Chorus Makes a Heart of Future: Selected Poems from the Poetry Project’s New Year’s Day Marathon Kyle Dacuyan (bio) For forty-seven years, every January 1st a gathering of poets and their accomplices have greeted the passage of the year with a daylong ritual of raucous, tender, wild experiments and offerings. The New Year’s Day Marathon was originally conceived as a fundraiser for The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s, a touchstone of downtown culture in New York City, whose expeditions in language and performance have radiated globally across many generations of avant-garde art. The idea: a cast of radical poets, music-makers, dancers, performers, and artists would each share work a few minutes in length, unrolling over the day in a kind of unruly and exuberant fever dream, with the ticket revenue from this public performance helping to sustain the breadth of readings, events, learning programs, and publications produced each year by The Project. The Marathon, like The Project, is an improbable and enduring endeavor. By many measures (not least of which financial), poetry appears to be at the far edge of artistic and literary practice. And a spirit of iconoclastic counter-hierarchy pervades The Project: it is a home for work that resists and challenges [End Page 224] institutionalized notions of convention, value, and legibility. On top of all of this, the communities and individuals passing through The Project are passionate in their aesthetic and political difference, making for a not unquarrelsome atmosphere and lineage. Fractious and located at the margin of the margin, and still the work persists and thrives. The Marathon’s group of performers has grown from several dozen in 1974 to more than 100 in recent years, to more than 300 individuals at the turn of 2020 into 2021. Most years draw an audience of a thousand to St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery in NYC’s East Village, where they sit shoulder to shoulder and on the floor for hours of oration and performance. Laurie Anderson, Amiri Baraka, John Cage, Diamanda Galás, John Giorno, Philip Glass, Eileen Myles, Yoko Ono, Yvonne Rainer, and Anne Waldman are a few of the thousands of artists who have been a part of the Marathon’s rich fabric—but what makes the assembly so special is that the usual markers of fame and recognition are each year totally atomized. The Marathon brings together poets and artists across generation and practice. There is no green room, no headliners; everyone and no one is a star. And beyond the performers, there are about 100 volunteers annually preparing and serving food, selling books, attending to the intricate logistics of such an unwieldy affair. The endurance of the Marathon affirms the vitality of dreaming, of experimental language practice, of ritual as we move through the constant vicissitudes of time—and ultimately the way these threads come together unpredictably to present new possibilities of collectivity. Every year, the Marathon demonstrates our appetite and need for new modes of listening and attention, new contexts for recognition of self and relation. And while catastrophe and uncertainty continue to roil across years and decades, the communities of The Project have always improvised to keep the Marathon alive. After a fire in 1978 left St. Mark’s unusable for several years, a number of neighborhood gathering places donated space to keep the annual event running. The Covid-19 pandemic in 2021 made physical gathering impossible—but the alternative online presentation opened the Marathon into a truly global celebration, with audiences and artists contributing from every continent but Antarctica. This portfolio brings together several of the poets who shared work as part of the 2021 New Year’s Day Marathon. Their poems ring with defiance, pleasure, and hope. Jan-Henry Gray’s River Capture presents polyvochal chords of suggestion and action, verbs cascading in erosion and toward new kinds of ecology. Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola responds to the state’s continued erasure of paintings on public monuments in Ciudad de México, testifying in a series of poems to the necessity of ritual as an intervention against the normalized. Composed in response to a prompt for ritual by Kazim Ali...
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Oct 26, 2021
Ursula Yovich + 1
Open Access
