As part of the celebration of The Poetry Project’s 60th birthday, I wanted to talk to the staff—my co-workers who make this place work through their time, insight, energy, patience, creativity and dedication. I asked them two questions to learn more about how they understand the Project and what it means to them.
—Kay Gabriel
1. Talk about a program at The Poetry Project that surprised you:
AYAZ O. MURATOGLU
Gary Indiana gave a legendary reading less than six months before he died, the book launch for Do Everything in the Dark. The parish hall was totally packed and someone wrote a missed encounter for "the sound tech" the next day, which was legendary for me, James [Barickman], and Noa [Mendoza], the sound team at the time, since we technically don't know who it was written "about."
CERINE Z.
Neti-Neti and Sinonó
I saw Amirtha Kidambi play with Darius Jones in 2021 and it was moving to experience her range amidst projects and time. The interplay of vocals, drums, and noise in Neti-Neti unleashed a stereo field that ricocheted thru the room and beyond the church. Amirtha Kidambi and Matt Evans processed the live sound in a way that felt like erosion revealing the grooves of sediment when water recedes. Harmony and corrosion draped the room in sonic layers like lengths of moss both intricately tangled and energetically levitating.
Sinonó's performance wielded a palette of iteration and held such a rapt and vast form of listening. The night reflected what i love most about poetry and music—a million worlds within a moment. Sinonó opened up sonic passageways of expansive resonance with cello, bass, and vocals. I never heard bass and cello together themselves before. Lester St. Louis and Henry Fraser created a gradient between percussion and resonant atmosphere. Vocals by isabel crespo pardo traversed the room like verdant green lacing the cracks of concrete or a warm breeze moving powerfully eyes can barely open. I left the Project emotionally exfoliated as hell!
HEATHER GLYNIS
The Bernadette Mayer memorial is, for my money, still the best memorial we’ve ever held at the church. I never knew Bernadette personally, but I started reading her not long before she passed and her work immediately opened up my world to a kind of language and love that I’d never seen in poetry before. The memorial didn’t feel funereal, it was full of a genuine, non-corny love that only comes from the fully lived rich life of an individual who was really about everything she claimed to be about. Erica Dawn Lyle played wailing guitar over the sound of Bernadette’s typewriter, Fanny Howe read “The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica.” I scribbled a spontaneous poem during the event and read it at the after party. If we suffered what else could we do? But there wasn’t suffering in the Project that night. Just pure Bernadette, the best poet, a real mother, a fierce wonderful badass bitch who not a soul worth their salt will ever forget.
JAMES BARICKMAN
I was pleasantly surprised by the 2021 New Year's Day Marathon. Because of pandemic-related social distancing measures, that year's reading was a 24-hour livestream consisting almost entirely of prerecorded video. The Project had never done anything like it before and I didn't know what to expect, though I wasn't looking forward to staring at my laptop all day. I was worried the event would only heighten the sense of isolation that pervaded the previous year and I'd be left feeling more distant from the Poetry Project and its surrounding community than ever before. Thankfully this was not the case, and it was oddly fun tuning in with everybody at the same time. It felt almost intimate, the way maybe broadcast TV used to feel, minus the ads and looming sense of brainwashing. Even the chat was (mostly) kinda pleasant. Some people really took to the form too—despite being confined to a Zoom window, Yoshiko Chuma could still blow my mind. I remember being really impressed with how everything came together, all thanks to my colleagues who had clearly put an insane amount of work into the whole thing. I just hope we never have to do it again.
KAY GABRIEL
There’s people who you know will shine at the Marathon, and then they get up there and vault over your already high expectations. Some memories: Cecilia Gentili re-baptizing us as “the Sex Project”; Nicole Linder and her scene-stealing monologues; the Jack Waters - Peter Cramer act of deadpan clowning and casual absurdism, complete with the giant blowup egg that bounced around the audience; Brandon López two years running; Christeene at the piano; Anthony Roth Costanzo closing the first half in 2023 with his rendition of “The Man I Love.”
