Why can't poetry be a business? Like music is a business? Like fiction is a business, like art is a business?  Is the antique sanctity of poetry and those who cling to it a silver lining that prevents poets from making a living off their work? This week, YBNY's Peter Milne Greiner sits down with Stephanie Berger and Nicholas Adamski, creators of The First Annual New York Poetry Festival on Governor's Island in July, to talk about unifying NYC's poetry community, bringing poetry into the mainstream, and how to do it by the book. Ambition, inspiration, and entrepreneurship: This is The Poetry Society of New York.

YBNY:  I understand the festival was organized under the auspices of something called the Poetry Society of New York, which you two created as an LLC. One question I've heard again and again in the poetry community is "That didn't exist already? Why not?" Can you talk about how you went about incorporating your idea, and why you think it has taken New York so long to come together in this way? Why you? Why now?

Nick: Should we tell him a true story?

Stephanie: Totally, yeah it's hilarious.

Nick: Stephanie created a reading series called The Poetry Brothel four years ago. Somewhere in there I came on board.  We decided to form an LLC because we didn't want to be a not-for-profit forever.  We decided that maybe we wanted to make some money at some point so we applied to have the name "The Poetry Brothel" and we received a document from the United States government which is in this apartment somewhere that says "it is illegal to call a company a brothel because that is a name that implies lewd or illegal activity" and could also be offensive to certain groups.  So we asked the person at the government office if there was already an LLC called "Poetry Society of New York," they said no, we said "we'll take it." So we decided to use that name as a front for our lewd--

Stephanie: --and illegal--

Nick: --business. We decided to make The Poetry Brothel the featured project of the Poetry Society of New York, but then once we had the name we started applying for different grants and started using the name as the legitimate front, aka our Laundromat, which allowed us to expand outside of only producing The Poetry Brothel.

YBNY: Is that what led you to the idea of organizing the festival? Would the festival have happened if you were allowed to be The Poetry Brothel, LLC? Or is it part of a larger agenda?

Stephanie: We had always talked about having a poetry festival. There was never a point where we decided that were going to become poetry entrepreneurs. That wasn't a cut and dry decision that happened. When the company situation unfolded it was almost because of the logistics of it that we realized that we couldn't just be The Poetry Brothel. We realized that we had to be a company that produced The Poetry Brothel. And then we sort of thought as a company "well, if you only do one thing, like, that sucks." We have all these other ideas that we want do as well. Once the idea of the company became our focus rather than The Poetry Brothel itself, we started to branch out and explore other projects more in-depth.  

YBNY: Did you expect that the poetry festival would become what it did?

Nick: The way the poetry festival happened was Stephanie and I sat down one day and made a list slash outline of all the projects we were working on.  It's something like thirty-seven active projects. The poetry festival was always one of them. It started out as something that we would run with the help of, or the sponsorship of, for example, Poets & Writers, or Poets House, or the Poetry Society of America. We would go in and run it sort of for them, but through them, using their name and all their clout and hopefully their resources, but lo and behold it's not super easy. Getting a meeting with the director of one of those organizations is essentially impossible.  So when the Poetry Society of New York happened we decided that if any young poet in New York wants have lunch and talk about some cool idea we want to be amenable to that. And then when we - through a number of different channels - did an event on Governor's Island two summers ago with our official brothel painter, where he built us one bedroom of a brothel in one of those big apartment buildings and we had a brothel out there for a month but just in one bedroom, and we were walking around looking at this empty island thinking "We should get a fucking - we should get one of these houses." At that point The Poetry Brothel wasn't in a position in which it was necessarily going to get one of those houses because everything on governor's island has to be sort of family friendly, etc., etc., but when we got the Poetry Society of New York name we re-applied and re-asked for stuff, got a house, went out to look at it, and saw that quad, essentially, in front of it and went "Holy shit. We have our venue."

Stephanie: There are tons of venues. Getting the perfect venue, the one that's very inspiring, is hard. A lot of people have a vision for an event and settle on a venue because it's available to them, but we've never operated that way. For us putting together an event is so much about the environment and putting people in a place where they're going to feel comfortable and feel the magic. One of the essential things that fed into making the poetry festival what it is - besides the fact that it was just a very inclusive idea that maybe other people had had but nobody had decided to execute - is that we are a new organization with a for-profit... model? Concept? Non-profit organizations have to plan their fiscal years to the T.  The reason that Poets & Writers, Poetry Society of America, all these organizations that Nicholas mentioned earlier, didn't get on board is because they were like "well, we would've had to know about this two years in advance to participate." That by its very nature makes the things that you produce not current, not contemporary. What Nick and I are trying to accomplish with the Poetry Society of New York is the production of very major events that can remain current and contemporary, and actually bring poetry into the mainstream in a way that allows the poetry to stay true to itself.

YBNY: Would you want - in the future - organizations like Poets & Writers to come on board, given that the festival is annual and they can now plan ahead? Or are you more interested in leaving that whole mechanism behind?

