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, Ed Friedman – whose term from 1986 to 2003 was the longest – Anselm Berrigan, Stacy Szymaszek and the incumbent director Kyle Dacuyan.