Poetry Readings Nyc
Griselda Humbarger
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April is Poetry Month, the Academy of American Poets tells us. In 2012, there were seven thousand four hundred and twenty-seven poetry readings in April, many on a Thursday. For anyone born in 1928 who pays attention to poetry, the numerousness is astonishing; in April of 1948, there were fifteen readings in the United States, twelve by Robert Frost.
Chen Chen was born in Xiamen, China, and grew up in Massachusetts. His debut poetry collection, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in two chapbooks and in such publications as Poetry, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Best of the Net, and The Best American Poetry. He is the recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, the Saltonstall Foundation, and Lambda Literary. He earned his BA at Hampshire College and his MFA at Syracuse University. He lives in Lubbock, Texas, where he is pursuing a PhD in English and Creative Writing at Texas Tech University.
The event was a celebration of first books, a celebration of queer Asian American poets. The event featured a cornucopia of Asian snacks, thanks to Michelle and Kazumi. Now I feel that one must have shrimp crackers and Pocky sticks at every literary event.
The most beautiful, cheesy thing happened when we came back from an intermission. Michelle and Kazumi asked everyone to join in singing me happy birthday. Then the two of them presented me with a box of cake pops. I took one back to my seat. I ate my cake pop while listening to Kazumi explain the next part of our event, an interactive workshop. Suddenly, tragically, a large chunk of cake pop fell to the floor. Suddenly, magically, the terrific poet and human Kenji Liu rushed to my side with a napkin, picked up the sad thing, wiped the floor.
Muriel drove me to LAX. Thank you, Muriel. During the drive, we talked about Xanga and LiveJournal, those blogging platforms that had been so important to us, once. We talked about our early reasons for writing: to document daily life, daily emotions and to share vulnerably, openly, before we understood what oversharing was.
John Shoptaw teaches poetry and ecopoetry in the English Department of UC Berkeley, where he is a member of the Environmental Arts & Humanities Initiative. His Times Beach won the Northern California Book Award in Poetry. He has published poems and essays in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, Arion, Oxford Public Philosophy, and elsewhere. His poetry is being anthologized in Treelines, The Ecopoetry Anthology, and The New Sent(i)ence. Artist Jenny Holzer incorporated a poem of his in her installation at the Salesforce Transit Center. His Near-Earth Object is now out from Unbound Edition Press. The foreword, by artist and author Jenny Odell, appears online in The Paris Review.
Jessica Fisher is the author of Frail-Craft, which won the 2006 Yale Younger Poets Prize, and Inmost, which won the 2011 Nightboat Poetry Prize. Her latest collection, Daywork, was published in 2024 by Milkweed Editions. She is the co-editor of The Addison Street Anthology, with UC Berkeley Professor Robert Hass. Her honors include the 2012 Rome Prize, a Holloway Postdoctoral Fellowship in Poetry, and a research grant from the Hellman Foundation. She holds a Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley, and she is currently an associate professor of English at Williams College.
If you require accommodations to participate in this event, please contact Coordinator Camille Santana Considine at poems-...@berkeley.edu or 619-708-2181 at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.
READINGS:
This program occurs at 6pm ET on a Thursday each month. Each reading may feature 1-3 poets. Readings are 15-25 minutes long on average per reader, though this may depend on other program components each month. Group submissions are strongly encouraged. Poets who submit alone will be paired with other poets if selected. Poets are welcome to promote sales of their books, and/or awareness of other media on the evening of the program. Poets should be prepared to engage in facilitated conversation and/or a Q&A after their readings on subjects including inspiration, craft, and Emily Dickinson.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
Only submissions made using our online form and Dropbox folder will be considered. We will not accept email or paper submissions.
There is no fee to submit proposals.
Group submissions from up to 3 poets are accepted.
To offer some comfort, inspiration and reflection during recent uncertain times, Dr Iain McGilchrist shared a poetry reading each day. A sample can be found below. The full 365 poetry readings on YouTube can be found here.
The Woodberry Poetry Room is home to a breathtaking range of poetry-related collections: including a landmark collection of literary recordings (1933 to the present) and a browsable selection of 20th and 21st century poetry monographs and magazines (which can be accessed at its Lamont Library location). It is also the repository of a wide array of rare books, broadsides, and typescripts (which can be accessed via Houghton Library).
