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 The Poetry Society of New York 116 Avenue C, #17 New York, NY 10009
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Dear Friends,
Eight years ago we created The Poetry Society of New York and its flagship series, The Poetry Brothel, with the goal of reinvigorating the very idea of a poetry reading. Part salon, part masquerade, part intimate performance-for-one, the brothel immediately took hold in NYC, and has expanded to numerous cities across the country and the world. In the years since, The Poetry Society of New York has grown and expanded into a multi-faceted non-profit organization.
This December we are holding our first ever membership drive. Becoming a member of The Poetry Society of New York ensures that the voice of New York and the voices of her poets remain strong and vibrant and heard for the next eight years and beyond.
Below you’ll find an in-depth description of our goals and activities to date, as well as an outline of our plans for 2016 and information about membership. We are particularly excited to welcome Natalie Eilbert and Dolan Morgan to our staff and to announce our merger with The Atlas Review in 2016, the details of which you will also find below.
We can’t thank you enough for your time, your energy, and your commitment
Gratefully yours,
Stephanie Berger, Nicholas Adamski, & B. Carter Edwards The Poetry Society of New York, Inc.
Our JourneyWhen we created The Poetry Brothel eight years ago, our goal was to present poetry to audiences in a new way. We soon discovered that that mission also had the power to bring new audiences to poetry. A few years later our mission expanded and we set out to unite the disparate poetry communities of the largest city in the United States with The New York City Poetry Festival, which in just five years has become one of the largest annual gatherings of poets in the world. Last summer The Typewriter Project was installed as an NYC Parks Department interactive art installation in Tompkins Square Park, where it offered thousands of the New Yorkers the unique opportunity to sit down at a vintage typewriter and add a few lines to possibly the longest collaborative poem ever written.
The Poetry Society of New York has developed over the years into a dynamic non-profit organization with the mission of revitalizing poetry communities and expanding the role of poetry within our culture. This fall we are thrilled to announce that a goal we have dreamt of since we started down this path has finally come to fruition. It is with great joy, pride, and certainly bright hope for our future endeavors that we announce that The Poetry Society of New York was officially granted tax-exempt charity status by the IRS. With the doors to brand new funding opportunities swung wide open, we are more eager than ever to continue with the vital work of rejuvenating poetry and redefining its position in the culture-at-large.
With this ever-expanding purpose in mind, we are excited to launch our first annual  membership drive this December. By becoming a member of The Poetry Society of New York, you are making a tax-deductible contribution to ensure that the work of developing a culturally celebrated poetry community for the new generation gets done. Members of The Poetry Society of New York will play an important role in the development of our programs, and they will also gain access to some cool member benefits!
Here at The Poetry Society of New York we feel a unique ability to address the challenges and opportunities dotting the new and constantly shifting poetry landscape of today. Poetry has been a part of the human experience since the dawn of language; it has evolved and adapted to fill the specific poetry-shaped hole that has existed in every place where humans have ever gathered. With the persistent forward march of exponentially growing technological wonders, we feel that it is poetry that grounds us, that returns us to that which connected our ancestors, both to each other and to us. It’s not that poetry is dying or being lost, as is so often stated; it’s that our need for it is growing larger and more vital every day. At The Poetry Society of New York, we are committed to stoking this fire and fanning these flames--to building the brightest and most vibrant vehicles possible for poetic work.
We are proud of all the projects that we’ve started and partnerships we’ve forged over the last eight years, but we are simply overjoyed to welcome Natalie Eilbert (VP of Publishing) and Dolan Morgan (VP of Education) to The Poetry Society of New York family in 2016, along with their groundbreaking project, The Atlas Review. Natalie founded The Atlas Review in 2012 as a way to combat the institutional weight of the literary community. A biannual magazine, chapbook press, and monthly reading series, all Atlas submissions are vetted anonymously by a culturally diverse editorial board, allowing the work to stand above names, credentials, and entrenched cultural biases.
The Atlas Review has been one of the greatest resources serving the poetry community of New York City over the past several years. The Poetry Society of New York’s decision to merge with Atlas stemmed from our desire to maintain a healthy, autonomous, and progressive poetry community. An unbiased publishing imprint in which the community can publish is an essential elements of a thriving literary community. Many of our programs focus on opening up the poetry community to bring in new audiences, but we cannot welcome new audiences without also maintaining the health of the community itself. We want to make sure that The Atlas Review will not only continue to serve the literary community for years to come, but that it will grow to set a new precedent in publishing that leaves a lasting impact upon the literary landscape of the city.
Friends, this is the work of our lives. By becoming a member of The Poetry Society of New York you will help ensure that this work continues to get done — that the problems will be considered deeply and the opportunities will be seized and explored in joy and exaltation! Every day we find new allies with like minds and congruent hearts. We are gathering a fresh congregation. We want you here with us. Say you'll join us. Say you want this too.
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