Poets & Writers Theater

In this episode of Public Access Poetry, a cable television show produced for two seasons during 1977 and 1978, Eileen Myles and Alice Notley read a selection of their work. The full archive of half-hour episodes featuring poets from the downtown New York City poetry scene can be found on PennSound, an archival project affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania.

“This city is full / of stranger things than a man collecting foil.” This short film is an adaptation of a poem of the same title by Matthew Yeager, author of Like That (Forklift Books, 2016) and cocurator of the KGB Monday Night Poetry Series. Directed by Sean Logan, the film features a drum score by tabla player Marcus Wise.

In this video, owner John Scioli and an assortment of customers share stories and memories of the Community Bookstore, known for being open at odd hours and completely crammed full of piles of books. The bookstore, which first opened in 1985 in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood, closed in 2016. 

At a public memorial at New York City’s Strand Book Store, family members, colleagues, and writers including Gay Talese, Fran Lebowitz, and Paul Krugman remember and honor Fred Bass, the bookstore’s longtime owner who died at the age of eighty-nine on January 3. The bookstore was founded by Bass’s father in 1927, and he began working there at the age of thirteen, taking over its management in 1956.

Poet and painter John Giorno gives a tour of his home on the Bowery in New York City and points out William Burroughs’s former bunker bedroom, kept intact with his bed, typewriters, and a bull’s-eye target. The building was a frequent hangout of artists including Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Mark Rothko, and Robert Rauschenberg.

Brett Fletcher Lauer and Lynn Melnick, editors of the poetry anthology, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation (Viking, 2015), introduce poets from the collection at a reading at the Strand Book Store in New York City.

Edward Hirsch speaks about American poets and poetry abroad at the Academy of American Poets' 2013 Poets Forum. Hirsch discusses his two new books, Gabriel and A Poet's Glossary, in the September/October 2014 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. For more Hirsch, watch him on the Why We Write panel at the Poets & Writers Live event in New York City this past June.

"You absolutely can tell a great story on the spot." This short film by Mark Cersosimo follows fiction writer C. D. Hermelin on his journey to becoming "The Roving Typist." After finding an old Royal Safari typewriter at a yard sale, Hermelin decided to set up shop in parks around New York City and type stories for strangers. Freebird Books serves as one of the backdrops in the film.

David Julius Caesar Salad sets up his manual typewriter in New York City's Central Park, prompting passersby to pick a subject. It's poetry on demand: He types out the poem while patrons wait on the benches nearby, and reads the poem to them when he's finished.

The Sonnet Project combines cinematic art with the poetry of William Shakespeare, set against the backdrop of New York City. The goal of the project is to film all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, each performed by a different actor in a carefully chosen New York City location. This is their sixty-seventh film.

"And each morning I am left with the furious kindling of birds." Roberto Montes reads from his first collection of poetry, I Don't Know Do You (Ampersand Books, 2014), at the Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, a cultural center and bookstore in New York City.

“Every door you open tonight is a sacrifice to gods whose names you will never learn.” Jon Sands, cofounder of Pop-Up Poets, performs in a New York City subway.

She was fourteen years old when she took the stage at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City's East Village. Sarah Kay, now twenty-four, is a cofounder of Project V.O.I.C.E., a national organization that celebrates and inspires youth self-expression, and a leading spoken word poet.

Actor Bill Murray read two poems by Wallace Stevens at Bubby's Brooklyn as part of Poets House's seventeenth annual Poetry Walk Across the Brooklyn Bridge last month.

This video, for Mark Strand's "The Poem of the Spanish Poet," was filmed in the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet’s New York City apartment and features animation by director and animation artist Juan Delcan.

Samuel Menashe, the first poet to receive the Neglected Masters Award from the Poetry Foundation in 2004, died Monday night in his sleep on August 22, 2011. He was eighty-five years old. In this clip, from the WNYC series “Know Your Neighbor,” Menashe is seen in his New York City apartment, where he lived for fifty years.

Okay, this is just about the best thing we've watched all summer. Check out this video of Brazenhead Books, a secret bookstore inside Michael Seidenberg's apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Why is it secret? Just watch this. 

In 1966 Allen Ginsberg wrote the anti-war poem "Wichita Vortex Sutra" (composing it as he spoke into a recorder while travelling across the Midwest.) Twenty-two years later the poet met composer Philip Glass in a bookstore in New York City's East Village, a chance encounter that eventually led to a collaboration that yielded this piece, which is featured on Glass's 1990 album, Hydrogen Jukebox.

Bob Holman reads "Happy New Year Poem" at the 37th annual New Year's Day marathon reading at the St. Mark's Poetry Project in New York City.