The Woodberry Poetry Room is a vibrant hub of literary activity: all of our events are free and open to the public. Many programs are also live-streamed. If you would like to be added to our mailing list, feel free to email us. If you have to miss an event, we invite you to visit our YouTube Channel featuring over 150 videos of past programs. All recordings produced through our public programs are added to the Poetry Room's landmark audio-visual archive (1933-present), which is searchable via HOLLIS.
This season, we are pleased to announce that Tongo Eisen-Martin will be guest curator for two amazing events. Stay tuned for additional Spring 2024 programs, which will be added to this site shortly.
Faculty members, graduate students, and local educators wishing to schedule classes or seminars in the room are encouraged to use the Special Collections Class Request tool. The Woodberry Poetry Room curatorial staff will follow-up to discuss your specific needs and interests.
Each year the Woodberry Poetry Room offers poets, writers, visual and multimedia artists, composers, and scholars of contemporary poetry the opportunity to apply for the WPR Creative Fellowship.
Past fellowship recipients have included Jonah Mixon-Webster, Diana Khoi Nguyen & Jane Wong, Tracie Morris, Erin Moure, Eileen Myles, Sawako Nakayasu, and Fanny Howe. WPR Creative Fellowships and Grants are generously funded by the Anagnostopoulos fund.
Founded in honor of poet, scholar, and Harvard graduate George Edward Woodberry (1855-1930), the Poetry Room first opened its doors on the third floor of Widener Library in 1931. Prof. Harry Levin later reflected that its opening was a kind of declaration that "Harvard was officially recognizing modern poetry."
In 1933, Packard launched the Harvard Vocarium, one of the first poetry and spoken-literature recording labels in the world. The preliminary batch featured several Latin and Greek recordings and T. S. Eliot's first poetry recording. Eliot's recording of "Gerontion" and "The Hollow Men" was made by Packard during the poet's year-long Charles Eliot Norton lecturership.
When the Poetry Room opened in Lamont in 1949, it was in a new suite of Alvar Aalto-designed rooms created specifically as "a place for poetry" and poetry listening. Four Thorens turntables, equipped with outlets for eight sets of earphones, helped to accommodate the growing visitorship. Over 4,000 listening requests were made during its first four months alone.
(The downside of this move was that it excluded women from the Poetry Room: Radcliffe students had previously had access to its Widener venue. With the exception of summer sessions, during which time such poets as Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath were able to visit, Lamont Library did not admit women until 1967.)
Working in collaboration with Packard and with the expertise of sound engineer Stephen B. Fassett, Sweeney was responsible for documenting the circuit tours of E. E. Cummings and Dylan Thomas, for making Wallace Stevens' last recordings, and for chronicling the performances of such emerging mid-century writers as John Ashbery, John Berryman, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Stephen Jonas, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, and John Wieners.
Sweeney also facilitated and recorded literary conferences and folk-music performances in Lamont Forum Room: among the highlights from this collection are one of the earliest live recordings of Ralph Ellison, made during the Conference on the Contemporary Novel, in August 1953.
Fassett continued to assist interim curators after Sweeney's tenure: in addition to his early work recording everyone from Baez to Plath, Fassett was instrumental in making Poetry Room recordings by Audre Lorde and Yvegeny Yevtushenko.
In 1974, Stratis Haviaras was named curator of the Poetry and Farnsworth Rooms, a position he held until 2000. During this lively period, Haviaras recorded a wide array of poets representing a broad range of late 20th century poetics: among them, Charles Bernstein, Rita Dove, Robert Duncan, Jorie Graham, Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, Gary Snyder, and Derek Walcott. Haviaras was also responsible for creating a substantive archive of Greek-language recordings, featuring such authors as George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis.
In addition, he recorded over 40 readings, seminars, and lectures by Seamus Heaney, during Heaney's pivotal period of affiliation with the university. Like Sweeney before him, Haviaras also began to transfer the Poetry Room's recordings to the next iteration of sound recording: the compact cassette.