Barbara wrote proposals and handled fiscal for the book fair, designed curriculum for the schools, and was raising a child with multiple disabilities in an artist’s coop on Greenwich Street at West Twelfth. I was living in a studio apartment with my cat on West Tenth Street.
Together we submitted a project to develop audiences for poetry to the National Endowment for the Arts. The proposal was to display small New York State poetry presses at a series of book fairs on piers and by other waterfront areas that permitted such activity. People walking across the Brooklyn Bridge might encounter tables of poetry books by unknown presses and unknown poets. Then browsers would have the opportunity to read the books and hear the poets. We would bring poetry to new audiences by finding audiences on boardwalks, beaches, and piers. We were awarded a seeding grant of two thousand dollars from the NEA to keep us going that first year. Because we were going to hold the fairs outside in public spaces, we would need permits but not have to pay rent for an arena.
The New York State Waterways Project began in the summer of ’79 at the South Street Seaport. Nine months after the New York Book Fair at Martin Luther King, Jr. High School. The presses were eager to show their work more often than the annual New York Book Fair allowed.
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