This event is a part of the “GIANT NIGHT: The Poetry Project at 50” platform series.

“But Blackburn’s omniscient tape recorder was more than a vehicle for retrieval…”
– Michael Davidson, Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word

The Poetry Project’s vast collection, currently being processed by the Library of Congress, is a goldmine of potential knowledge and inspiration. Spanning the entirety of the Project’s existence, it includes over 4,000 hours of audio, much of it untapped as a scholarly resource.

Participants will choose particularly rich poems and discuss their historical impact, the texture and grain of the work’s recitation and the impact of these readings, poems, and people on the landscape of American poetry and art. Scholars and writers, including CA Conrad on Eileen Myles and Joe Ceravolo, Tonya Foster on Gwendolyn Brooks and Ntozake Shange, and Anna Vitale on Amiri Baraka w/ the Anti-Imperialist Singers, will excerpt from and discuss recordings of landmark readings being digitized specially for the Poetry Project’s 50th Anniversary by the Library of Congress. The goal of this event is both to showcase the Poetry Project’s history and to encourage engagement with the organization’s archival collection – Please join us as we call attention to the living community that has sustained the Project for its first 50 years and that remains vital as it moves into its next half century.

This event is being made possible with support from New York Council for the Humanities.