What is Poetry? (Just kidding, I know you know): Interviews from The Poetry Project Newsletter

by Anselm Berrigan (Editor)

The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church was founded in 1966 for the overlapping circles of poets in the Lower East Side of New York. These interviews from The Poetry Project Newsletter form a kind of conversation over time between some of the late 20th century's most influential poets and artists, who have come together in this legendary venue over the past 50 years. Includes interviews with Charles North, Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer, David Rattray, Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Koch, Harryette Mullen, Barbara Henning, David Henderson, Lisa Jarnot, Alice Notley, Ed Sanders, Samuel Delany, Harry Matthews, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Renee Gladman, Lorenzo Thomas, Fred Moten, Stan Brakhage, Alex Katz, Lewis Warsh, Ron Padgett, Maggie Nelson, Wayne Koestenbaum, Eileen Myles, and more. "I find it one of the liveliest points of communication in the American poetry world. There is an incredible excitement to come to the church and read one's poems to the many other poets who congregate there, drawn to the church by its own energy and thrust."—Donald Hall From the introduction, by Anselm For the poets closely involved with the Poetry Project since, and subsequent to, its inception, the interviews were an opportunity to speak directly to a community one could perceive as known, imaginary, expanding, unwieldy, intermittent, formative, desperately necessary, and sometimes peculiarly unsatisfying all at once. Community being the kind of term that often implies everything and nothing simultaneously, with the bottom falling out of the word depending on who happens to be wielding it. Poets can be particularly adept at using and exposing such terms.

Genres: Poetry

440 pages, Paperback

Published April 4, 2017

About the author

Anselm Berrigan is the author of four books of poetry, including Free Cell, Some Notes on My Programming, Zero Star Hotel, and Notes from Irrelevance, and is the co-editor with Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan of Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan. He is the poetry editor for The Brooklyn Rail, and formerly served as Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church. He lives and works in his hometown of New York City.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

As I read through the first half of these interviews, I thought perhaps I was gaining something, some insight about poetry; by the end of the book, I realized most of these interviews are less about poetry and more about the poets’ egos, which, unfortunately, is one reason why I think poetry will never really become a mainstream art (not that we want it to become one) and why so many are turned off by it in the first place.
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Admittedly, I am hardly familiar with any of these poets, I may have heard of a few of them by name, but am unfamiliar with their work; I was hoping to find at least a couple poets in here that I would want to follow, to look up their work and come to enjoy it. This was not the case, and, in fact, quite the opposite. Any poets I did look up from these interviews was mostly to confirm my suspicions about their work (based on the interviews) that I would not enjoy it.
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I used to lament the fact that I have never really been involved in a “vibrant” artistic community such as exists in New York City at a place like St. Marks; after reading these interviews, I’m glad I never was. Perhaps it’s just these specific interviews (that hardly discuss poetry at all, at least in the ways I expected them to). But I find these interviews to be tedious, self-aggrandizing (as much of modern poetry is, also), and existing for their own sake, in an echo chamber, a cabal of poets interviewing each other just to hear themselves speak to one another, name-dropping the whole way.
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I expected much more from a collection such as this, more discussion about technique and form and opinions about what makes poetry so necessary and alive. These discussions feel . . . I don’t know, self-promotional, unchallenging, and more like a group of pals trying to get each other’s names in print, too focused on culture and collaboration and activism, which has its place in poetry, but my sense is that this New York school of thought believes these aspects to be what poetry is all about, and I think they’re entirely wrong. They also consistently deny that there is a "New York School," which is stupid to me; there clearly is one, and now I know better which poets to avoid.
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What is poetry? It's definitely not this.
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Sorry.