This fall The Poetry Project turns sixty, and this issue of the Newsletter is our last before that golden-girl milestone. We’re reflecting a lot on our history and our future, and we’re thinking with enthusiasm about how we keep alive the radical spirit of this place: experimental, intergenerational, liberation-oriented and endlessly curious about what people can make possible together in the intimate, porous, invigorating and hypersocial space of the church.

“Keeping alive the spirit” is former Program Coordinator and Newsletter Editor Gillian McCain’s phrase from her interview in this issue with Nicole Wallace about starting the Project’s Friday Night Series in the early 90s. McCain talks about programming from the perspective of looking back to the 70s, not from the perspective of just preserving history but instead as a way to reinvigorate an ethos: looking out for people who are making extraordinary and deeply strange work. In a related spirit, the poet Urayoán Noel holds forth in an interview with Mateo Rodriguez-Hurtado on his “surrender to language as a trippy death drive … I came of age seeking such queer spaces of gloriously uncomfortable weirdness.”

Here’s more work in this issue from that freak edge. Three of this year’s Emerge—Surface—Be fellows have poems in the issue: Christopher Kazar Janigian, mace dent johnson, Marc Solomon. Elsewhere, Drew Zeiba reviews Shanzhai Lyric’s Endless Garment, a poetic megatext composed out of mass-produced and charmingly incorrect slogans printed on t-shirts and counterfeit designer bags. Zeiba argues that Shanzhai Lyric, the artistic duo of Ming Lin and Alex Tatarsky, has composed “a collective, ongoing poem happening in streets and photographs and e-comm scrolls—an idea of a perpetual togetherness.”

I’m writing this note just after May Day: "togetherness" is on my mind, in that experimental, social sense and in a more explicitly political register too. Kassy Lee reviews Troubled Lands, a collection of short stories by left-wing Mexican and Cuban writers that Langston Hughes compiled and translated in the early 30s, published for the first time this year. Elena Gomez reflects on the utopian urge of Rainer Diana Hamilton’s and Violet Spurlock’s This Reasonable Habit, arguing that the book’s “commitment to representing social speech, and its exacting, contextualising assertions for the rich history of literary gatherings, announce that poetry is, as it ever was, always of the people.” What more to say except: period? Or actually Juliette Jeffers’s poem “Barbarella” can have the last word here: “Instead of dying,” she writes, “I ended up at a party.”