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. 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 – 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. The archive contains around 40,000 hours of audio and visual recordings, as well as ephemera including posters, correspondence, financial information, and other material. As of 2024, 419 recordings have been digitized and are available to listen to, open-access, on the Library's website. The Library has also digitized Bernadette Mayer's notebooks from her tenure as director of the project.

History of the Poetry Project
Prior to the formal establishment of the Poetry Project, St Mark's Church was already a venue for cultural events. In January 1966, the 'Poetry Committee', a group of organising poets composed of Paul Blackburn, Carol Bergé, Carol Rubinstein, Allen Planz, Jerome Rothenberg, Paul Plummer, and Diane Wakowski, was established there. Their idea was to use the church as a new venue for reading series which had previously occurred at Les Deux Mégots.

In May 1966, the Reverend Michael Allen, the priest of St Mark's, decided to accept a federal grant of almost $200,000 from the Office of Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Development. The Poetry Project was established using this money, along with corresponding film and theatre programs, though these did not last beyond 1966. The grant was administered jointly by Michael Allen and Harry Silverstein at the New School, and was technically to be used for 'creative arts for alienated youth' and the socialisation of juvenile delinquents. Joel Oppenheimer was appointed as the first director of the Poetry Project, a role he held until 1968, when Anne Waldman took over.

The Poetry Project hosted (and continues to host) workshops and readings. Notable events include Bernadette Mayer's workshops between 1971 and 1974, during which she and her students co-created the 'Experiments', a seminal work in the canon of Language writing, and an incident where the poet Kenneth Koch was shot at during a poetry reading by fellow poet and anarchist Allen Van Newkirk. The Poetry Project was a key community hub for the so-called 'second generation' of the New York School of poets.

Publications
The Poetry Project's first publication was The Genre of Silence, published in 1966 by Joel Oppenheimer. The publication was required by the terms of the federal grant which funded the Project in its early years. At the time, Oppenheimer noted that the money would be better spent supporting The World, which was already extant.

The World was a little magazine published from the winter of 1966 onward, and was heavily attached to the Poetry Project. Writing from The World was published in The World Anthology of 1969, and Out of This World: An Anthology of the St. Mark's Poetry Project 1966-1991.

Unnatural Acts was a magazine produced from Bernadette Mayer's workshops between 1971 and 1974. Unnatural Acts contained poems with no attribution and was a kind of 'group project' by the workshop participants and Mayer.

The Poetry Project Newsletter is currently the main publishing output of the project. It has been published since 1972, and publishes poems, criticism, reviews, interviews and essays.

The Recluse was an annual literary magazine that ran from 2014 to 2022 and was published by the Poetry Project.

House Party is an online digital publication by the Poetry Project. Footnotes publishes material, current and archival, from workshops held at the Project. Neighbird is another digital publication of poetry from the Project.

Public Access Poetry
From 1977 until 1978, the New York City public-access television show Public Access Poetry (PAP) showed readings at the project featuring poets such as Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Eileen Myles, John Yau, Brad Gooch, Alice Notley, Jim Brodey, and more.

On the show, performers and poets gave half-hour readings. In 2011, after launching a successful Kickstarter campaign, The Poetry Project was able to restore, preserve and digitize all of the remaining film. In April 2011 with the Anthology Film Archives they presented screenings of highlights of the PAP films.