KYLE CARRERO LOPEZ
Definitely Harmony Holiday + Zoe Imani Sharpe this past spring, which I tuned into online. Rigorous, archival, and haunting readings. I don’t have much to say that wouldn’t be better said by taking some time to watch the program on YouTube if you haven’t. That’s one of the great gifts of the Project!
MIRENE ARSANIOS
So many singular readings. In this last season only: Fred Moten + Danny Hayward; Laura Henriksen + Brandon Brown; Salma Shamel + Ciarán Finlayson; Malcolm-x Betts + Okwui Okpokwasili. The launch of Jayne Cortez’s Firespitter was absolutely transformative. But I think that what surprises me the most is the range we offer, the fact that you can take a free reading group on Marina Vishmidt's work and a workshop on fiction for poets; that we can host a book launch with Jasbir K. Puar and a reading with Mel Elberg and Don Yorty. That range continues to surprise me: it can contain worlds without feeling chaotic or losing purpose or vision.
ROBERTO MONTES
One program that stands out to me is “tránsitos del sueño del istmo con Tierra Narrative” (“isthmus dream transits with Tierra Narrative”), which took place virtually on March 18, 2021. The event was curated by our wonderful curatorial fellows at the time, Maryam Parhizkar and Óscar Moisés Díaz of Tierra Narrative, and featured readings from Shyanne Figueroa Bennett, Edgar García, and Wingston González. The logistics of a live, virtual, bilingual reading were complicated for us, and I’m grateful to jen eleana hofer, whose help was instrumental in coordinating virtual interpreters, and to Tierra Narrative, who also did translation work. I remember a profoundly moving moment during Wingston's reading, listening to the interpreter Alexia Veytia-Rubio, whose voice rose and intensified in accordance with the tide of the verse, when the impact of so many people working in collaboration around the world pierced through the isolation of Zoom.
WILL FARRIS
A poorly-kept secret (because I bring it up with every chance I get) is that I love dance more than poetry, am constantly whispering into the emperor's ear to bring more dance to the Poetry Project.
I think dance is the closest to god that we will ever get. Liberated from the nightmare of language, dance exists with/in the medium of movement, is produced from/by a Weilian condition of attention towards which poetry doggedly works but, like a mathematical limit, can never arrive. Language will always get in language's way.
Free from language and entrenched in movement, dance exists in this arrival, is instantiated by it. Put differently, if poetry encodes time, dance performs it. To dance and to watch dance are both to bear witness to it, to both its creation and its destruction; there is a third thing that emerges in the gap between performer and audience, in the gap between dance's creation and destruction. It feels something like presence, as in go out and stand in the presence of.
All of that is to say that on Friday, May 22 of this year, Malcolm-x Betts gave the most generous and present performance I have ever seen at the Project, and one of the most generous and present performances I have ever seen in my allotted time on this earth. I think he both saw and was god that night. I think the audience all saw and were god too.
I think that's all the exposition I'll give. I find it both a shame that it was one of the few events of last season to not be recorded, and I also think its archivelessness is perfect. Like how we know Arthur Russell performed at the Project but don't have documentation beyond knowing it. Like being astonished by the fact that we even lived.
2. Talk about somebody significant to you who you met through the Project:
AYAZ O. MURATOGLU
I met Noa Mendoza at the Poetry Project when we were interns in 2021, a few months after I moved to the city, and I can't imagine my life as a poet or translator or friend without them.
CERINE Z.
I think what is so special about meeting someone in the vast orbit of the Poetry Project is that friends and comrades often summon another niche nexus of interest/intrigue/experience. I met Pedro Lopez while collaborating on the A/V team. I didn't realize we grew up near each other until I saw the same phone number area code in the Whatsapp chat on the day of the Poetry Project Marathon. Growing up on the same stretch of coastline felt like unique and fun starting place for connection—and what evolved from there felt like a cherished nodal point among different communities and ecosystems in New York. While working with and crossing paths with Pedro I feel very admiring of his presence and the way he actualizes his ideas with collaboration and thoughtfulness!
