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.
This courageous circus and madcap effort is also The Poetry Project's biggest fundraiser. The money raised at the New Year's Day Marathon supports: over 65 events that reach thousands of attendees around the world; a breadth of creative and scholarly publications; curatorial and writing fellowships; emerging writer prizes; the hundreds of workshop attendees who join us each season; and the payments we make to the 500+ teachers, performers, readers, editors, technicians, lecturers, writers, curators, scholars, and critics we program each year. The Marathon is crucial to maintaining the working and learning community, the alternative economy of poetry, and the cultural anti-enterprise we have been collectively authoring for more than half a century.
We are absolutely thrilled to announce that on January 1, 2023, we will be returning to the sanctuary for The Poetry Project's 49th Annual New Year's Day Marathon. And we're so happy to share that the entire event will be livestreamed. However you join us, we hope that you do.
We're back. Come as you are, expect to leave new.
Featuring Christeene, DAYS, Shanzai Lyric, Kimberly Alidio, Basie Allen, Stine An, Jaye Bartell, S. Erin Batiste, Jim Behrle, Anselm Berrigan, Wo Chan, CAConrad, Mike DeCapite, Cyrus Dunham, Douglas Dunn, Marcella Durand, Tess Dworman, Mel Elberg, Jared Daniel Fagen, Erica Hunt, Lucy Ives, Kamikaze Jones, Wayne Koestenbaum, Shiv Kotecha, Yvonne LeBien, Kyle Carrero Lopez, Brendan Lorber, Airea D. Matthews, Iris McCloughan, Yesenia Montilla, Eileen Myles, Laura Ortman, Sadé Powell, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Sarah Nicole Prickett, Macy Rodman, Bassem Saad, Samita Sinha, Andrew Smyth, Rosie Stockton, Stacy Szymaszek, Edwin Torres, Anh Vo, Anne Waldman, Harron Walker, and many more to come!
The Poetry Project's 49th Annual New Year's Day Marathon will take place in two five-hour periods with an hour break in between. Both sections of the marathon will be ticketed with a limit of 300 tickets per section. Masks will be required while in the Sanctuary. In the Parish Hall, where we will be selling books, food, and beverages, masks will be optional.
Stay tuned for more info on hour-by-hour performers, tarot, tattoos, and other surprise opportunities we’ll be bringing together for the day!