The Poetry Project

Name: The Poetry Project
Address: 131 E 10th Street, New York, NY, 10003, US
Telephone: +12126740910
Price range: $
Rating: 4.6

Home
United States
New York, NY
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.
(53)

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.

11/22/2024

Please join us on Wednesday 12/4 at 7:30pm for Other Countries, Black Q***r Expression, 2024 Winter Solstice Reading!

By presenting the work of Black q***r writers, past and present, Other Countries' readings celebrate our voices, honor our ancestors, and foster reunions and new connections. Our early readings were hosted by The Studio Museum in 1989, The Le***an and Gay Center, and other venues throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and were revitalized in the 2020s at the Gene Frankel Theatre, the CUNY Graduate Center, The LGBTQ Center, and now The Poetry Project. Celebrating Black Q***r Expression, Other Countries’ 2024 Winter Solstice reading will feature invited wordsmiths and provide opportunities for open-mic readers selected on a first come, first sign-up basis.

This event is free-to-attend, no registration required. It will also be livestreamed for free on The Poetry Project's YouTube channel.

11/13/2024

Please join us on Friday 11/22 for Holland Andrews & yuniya edi kwon / Ka Baird & Zeena Parkins!

An evening featuring two of the most electrifying duos in the New York music scene. Composer-performers, multi-instrumentalists, and vocalists Holland Andrews and yuniya edi kwon co-create works in the interstices of composition, improvisation, dance, physical theater, and ritual. Ka Baird and Zeena Parkins, playing flute and harp respectively, make improvised music that brings their instruments and their bodies to their technological and corporeal limits. Both pairs play together at the edge of language, dialogically investigating a realm where linguistic signification dissolves into intensities of feeling.

poetryproject.org/events

11/08/2024

We're pleased to share one more addition to Fall 2024 Workshops at The Poetry Project: Tethering Words: An Exploration on the Materiality of language; A Deep Study Session with Amany Khalifa and Alia Al-Sabi!

In the past year, the feeling has been that language is saturated to its brim. Oftentimes the distance that separates us from our kin in our besieged lands becomes both paralyzing and suffocating, and this is a tension that we have been trying to grapple with. With an influx of words, images, and speeches circulating endlessly, how can there be a collapse in language at the same time it overflows? We search within our own ancestral inheritance of revolutionary literature and praxis for modes of navigation that help guide us through this paradox, and in this study, we will be exploring and expanding on other guiding mediums from the collective traditions present in the group. We will also trace how language can embody the notion of “passage,” in both its literary and literal sense. Through this premise, we think of the movement embedded in the duality of the conceptual and the material manifestations of the word. We hope that the space of this study will be generative, experimental, and reflective of our disjointed, haunted, insistent, faithful, angry, and grieving present.

Monday, November 25, 7–10pm, in person at St Mark's. More information and registration @ poetryproject.org/learning

11/07/2024

Crooning deadpan ballads or podcasting for long-distance truckers, Macy Rodman is a multigenre performance sensation with a wicked comic mind. Writer, director and comedian Julio Torres makes blistering sense of a bad world with fond absurdity and surreal desperation. The combination of their shared, explosive insights at the Project is sure to catalyze something—a new shape, a rock ‘n’ roll gender, an avant-garde letter of the alphabet, a permanent vacation from the gig economy? Come through to find out for yourself.

Wednesday, November 20 at 8pm, in the sanctuary at St Mark's Church.

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

poetryproject.org/events

11/01/2024

Please join us for an evening featuring readings by Geoffrey Olsen and Ted Rees. Both poets released new full-length books in Spring 2024. Olsen’s first book, Nerves Between Song, was published by beautiful days press in May 2024. Rees’s fourth book, Hand Me the Limits, was published by Roof Books in April 2024.

Friday 11/15, 8pm in the Parish Hall at St Mark's // poetryproject.org/events

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

10/23/2024

The Poetry Project is very pleased to share that out of a pool of over 250 applicants, this year's mentors have selected the following poets as the 2024–2025 cohort of Emerge—Surface—Be fellows:

Dina Abdulhadi will work with Amelia Bande
angela abiodun will work with Marwa Helal
Alexandra Egan will work with Morgan Bassichis
Car Lara will work with Rainer Diana Hamilton
Tangie Mitchell will work with t’ai freedom ford

In addition to this year's fellows, the mentors identified five finalists whose names we are grateful to share: Alisha Acquaye, Bayan Kiwan, Jerie Choi Ortiz, Mahan Saidi-Grant, and Cat Wei.

The selected fellows will work one-on-one with their mentors to develop their craft; explore publication and performance opportunities; and reflect on the professional and community-based dimensions of a writing life. The Poetry Project will also be thrilled to feature the selected fellows in paired readings in the upcoming spring season.

more on this year's cohort @ poetryproject.org

10/23/2024

Please join us on Wednesday 11/13 for Lou Cornum & Trish Salah.

