What Is Poetry? (Just Kidding, I Know You Know): Interviews from the Poetry Project Newsletter (1983–2009)

On the 50th anniversary of the founding of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, Berrigan collates a treasure trove of selections from its newsletters, featuring conversations with luminaries such as Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Koch, Alice Notley, and Anne Waldman. Koch and Ginsberg expound on the New York School as a “vernacular revolution in American poetry” and David Henderson charmingly relates his hazy memory of the fistfight that launched the Poetry Project itself. Paul Schmidt discusses the performative aspects of translation, and painter Alex Katz relates the history behind his famed portraits of New York School elites. Alice Notley remarks on feminism and the dearth of positive representations of motherhood in poetry, with a few choice words for Sylvia Plath. Maggie Nelson and Wayne Koestenbaum chat about their respective explorations of poetry/prose hybrids, Jane and Hotel Theory. Kenneth Koch expresses the project best: “Certain things can only happen at St. Mark’s... the classiest things... but totally without pretentiousness.” There is a wide diversity in representation here, in the interviewees themselves and in their work’s aesthetics, form, and content. The vast majority of the contributors are poets, with an emphasis on the New York School, but there is valuable insight to be gleaned for anyone working in the creative arts.[em] (Apr.) [/em]