HEATHER GLYNIS
Penny Arcade and Patrick DeDauw, two unique brilliant minds in our beloved city of rats who have influenced me in differing, important ways. Penny I met more recently at Don Yorty and Mel Elberg’s reading. Her plays, Bad Reputation and Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!, were major texts that have seeped into my own writing and performance practice. Her rejection of careerism, flouting of decorum, and immediate warmth made me feel like our strange, special community can flourish outside of the academy, that it is just a collection of likeminded freaks.
Patrick is one of the smartest, funniest people I know. A mensch of the party and a real political mover and shaker, like if a writer at Mad Magazine was a labor organizer. I met him at the Cookie Mueller book launch, where he cried at the archival video of Cookie reading. Then I knew he must be one of the Ones, and indeed, he is.
JAMES BARICKMAN
Though I could just as easily answer this question with any of the names in the Newsletter's masthead, I'd be remiss if I did not mention my best friend of nearly a decade (and former roommate) Cori Hutchinson. I met Cori on my first volunteer shift at the Project in November of 2016, when she was an intern working the box office. It turned out we were the only consistent Monday night support staff that entire season so--thanks to a poetry-induced Stockholm syndrome strong enough to overpower our mutual social anxieties--we eventually became friends. One of the first times we hung out outside of the Project, we watched The Cave of Forgotten Dreams on Cori's laptop. I fell asleep sometime in the middle; Cori didn't wake me until the movie was over. For years since, we've both been workshopping a Herzog impression. The way he intones "frozen in time," dragging out the "fro" with a soft "y-" sound that leads into the next syllable. To be honest, it probably still needs some work but at least we're getting there.
KAY GABRIEL
I feel really grateful for the students I’ve come to know in my workshops at the Project. I love getting to see their writing processes develop, and seeing them teach other, think together and write in a more ambitious way over the course of the workshop. The workshops here have a low barrier to entry—anyone can sign up, we offer scholarships, and the cost is relatively low—so they bring together a wide range of people who may not know each other that well. And I get really excited when people who I know from elsewhere sign up to take a class: like anybody who’s run a disciplined reading group could say, doing something intellectually challenging together is invigorating and humbling and unlike any other form of connection.
KYLE CARRERO LOPEZ
I loved meeting Denardo Coleman, Jayne Cortez’s son, during the recent launch for Firespitter! It was so special to be a part of such a personal celebration of her life and work, and since then, I’ve been inspired to dig even deeper into her writings and have been occasionally reading poems of hers to friends of mine or as intro poems to my own readings, like at the NYC Poetry Festival. Meeting him reminded me how central the Project is to the history of poetry in this country and to the world at large.
MIRENE ARSANIOS
The staff! Laura Henriksen of course. I love the staff at the poetry project and am grateful for the quality of the relationships we're all forging over time. I loved meeting Danny Hayward; I loved getting to know Eileen Myles a little more; collaborating with Nightboat. I'm now in CDMX and had a coffee with Kit Schluter, whom I didn't know before. The Project enables a kind of sociality I find incredibly precious. I'm grateful.
ROBERTO MONTES
I remember my first day of work at the 2020 New Year's Day Marathon. I was desperate to make myself useful and shadowed Laura Henriksen as she maneuvered through the church, checking in on volunteers, performers, and the audience. I was (still am) impressed by the care and attention she showed to every person in the room, even in the chaos of the marathon. The impossibility of such a small team coordinating such a massive and special day becomes possible through the generosity of care and diligence of people like Laura. I have learned a lot from her about being a more thoughtful person, and I’m lucky to know her.
WILL FARRIS
My coworkers. I feel deeply honored and constantly lucky to work in the service of poetry, in the company of fiercely critical and gracious artists, organizers, and thinkers with aligned ethics and a well-calibrated moral compass, who understand disagreement and difference are not our obstacles but are in fact our most vital points of contact and connection. I have been at the Project for nearly seven years now and still I am astonished. Thank you.