In lyric experiment and searing insight, Trish Salah locates the subject in a minefield of dispossession, and thinks in often discomfiting ways about how a poetics of gender liberation might meaningfully expand the projects of anti-racist and anti-colonial social transformation. Lou Cornum thinks through disaster and utopia, making sense of accumulated forms of consciousness across centuries of struggle to illuminate how an unlivable world could be made otherwise.

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

poetryproject.org/events

10/21/2024

Please join us Monday, November 11 at 8pm in celebrating the release of Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary (Verso, 2023).

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy is a veteran of the infamous Stonewall Riots, a former s*x worker, and a transgender elder and activist who has survived Bellevue psychiatric hospital, Attica Prison, the HIV/AIDS crisis, and a world that white supremacy has built. She has shared tips with other s*x workers in the nascent drag ball scene of the late 1960s and helped found one of America’s first needle exchange clinics from the back of her van.

Miss Major Speaks is both a document of her brilliant life—told with intimacy, warmth, and an undeniable levity—and a roadmap for the challenges black, brown, q***r and trans youth face on the path to liberation today. For this event, Miss Major will read from the book and after, she and coauthor Toshio Meronek will be joined by artists and activists Morgan Bassichis and Una Osato to discuss critical themes that surface in the text, including envisioning freedom beyond mainstream institutions and nonprofit organizing.

The event is free with registration. Masks will be required and books will be available.

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

poetryproject.org/events

10/21/2024

Please join us on Friday, November 8 for Rachel Hunter Himes & Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste!

What is the difference between a sh*tty review and a bad review? What modes of racialized and gendered apprehension and misapprehension constitute art criticism? What happens when artists refuse the critical appraisal of their work? This evening brings the artist Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste and the art historian Rachel Hunter Himes together in pursuit of questions such as these. Hovering between a reading, a performance, and a conversation, the night will investigate what is at stake, both politically and formally, in critical writing and aesthetic evaluation.

poetryproject.org/events

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

10/18/2024

Please join us on Thursday November 7 at 8pm for Creighton Baxter & Tsohil Bhatia!

This evening pairs two artists who work at the edge of text, image, and matter: Creighton Baxter, who creates performances, paintings, and sculptures that mine the overlaps between illness, abjection, and the erotic; and Tsohil Bhatia, a member of the Red Flower Collective and an artist who works with time, food, and domesticity as artistic mediums. These two will share work alongside each other that, in their own ways, rearticulates how ongoing social antagonisms move through and create the conditions for our everyday intimacies.

poetryproject.org/events

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

10/18/2024

Please join us on Wednesday, November 6 for a Jerome Rothenberg Celebration! Co-hosted by Matthew Rothenberg and Pierre Joris

For 70 years, poet, translator & anthologist Jerome Rothenberg (1931-2024) influenced literary discourse & poetics worldwide: coining the term "ethnopoetics" to embrace the poetic expression of oral cultures once marginalized by the West; exploring Jewish identity from Poland to America; and reimagining avant-garde poetic traditions from Romanticism to Dada & beyond.

This event will celebrate his lifetime of achievements and welcome The Serpent and the Fire, his final great anthology: an "omnipoetic" survey of poetries covering the Americas from Patagonia to Alaska, due October 2024 from University of California Press.

With readings and performances by John Zorn & Pierre Joris, Marty Ehrlich & Charles Bernstein, Matthew Rothenberg, Nicole Peyrafitte, Anne Waldman, Jeffrey Robinson, Michael Heller, Cecilia Vicuña, Anne Tardos, Bob Holman, Lee Anne Brown, Jake Marmer, Barbara Einzig, Steve Clay, Bruce Andrews, Mimi Gross, George Quasha, Ed Sanders, Janet Hamill, Ligorano/Reese, Ariel Resnikof, Amish Trivedi, Howard Norman, and Ellen Zweig.

7:30pm, 8pm reception! poetryproject.org/events

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

10/17/2024

The Poetry Project’s Halloween Party is back! Join us for our annual celebration of the macabre and otherworldly, a night of resurrection where dead words return in new, eerie forms. With readings and performances by Amy De’Ath, Mayada Ibrahim, Untitled Queen, and Alima Lee. Costumes welcome!

poetryproject.org/events

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

10/17/2024

Please join us on Wednesday, October 30 for an evening celebrating the publication of Love, Joe: The Selected Letters of Joe Brainard, edited by Daniel Kane.

