Hour 1 (11am-noon) - The 50th Annual New Year's Day Marathon

Every year on January 1st-for fifty rowdy, enduring, and improbable years-The Poetry Project and its friends, lovers, and co-conspirators have gathered for the New Year's Day Marathon. What began as a reading of thirty-odd poets has grown into a twelve-hour-long spectacle of 150 performances. The New Year's Day Marathon is The Poetry Project's signature event and our calling card, an untameable celebration of the horizon of language, the act of devotion, and the edge of experiment that is avant-garde poetry and performance. A nycthemeral testament to centering the margin, to the weird as social practice, the New Year's Day Marathon is real lived and living proof that poetry is the revelator, the subterranean taste- and troublemaker of the literary arts and downtown cultural scene, and a true accomplice to social change.
The New Year's Day Marathon is a party/afterparty with a mind of its own. It's an uncanny experience that is both a real event and a mutually agreed upon fever-dream-an enormous feat and group effort that also sort of just happens, that reminds us we are happening too. It's a place where like-minded freaks gather, where we go to see and be seen. It is our annual commitment to the belief that if we can do it together then we should do it together; it's where we go to fall in love with poetry, with each other, with a utopia that isn't here yet, with the utopia that's always been here. The Marathon is the chicest, strangest sustainer, and the only way we know how to begin the new year.
It is also The Poetry Project's biggest fundraiser. The money raised at the New Year's Day Marathon supports: over 65 events each year that reach thousands of attendees around the world; a breadth of creative and scholarly publications; 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.
Hour 1, 11am-noon, hosted by Mel Elberg, includes performances by: Claire Chase; Ama Birch; Joshua Garcia; Ivanna Baranova; Marcella Durand; Jenny Romaine; Collier Schorr; David Kirschenbaum; Marcos de la Fuente