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| St. Mark's Poetry Project | |
|---|---|
| Name | St. Mark's Poetry Project |
| Formation | 1966 |
| Type | Literary nonprofit |
| Location | East Village, Manhattan, New York City |
St. Mark's Poetry Project is a longstanding arts organization and reading series based in Manhattan, known for fostering avant-garde and community-centered poetry since the 1960s. Founded amid the cultural ferment of Greenwich Village, Manhattan, the Project became a hub connecting figures from Beat Generation, Black Mountain College legacies, the New York School, and emergent downtown scenes. Over decades it has linked venues, presses, journals, and festivals while hosting readings, workshops, and archive projects that intersect with institutions such as The New School, Columbia University, Barnard College, City College of New York, and New York University.
The organization's origins trace to a nexus involving Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Ed Sanders, John Cage, LeRoi Jones, and collaborators who had associations with The Village Voice, Beatnik movement, San Francisco Renaissance, Black Arts Movement, Judson Dance Theater, and Fluxus. Early programming connected with venues like Cafe Wha?, Caffe Lena, The Five Spot Cafe, and galleries in SoHo, Manhattan. During the 1970s and 1980s the Project intersected with actors from The Kitchen, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Poets House, and the Knitting Factory, while board members and directors engaged with figures from Bob Dylan circles, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Allen Ginsberg allies and editors at City Lights Publishers, Grove Press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Penguin Books USA. The Project weathered fiscal crises paralleled by nonprofit arts in New York like New York City Opera and Brooklyn Academy of Music, and responded to cultural shifts including the AIDS epidemic, 9/11 attacks, and the 2008 Global financial crisis.
Programming aligns with missions advanced by organizations such as National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Creative Capital, Ford Foundation, and private foundations like Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Project runs reading series, open mics, residencies, and fellowship programs modeled after initiatives at MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Blue Mountain Center, and partnerships with university programs at Princeton University, Harvard University, Yale University, Rutgers University, and CUNY Graduate Center. Workshops and editorial labs draw pedagogical influence from curricula at Columbia University School of the Arts, Sarah Lawrence College, Ithaca College, New School MFA Program, and community outreach practices like those at 826NYC. Seasonal festivals echo formats of Poetry International, Brooklyn Book Festival, Poets & Writers Readings, and conferences such as Association of Writers & Writing Programs.
Iconic readings have included appearances tied to the reputations of Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, Peter Orlovsky, John Ashbery, Amiri Baraka, Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer, Ted Berrigan, Eileen Myles, Anselm Hollo, Alice Notley, Jackson Mac Low, William S. Burroughs, Norman Mailer, Robert Creeley, Diane di Prima, Meredith Monk, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Suzanne Vega, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Kurt Vonnegut, Susan Sontag, Julio Cortázar, and Jorge Luis Borges-linked translators. Benefit readings have featured supporters from The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry (magazine), The Atlantic (magazine), The New York Times, and literary prizes like the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Nobel Prize in Literature, and the T.S. Eliot Prize circle. The Project has hosted themed events tied to anniversaries of Beat Generation works, retrospectives on Black Mountain College figures, and collaborative evenings with institutions like Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum, and Guggenheim Museum.
The Project maintains an archive practice akin to operations at Poets House, New York Public Library, Library of Congress, and university special collections at Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale Collection of American Literature, and Harry Ransom Center. Its small press publications and broadsides have been associated with printers and publishers such as City Lights Publishers, New Directions Publishing, Faber and Faber, Copper Canyon Press, Coffee House Press, Wave Books, Ugly Duckling Presse, BOA Editions, and journals like The Paris Review, Boundary 2, Conjunctions, Fence, Grand Street, and Bomb Magazine. Oral histories and recorded readings have been collected in formats similar to archives at The Smithsonian Institution, The New York Historical Society, and digital preservation projects with NYU Digital Library, Internet Archive, and JSTOR collaborations.
Educational outreach includes partnerships with public and charter schools under models used by Teachers & Writers Collaborative, YoungArts, Poets House, 826 National, and arts-in-corrections programs akin to Prison Arts Coalition. Collaborations have connected the Project to community organizations such as Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Coalition for the Homeless (New York), Chinese-American Planning Council, and youth arts initiatives like Lucky Price, LIFT (nonprofit), and BRIC Arts Media. Workshops and mentorships mirror programs at Literary Arts (Portland), Danforth Museum, and longstanding educational publishers like Random House outreach arms.
Artists and alumni associated through readings, workshops, or editorial projects include Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Anne Waldman, Eileen Myles, Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, Bernadette Mayer, Jackson Mac Low, William S. Burroughs, Diane di Prima, Meredith Monk, Philip Glass, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Suzanne Vega, Kurt Vonnegut, Susan Sontag, Adrienne Rich, Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Seamus Heaney, Jorie Graham, Tracy K. Smith, Joy Harjo, Natasha Trethewey, Billy Collins, Mark Strand, Billy Collins, Sharon Olds, Louise Glück, Derek Walcott, Rita Dove, Charles Simic, Yusef Komunyakaa, Rigoberto González, Claudia Rankine, Saul Williams, Camille Rankine, Ocean Vuong, Ada Limón, Terrance Hayes, Eileen Myles, Amiri Baraka, Frank O'Hara.
Governance follows nonprofit frameworks similar to Board of Trustees (nonprofit), with fiscal oversight practices like those at New York Foundation for the Arts, Nonprofit Finance Fund, Independent Sector, and grant applications to National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and municipal support from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Fiscal crises and strategic plans have been discussed in contexts resembling management at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Carnegie Hall.
Category:Arts organizations based in New York City