generally, they write:

Step Step Step is built inside the intersection of our practices and the desire to make our way towards each other. “Couple” and “collaborators” are, and are not, the same thing. After two years spent mostly alone with each other, prior boundaries we’d had around working together seemed to dissipate into the shared life we were crafting day-to-day. The piece began by watching the other person work in their element and then doing what we both do most equally, where we overlap: writing what we witness. Some words, sounds, movements resonated within our commonalities. Some kept our distinctions present and frictive. What’s left is what feels right to us. This is about the steps inside the unfolding process. This is about finding the middle point of our two, building from there, pushing against edges to make more space for ourselves and each other. This is about the possibility of buoying each other up, up, up.

Friday, April 12 @ 8pm / St. Mark's

eventbrite.com/e/tara-aisha-willis-and-damon-locks-tickets-810729512797?aff=oddtdtcreator

This event will also be livestreamed for free on The Poetry Project's YouTube channel.

Address

131 E 10th Street
New York, NY
10003

Telephone

+12126740910

Website

http://poetryproject.org/

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Within the first few weeks of our Spring 2024 season—beautifully, potently, and thoughtfully curated by Laura Henriksen, Program Director at the Project—we have already witnessed the connective and energizing ways gathering to engage with and support the work of poets and poetry makes possible more expansive conversations and exchange around language, community-building, and the present moment. These moments of confluence, deep listening, learning, interconnection—the gift of being present in space and time with one another to radically support and organize around poetry—is at the heart of our work. Poetry Project Membership is a crucial way of creating and deepening these connections, and of intentionally supporting the poets, writers, performers, thinkers, and educators who make our work and this Project of poetry possible. Whether you’ve been a long time member and supporter of The Poetry Project, have only attended one or two events, or have been returning to our events, programming, and publications over the past few years, we’d be honored if you might consider deepening your participation in The Poetry Project’s community by becoming a Poetry Project Member this spring. Membership benefits range from discounted/free admissions to Poetry Projects events, early access to workshop registrations, an annual subscription to our publications, and more. Beyond these perks, Poetry Project Membership provides essential material support that directly impacts our community and programming, helping us to pay poets, presenters, performers, and publication contributors equitably; provide workshop scholarships and free learning programs; and expand the accessibility of our events through offering live streaming, CART captioning, ASL, and other language accessibility services. The Poetry Project now offers monthly payment options for all our Membership levels, starting at $5/month for an Individual Membership, which includes discounted admissions to our eve

“To name it now so as not to repeat history in oblivion. To extract each fragment from the word from the image another word another image the reply that will not repeat history in oblivion,” writes Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, whom The Poetry Project will celebrate this spring, alongside Wendy's Subway. Each poet, writer, artist, teacher, and performer we'll welcome as part our Spring 2024 Season demonstrates in different ways this work of fragmentation and excavation, of remembering and divining, of learning the lessons of history outside the bright cold of oblivion. Against that emptiness, we offer this abundance of word and image, song and sound, we offer these evenings together in our poetry church. February Wednesday 2/14: Cecilia Gentili & Macy Rodman Friday 2/16: Ahmad Almallah & India Lena González Wednesday 2/21: Imogen Binnie & Evan Kennedy Wednesday 2/28: Joris/Peyrafitte — Domopoetics: Karstic Actions/Works March Friday 3/1: Nora Treatbaby & Mohammed Zenia Siddiq Yusef Ibrahim Friday 3/8: stefa marin alarcon and OHYUNG Wednesday 3/13: Book Launch for Martin Wong's Footprints, Poems, and Leaves and Das Puke Book Thursday 3/14: Redistributive Art: A Dis/Course Workshop with Diya Vij Monday 3/18: Samuel Espíndola Hernández & Jimin Seo Wednesday 3/20: She Follows No Progression: A Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Reader Friday 3/22: Zaina Alsous & Dana Ysabel Dela Cruz April Monday 4/1: Launch of Ann Rower’s If You're A Girl (Revised & Expanded Edition) Wednesday 4/3: Chris Kraus & Kim Rosenfield Monday 4/8: New York Arab Festival at Poetry Project Wednesday 4/10: Alice Notley & Anne Waldman Friday 4/12: Tara Aisha Willis & Damon Locks Thursday 4/18: Nuar Alsadir and Claire Donato: Psychoanalysis and Poetry Friday 4/19: Joshua Garcia & charles theonia Wednesday 4/24: Saretta Morgan & Jared Stanley Friday 4/26: Cody-Rose Clevidence & Sahar Khraibani May Wednesday 5/1: Launch of Breathlehem: The Selected Poetry of Jim Brodey Monday 5/6: Fulla Abdul-Jabbar

Dear Poets, This spring at the Poetry Project, we are thinking about correspondence. Colors can correspond and shapes can correspond, words and events can correspond to each other, as can names and people and things. Correspondence is a relationship, or rather many kinds of relationships, and so when we think about correspondence, we of course are thinking about you, our community of poets and people who love poets, or at least poetry. What does it mean to respond to something, in language or in feeling? How might we describe the experience of relaying a message and awaiting a reply? Fred Moten begins his new book — “we’re walking / an open diary. / Inconstancy, / which seems / like exercise / in parting, / is really / overlap / and incline, / a velvet / soundmap / of approach” We're pleased to share with you our Spring 2023 Season. All in-person events will also be livestreamed unless otherwise noted. Stay tuned for more events and workshops this spring! We eagerly anticipate your approach, The Poetry Project poetryproject.org/events Thank you so much to poet, photographer, and the Poetry Project's very own Creative Communications Coordinator, Ivanna Baranova, for sharing her beautiful photographs with us for this season's flyers.

Announcing Fall 2022 at The Poetry Project! Following our spring 2022 inquiry into listening as a form of poetic echolocation, in the fall of 2022 we’ll extend our exploration of the ways we locate ourselves relationally by considering the haptic’s mysteries of proprioception, by considering touch. We are interested in what it means to hold and to be held, to trace and to catch, what it takes to build a container of openings, not organized around limitation but possibility, temporary and movable, a kind of lively devotion, communal. We’re thinking about the local and localism, and how those scales have shifted over time, both in the specific geography we inhabit and through communities that, while located geographically elsewhere, are nevertheless present. We’re reflecting on the many complexities and intricacies of touch, the ways it can harm as well as heal, exclude as well as include. We’re remembering that touch is something that happens both in community and in solitude, across distances and histories. We're curious about the temporality of touch, the way a moment of contact can transform its players in ways both fleeting and permanent, how it can literally enable survival. As Dolores Dorantes writes, “You live because the moon touched the stone jutting out of the pond to show you, copiously, its edges.” Our events this season are noted as either happening virtually or in-person, with details on our event pages for registration, access, and safety practices. As we continue to update capacity and conditions for in-person gathering, please note that registration for our in-person events will open three weeks in advance of the event. poetryproject.org/events

House Party is a new digital performance and publication series out of The Poetry Project with readings, songs, dances, writings and prompts from the past, present, and future. Within each issue, we'll also be sharing a living list of resources, emergency grants, and other recommendations. We know that sociality and home are shifting through this uncertain moment. We also know that poets are impresarios of constraint, looting and improvising from all the means available. From the hearts and living rooms and bathtubs of our collective digital church, we're very pleased to welcome you to this first issue. Our house party is your house party.