Project History
The Poetry Project has, over the decades, provided poets with a safe haven, laboratory, and stage. These, combined, have activated and preserved our various ways of thinking and linking language to ourselves and to the world. Remarkably, the Project has never stopped reinventing itself as an institution: that is, it has allowed the currents of poetic innovation to inform its choices and decisions. In this, it is as unique as it is irreplaceable. – Ann Lauterbach
Since its founding in 1966, the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery has been a forum for public literary events and a resource for writers. Over the past four decades, hundreds of poets, writers and performers, including Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, Alice Walker, John Cage, Sam Shepard, Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones), Terri McMillan, Robert Creeley, Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer, Kenneth Koch, Patti Smith, Yoko Ono, Sherman Alexie, and Michael Ondaatje, have shared their work at the Poetry Project. With three different reading and performance series a week, plus lectures and special events, the Poetry Project is a vital and hospitable hub for the writing community in New York City. The Poetry Project was the scene of the only joint reading by Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg and has been the site of historic memorials to poets Paul Blackburn, Robert Duncan, Charles Reznikoff, Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, Edwin Denby and many others. Staffed completely by poets, the Poetry Project consistently achieves an integrity of programming that challenges, informs and inspires working writers, while remaining accessible to the general public.
Now in its 43rd season, the Poetry Project continues to furnish encouragement and resources to poets, writers, artists and performers whose work is experimental, innovative and pertinent to writing that proposes fresh aesthetic, cultural, philosophical and political approaches to contemporary society.
If you’d like to know more about the Poetry Project’s history, please visit The Project Papers, which are published essays about and from the Poetry Project.
