In 1975, I began the Poetry Festival at St. Clement’s Church in Clinton on West 46th Street. Also known as Hell’s Kitchen, the area west of the midtown theater district near is where Barbara had staged Noisy City Sam.
Small poetry presses from the book fair - Endymion, Home Planet News, Alice James, Hanging Loose, and Mulch - brought audiences to a weekly series of late night readings. Poets - Sandy Chapin, Ted Berrigan, Rissa Korsun, Enid Dame, Joel Oppenheimer, Bob Holman, Grace Paley, and Richard Davidson - read on stage sets borrowed from productions in St. Clement’s little theater.
At the requests of poets Louis Simpson and Muriel Rukeyser we staged benefit readings in the larger (200 person capacity) theater space on behalf of poets, Kofi Awoonor and Kim Chi Ha. Allen Ginsberg, Ntozake Shange, and Daniel Berrigan joined San Francisco poet Roberto Vargas for a reading to draw attention to the struggles in Nicaragua.
A room was set aside for a poetry library that began when Suzanne Zavrian and Michael Andre contributed a display of magazines from the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines (CCLM).
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