A poetry slam is a competitive art event in which poets perform spoken word poetry before a live audience and a panel of judges. While formats can vary, slams are often loud and lively, with audience participation, cheering and dramatic delivery. Hip-hop music and urban culture are strong influences, and backgrounds of participants tend to be diverse.
Performance poetry is a broad term, encompassing a variety of styles and genres. In brief, it is poetry that is specifically composed for or during a performance before an audience. During the 1980s, the term came into popular usage to describe poetry written or composed for performance rather than print distribution, mostly open to improvisation.
CBGB was a New York City music club opened in 1973 by Hilly Kristal in Manhattan's East Village. The club was previously a biker bar and before that was a dive bar. The letters CBGB were for Country, Bluegrass, and Blues, Kristal's original vision, yet CBGB soon became a famed venue of punk rock and new wave bands like the Ramones, Television, Patti Smith Group, Blondie, and Talking Heads. From the early 1980s onward, CBGB was known for hardcore punk.
A poetry reading is a public oral recitation or performance of poetry. Reading poetry aloud allows the reader to express their own experience through poetry, changing the poem according to their sensibilities. The reader uses pitch and stress, and pauses become apparent. A poetry reading typically takes place on a small stage in a café or bookstore where multiple poets recite their own work. A more prominent poet may be chosen as the "headliner" of such an event and famous poets may also take the stage at a bigger venue such as an amphitheater or college auditorium.
The Bowery is a street and neighborhood in Lower Manhattan in New York City, United States. The street runs from Chatham Square at Park Row, Worth Street, and Mott Street in the south to Cooper Square at 4th Street in the north. The eponymous neighborhood runs roughly from the Bowery east to Allen Street and First Avenue, and from Canal Street north to Cooper Square/East Fourth Street. The neighborhood roughly overlaps with Little Australia. To the south is Chinatown, to the east are the Lower East Side and the East Village, and to the west are Little Italy and NoHo. It has historically been considered a part of the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Bob Holman is an American poet and poetry activist, most closely identified with the oral tradition, the spoken word, and poetry slam. As a promoter of poetry in many media, Holman has spent the last four decades working variously as an author, editor, publisher, performer, emcee of live events, director of theatrical productions, producer of films and television programs, record label executive, university professor, and archivist. He was described by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in The New Yorker as "the postmodern promoter who has done more to bring poetry to cafes and bars than anyone since Ferlinghetti."
Gary Mex Glazner, is a poet and author. He was the Managing Director of the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City, 2007 to 2010.
Elizabeth Murray was an American painter, printmaker and draughtsman. Her works are in many major public collections, including those of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Wadsworth Atheneum. Murray was known for her use of shaped canvases.
The Nuyorican Poets Cafe is a nonprofit organization in Alphabet City, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It is a bastion of the Nuyorican art movement in New York City, and has become a forum for poetry, music, hip hop, video, visual arts, comedy, and theater. Several events during the PEN World Voices festival are hosted at the cafe.
Michael Thomas Holman is a New York-based artist, writer, filmmaker and musician. He is also an early 1980s downtown scene subculturalist and creator of the Hip Hop music program Graffiti Rock. Holman is a founding member, along with Jean-Michel Basquiat, of the experimental band Gray.
Jeffrey Cyphers Wright is an American lyric poet, writer and publisher. Beginning in 1976, Wright studied with Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery. He also studied with Allen Ginsberg at Brooklyn College and received an MFA in poetry from there.
Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz is an American nonfiction writer and poet.
David Spelman is an American, New York-based, record producer and curator working in recordings, films and live events
New York State is a major center for all types of music. Its diverse community has contributed to introducing and spreading many genres of music, including salsa, jazz, folk, rock and roll, and classical. New York's plethora of music venues and event halls serve as popular markers which have housed many noteworthy artists.
Janet Hamill is an American poet and spoken word artist. Her poem "K-E-R-O-U-A-C" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her fifth collection, titled Body of Water, was nominated for the William Carlos Williams Award by the Poetry Society of America. Her first collection of short fiction, titled Tales from the Eternal Cafe, was named one of the "Best Books of 2014" by Publishers Weekly.
Cheryl Burke, known professionally as Cheryl B, was an American journalist, spoken word poet, performance artist and playwright, associated with the East Village arts scene in New York City. She is best known for her autobiographical book My Awesome Place: The Autobiography of Cheryl B, which was published posthumously and was co-winner, with John Irving's novel In One Person, of the 2013 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Literature.
Paul Pines was a poet, writer and psychotherapist. Also known for founding and programming Jazz at the Lake: the Lake George Jazz Weekend, Pines started the acclaimed The Tin Palace jazz nightclub on New York's Bowery in the East Village.
The Tin Palace was a jazz nightclub on the Bowery in New York's East Village founded by Misha Saradoff and Charlie Burck that opened in 1973 and operated there throughout much of the 1970s.
Rhythm of Structure is a multimedia interdisciplinary project founded in 2003. It features a series of exhibitions, performances, and academic projects that explore the interconnecting structures and process of mathematics and art, and language, as way to advance a movement of mathematical expression across the arts, across creative collaborative communities celebrating the rhythm and patterns of both ideas of the mind and the physical reality of nature.
Diane Marie Burns was an Anishinaabe and Chemehuevi artist, known for her poetry and performance art highlighting Native American experience. After moving to New York City, she become involved with the Lower East Side poetry community, including the Nuyorican Poets Café.