Joe Brainard was one of the most distinctive figures on New York City’s vibrant cultural scene in the 1960s and 1970s. Widely known for his influential experimental memoir, I Remember, Brainard worked in a variety of forms, from New-York-School-aligned poetry to Pop-Art-adjacent artworks, including wild riffs on the comic strip character Nancy. Love, Joe presents a selection of Brainard’s letters that stretch from 1959 to 1993 addressed to artists and friends such as John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Fairfield Porter, Bernadette Mayer, James Schuyler, Alex Katz, and Andy Warhol. The letters, edited and annotated by Daniel Kane, allow readers to witness an extraordinarily fertile moment in New York’s history, when literary and visual arts intersected with happenings, proto-punk and psychedelic rock concerts, and experimental music and dance performances. The evening will include readings by Tyhe Cooper, Kyle Dacuyan, Heather Denton, Mike Funk, Brad Gooch, Vincent Katz, Michael Lally, Ann Lauterbach, Keith McDermott, Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, and Nicole Wallace.

We hope you can join us at 7:30pm for a reception before the event. The reading will begin at 8pm.

poetryproject.org/events

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

10/16/2024

Unfortunately Jordy Rosenberg will no longer be able to join us to this Friday's event. We're excited to welcome Salma Shamel, who will join Bassem Saad in a conversation!

poetryproject.org/events

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

10/09/2024

Please join us for an evening featuring readings by poets Farnoosh Fathi and m.s. RedCherries. Fathi’s second book of poems, Granny Cloud, was released in Sept 2024 by New York Review Books and “is a portrait of ecstatic decisions and revisions, constantly reversed, constantly renewed.” RedCherries's debut collection, mother, was released in July 2024 from Penguin Books and is a 2024 National Book Awards finalist in poetry.

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

poetryproject.org/events

10/08/2024

Please join us on Friday, October 18 at 8pm in the Parish Hall for Jordy Rosenberg & Bassem Saad.

Bassem Saad and Jordy Rosenberg bring to fiction what’s typically shunned from it: a political worldview and historical consciousness that subtly shapes the way characters move through a world where only surreal, stark humor can measure up to the dystopian reality, we, the readers, live in.

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

poetryproject.org/events

10/03/2024

Announcing October–December Learning at The Poetry Project!

This second module of Fall 2024 workshops, facilitated by 최 Lindsay, Wendy Lotterman, and Kamelya Omayma Youssef, will explore anti-epiphanic modes of poetic expression, multi-modal forms, and theories of duration; disentangling intimacy from privacy within the lyric form; and the question of poetics within an ante-surveillant, insurgent space.

A limited number of full-tuition scholarships are available. To be considered, please apply by Sunday, October 20.

For more information head to poetryproject.org/learning

10/02/2024

Please join us on Monday 10/18 at 8pm for “No Aesthetic Outside My Freedom”: Mourning, Militancy, and Performance.

Co-presented with Jewish Currents.

This event invites artists to engage in public mourning of Palestinians martyred by Israel over the last year, reckoning with the immense scale of annihilatory colonial violence while centering the need for ongoing and escalating resistance to the forces of empire across the globe. Four artists spanning a range of communities, practices, and lineages will create short performance scores in response to these animating questions: What interventions might performance offer for ethically mourning mass colonialist murder? How might those interventions help us to connect this moment of mass murder to others across history and geography to build a stronger framework of solidarity and analysis? How can this work gather others up in a process of mourning which is inextricable from its political responsibilities? How can performance offer a way to mourn while avoiding creating monuments and memorials which distract from the urgent work of active, escalating resistance?

These scores will then be interpreted by a larger group of performers in The Poetry Project’s space, offering a multiplicity of ways to find space for mourning which supports, rather than distracts from, militant resistance efforts. This event takes its title from a line in Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “State of Siege”, which (in Fady Joudah’s translation) reads: “The martyr teaches me: no aesthetic outside my freedom.” In the spirit of that reminder, this event is grounded in the struggle for Palestinian freedom, while making space to mourn those who have been martyred in that struggle.

Featuring Leila Awadallah, Noel Magathe, Fadl Fakhoury, Rasha Abdulhadi, and Fargo Tbakhi, interpreting performance scores written by Brandon Shimoda, Christina Sharpe, and Natalie Diaz.

If you’d like to attend this event, please make a contribution to Gaza Mutual Aid Collective and provide a receipt for your donation at the door.

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

poetryproject.org/events

Address

131 E 10th Street
New York, NY
10003

Telephone

+12126740910

Website

http://poetryproject.org/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when The Poetry Project posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to The Poetry Project:

Videos

We’re delighted to launch the fall season with a reading by our summer workshop participants. Please join us in celebrating the work of the poets and writers who make this exceptional community so vibrant and irresistible! Featuring readings from Anna Moschovakis and Lou Cornum's workshop participants. Monday, September 16, 7pm ET. This reading will take place virtually over Zoom.

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