All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s

4. The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church

4 The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church St. Mark’s Church and the “Political” Avant-Garde Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch governor of what was then known as New Amsterdam , founded St. Mark’s Church, officially called St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie. The original chapel was built in 1660. Stuyvesant’s land holdings extended from what is now Broadway to the East River and Fifth Street to Seventeenth Street. This property was known as Stuyvesant’s “Bouwerie,” derived from the Dutch word meaning “cultivated farm” or “gentleman’s estate.”1 After the original chapel deteriorated, the present structure was built on the same site in 1799. As the Lower East Side began to attract large numbers of European immigrants in the first half of the twentieth century, and as artists and writers began the slow migration eastward from the West Village in the 1950s, the church became known as an iconoclastic parish that valued its artistic constituency . Artists, dancers, and poets including W.H. Auden (who lived on St. Mark’s Place near First Avenue) were members of the church, and the administration developed a number of professional artistic programs designed to engage the interest of local young artists. Even in the church’s role in the relatively liberal Episcopalian establishment, St. Mark’s was seen as unorthodox , particularly when Michael Allen became pastor in 1959. To Auden’s chagrin , under Allen’s leadership St. Mark’s Church abandoned the traditional 123 Latinate Book of Common Prayer in favor of an English-language liturgy. Auden at first tried to tolerate this change, and he spent some time helping Allen with the new wording of the services. However, Auden “soon came to hate the change, and began to declare that the church should instead go back to Latin. . . . He himself ceased going to St. Mark’s, and began to attend a Greek Orthodox church a few blocks away.”2 Allen also brought in a relatively radical perspective on the role that artists could play in the church; according to church administrator Steve Facey, “Michael Allen understood prophetically in the early 1960s the cultural and political ferment that we were going through. He opened the door up to artists, particularly to the poets who were being closed out of Le Metro coffee shop, and the reason he opened up the place to artists was because he felt they were among the few people in society that were really doing theology. When he was drafting me to be the administrator , he wanted to create a climate that would really foster the development of these arts projects.”3 The social environment of the Lower East Side, particularly from 1966 to 1968, paralleled and influenced the radical climate that Facey refers to. “Thousands of newcomers—mostly white, middle-class, well-educated men and women in their late teens and twenties—descended on the neighborhood, transforming unrenovated tenement rooms into ‘pads’ for drug parties and ‘love-ins.’ During the months of May and June 1967, it was estimated that two thousand hippies moved into the tenements adjacent to Tompkins Square Park.”4 New publications arrived to document the changes. The East Village Other, a countercultural weekly that covered the neighborhood’s political and artistic renaissance and regularly attacked church, military, police, and governmental icons representative of the “Establishment,” began publication in October 1965. Geared mostly to the newly arriving, predominantly white hippie subculture, the East Village Other included articles by armed revolutionaries , idealized drug dealers, and poets. Artistic production on the Lower East Side expanded beyond literature, jazz, and the visual arts. New music, including acid rock and the dronein fluenced sounds of the Velvet Underground, became part of the neighborhood ’s soundtrack.5 Pop artist Andy Warhol rented the Polish National Social Hall at 23 St. Mark’s Place and transformed it into the Electric Circus. At the Electric Circus, Warhol debuted the multimedia Plastic Exploding Inevitable , where poet Gerard Malanga and “superstar” Edie Sedgwick danced on stage to the music of the Velvet Underground as psychedelic light shows played throughout the space. In early 1968, Bill Graham opened the Fillmore East, a performance space on Second Avenue where musicians including Janis Joplin, the Who, the Kinks, the Grateful Dead, and Jefferson Airplane could all be heard.6 As a result of all this activity, the neighborhood’s makeup T H E P O E T R Y P R O J E C T A T S T . M A...