The Poetry Project is bringing back its beloved New Year’s Day annual event and fundraiser. The 49th Annual New Year’s Day Marathon will return to St. Mark’s Church (131 E. 10th St.) in person for two five-hour sessions of live performances by a huge array of poets, musicians and dancers. They write:
For almost fifty years, The Poetry Project has gathered poets, artists, and audiences on New Year’s Day for a daylong celebration of poetry and its accomplices—music, dance, performance, and all manner of other provocations and experiments. Throughout the course of a hazy, time-altering day that turns edgelessly into a fever-dream night, The New Year’s Day Marathon gathers hundreds of poets and performers from every corner of the creative demimonde, the radical margin, the flagrant underground—a true gathering of the many counter-cultural lineages from which we hail. From the moment we open the sanctuary gates until the time we say goodnight to the poetry ghosts, the New Year’s Day Marathon welcomes thousands of audience members who come to participate in one of the world’s longest-running events of poetic encounter and shared listening. Heart-breaking and -making, exhausting and exhilarating, rancorous and sweet, the New Year’s Day Marathon is The Poetry Project’s greatest possibilizer, the most surreal and sprawling literary event of the year.
Learn more here and buy tickets here. The festivities will be live-streamed, as well.
