The Bowery Poetry Club is a

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the U ...

poetry performance space founded by

Bob Holman 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 ...

in 2002.Aptowicz, Cristin O'Keefe. (2008). ''Words in Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam.'' Chapter 26: What the Heck is Going on Here; The Bowery Poetry Club Opens (Kinda) for Business. Soft Skull Press, 288. . Located at 308 Bowery, between Bleecker and Houston Streets in

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five Boroughs of New York City, boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the List of co ...

's East Village, the BPC is a popular meeting place for poets and aspiring artists.

Building history

The building was built in the 1850s as a lumber yard. Its last incarnation before becoming the BPC was as a

formica ''Formica'' is a genus of ants of the family Formicidae, commonly known as wood ants, mound ants, thatching ants, and field ants. ''Formica'' is the type genus of the Formicidae, and of the subfamily Formicinae. The type species of genus ''Fo ...

tabletop manufacturer that ran on DC current. Plywood scraps were used to heat the building in a

pot-belly stove A potbelly stove is a cast-iron, coal-burning or wood-burning stove that is cylindrical with a bulge in the middle. Gove PB (editor in chief) (1981). ''Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged''. Springfield ...

. In a 2002 article about the club in ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'', Holman talked about the then-risky choice to open the club on Bowery, which at the time was a "skid row": The Bowery Poetry Club closed for renovations on July 17, 2012 and re-opened in March 2013 as a joint performance venue with Duane Park, which relocated from

TriBeCa Tribeca (), originally written as TriBeCa, is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan in New York City. Its name is a syllabic abbreviation of "Triangle Below Canal Street". The "triangle" (more accurately a quadrilateral) is bounded by Canal Stre ...

. In the process, BPC dropped "Club" from its name, becoming "Bowery Poetry". The venue presents Duane Park's

burlesque A burlesque is a literary, dramatic or musical work intended to cause laughter by caricaturing the manner or spirit of serious works, or by ludicrous treatment of their subjects.

performances Tuesdays through Saturdays, with Bowery Poetry presenting shows on Saturday afternoons, Sundays, and Mondays. Bowery Poetry is operated by Bowery Arts + Science, a non-profit organization founded by Bob Holman, and run by filmmaker and poet Nikhil Melnechuk.

References

Notes

External links

Bowery Poetry Club websiteBowery Arts and Science websitePoems Recorded Live at the Bowery Poetry Club (podcast series)Litkicks article on Brooklyn Poetry Day at the Bowery Poetry ClubAll About Jazz on a Jazz event at the Bowery Poetry ClubDavid Amram on playing jazz with poetry at the Bowery Poetry Club and in the 1950s with Jack Kerouac
{{Authority control Entertainment venues in Manhattan Spoken word Poetry organizations Performance art in New York City

Poetry Club Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in a ...

2002 establishments in New York City