The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church was founded in 1966 in the East Village of Manhattan by the poet and translator Paul Blackburn, it has been a crucial venue for new and experimental poetries for over four decades.
The Project offers a number of reading series, writing workshops, a quarterly newsletter, a website, and audio and document archives. Housed in the historic St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, the grounds are the site of historic memorials to poets Paul Blackburn, Allen Ginsberg, Michael Scholnick, W.H. Auden, Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan, and 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. Past Artistic Directors of the project have included Joel Oppenheimer, Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer, Ron Padgett, Eileen Myles, Ed Friedman – whose term from 1986 to 2003 was the longest[1] – and Anselm Berrigan; the current Artistic Director is Stacy Szymaszek.