The Village Voice Gravitates Toward the Poetry Project Upon Its 50th Anniversary

The Village Voice's Jennifer Krasinski melts your hearts with "The Poetry Project’s Half-Century of Dissent." In a feature that will guide you to the Project's annual New Year's Day Marathon Reading--and highlight another 50th-anniversary fundraiser for the East Village institution, "GIANT NIGHTS," which will "honor its history as well as its present"--Krasinski interviews long-term Artistic Director Stacy Szymaszek, and provides a brief history of St. Mark's as well. An excerpt:

The Project's reputation for wild experimentation as well as intimate revelation always extended beyond literary circles, influencing generations of rock musicians. Although he was aware that Patti Smith, Richard Hell, and Jim Carroll had all read at the Project, Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore says one of his most indelible memories of the place was a night of performances from free-jazz pianist Cecil Taylor and poet Clark Coolidge. "Clark read nonstop for forty-five minutes, no uhs, umms, or any pauses whatsoever, as he recited a litany of seemingly non sequitur jazz-bop language lines that left me both confounded and intrigued at the layers of inspired consideration he brought to contemporary post-Beat poetry. Cecil began his reading from somewhere upstairs, chanting and howling as he slowly made his way to the podium, where he proceeded to sing/talk/hum lines of verbiage that dealt with the music of the spheres and the architectures of man's own creative impulse." It was, in Moore's experience, "a very heavy night."

The gravitational pull the Project exerts on its audiences, and younger poets in particular, has always been in force. Its discovery has been, for many writers, an epiphany that has felt like a homecoming. "When I was a young adult, the Poetry Project was the North Star to me, as it was to so many others," says Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts, who curated the Monday-night readings in the Nineties. "I credit the bulk of my early poetic education to it — the amazing marathons, at which I would take note of the performers whom I admired most and then go seek their work; all the reading series, which radiated the kind of magic power that shapes a life." Szymaszek remembers very clearly understanding that when she arrived in 2005 to take her first job there, "I knew that these were my people, and that this was my place."

Read more at the Village Voice. We wrote about Miles Champion's commissioned history of the Project a few years ago.