Nick: The Poetry Society of New York has the mission of A: uniting the balkanized poetry world of New York City. There are poets in Brooklyn who will never go to the Upper West Side or Harlem or the Bronx or maybe once in a year to hear a poetry reading. The festival meant to put it all in one space so someone could go to, say, the Nuyorican reading at one and then the KGB reading at one thirty and then something they've never heard of like DrunknSailor at two, Typewriter Girl at two thirty, etc. So  anyway Poets & Writers magazine, Poetry Society of America, Poets House - especially - are part of the New York poetry community.  There's not reason that we would exclude them, of course, but logistically they couldn't participate.  

YBNY: I don't understand. They couldn't even participate? They couldn't send poets? It doesn't cost money to send poets.  Does it?

Nick: I mean we literally went to Poets House - who was the only one that we tried to talk to, honestly, and they definitely had a meeting with us, and they were just like "we can't even throw something together for this."

Stephanie: And who are the other major poetry organizations besides Poets' House? Poetry Society of America, The Academy of American Poets...

Nick: Ninety-Second Street Y and Poets & Writers. That's it. It's four plus the 92^nd Street Y. Those are the pillars.  But then also NYU, Columbia, The New School. When we got in touch with reading series around the city everyone thought it was awesome and wanted to be part of it. For all they knew we were two hippies who were going to put down some blankets in Central Park and call it a poetry festival. When we contacted the Bowery Poetry Club they offered to host our fundraiser and Bob Holman was ecstatic. KGB, a super-respected, established reading series told us they'd be there with bells on. Nuyorican, "Of course we'll be there; we want eighteen microphones!" 

Stephanie: Most major poetry organizations operate on a non-profit basis, which basically means that they cater to an elite portion of society that are into that kind of poetry, and can gain money from people who want to fund that kind of poetry. It's this elite circle that doesn't matter to the majority of the population, but matters a whole lot to people like us. I haven't researched it a ton; about who else is really trying to bring poetry into the mainstream without sacrificing the quality of the work, but basically we're incredibly ambitious and we really like poetry, the good stuff, the stuff we learned in school, but we also think that it could be significant to a larger population. It's been shoved into a corner. 

YBNY: You believe there are more powerful and vital ways of activating poetry and fostering a greater engagement between poems and--

Stephanie: --the world, the rest of the world, and we're about doing that in not-boring ways. We will create books, we will create readings, and we'll also create video journals, we'll do Poetry Brothels, we'll do poetry festivals, we'll find an infinite number of other ways to create places for poetry to exist in society that is not in the expected ways and is not conventional--

Nick: --and is not boring. 

YBNY: Never be boring.

Stephanie: Never be boring. Anyone who has been to a poetry reading anywhere in the world knows exactly what we're talking about. You're like "yes I get to read my poem," you get on stage, and for the rest of the night you're bored. 

Nick: There were people at the festival who were actually said to us, "How dare you have three stages of poetry going on simultaneously." Furious people.

YBNY: I thought one of the most striking aspects of the festival was the simultaneity of readings - its microcosmic showcasing of the poetry of an entire city. One of the most stunning instances of this for me was a poet like Paul Legault reading at the same time as Yusef Komunyakaa.  It was almost as if all of these voices were forging themselves inexorably into a single message or revelation throughout the weekend. I thought the disruption was conceptually very cool. So what are your thoughts about that? I mean obviously it was a logistical thing, but it was a logistical thing that turned into something bigger.

Nick: We didn't really think of it like meta-meta-ly!

Stephanie: We anticipated that there would be a little bleed-over, but we also figured that if you really want to hear one stage, you can go sit right up in front of that stage. And in future years, guess what, we may have four stages - we may have five!

YBNY: Yeah, I was going to say you should keep it that way. It does work. So it was a little bit disruptive and you couldn't really focus on it 100 percent all of the time, but...

Nick Yeah, welcome to New York City. I can't tell you how many times I've gone to a reading and someone was like, "Hey thanks for coming out, I know John Ashbery is reading at the 92^nd Street Y tonight, I'm sure everybody in the city who likes poetry is there, but the ten of us are here, whatever. So for someone to be like "Wow, I don't know exactly how this happened but Yusef Komunyakaa is three hundred feet away from me and there are two hundred people listening to him read but I'm so glad the twenty of you are sitting here listening to me" is the same sentiment, but better in the festival setting.  Also someone complained in an interview that the wind through the leaves was too loud. As if we could...have controlled that.  

YBNY: Here we are in the most idyllic part of New York City doing our favorite thing! Boo hoo!

Stephanie: This is a priceless... element of the whole situation. Somebody, who we shall not name, in an article that came out after the festival, was sort of complaining about how "poetry shouldn't exist in such a public, cacophonous environment, and this was awful and you couldn't really focus on the poetry at hand and OH! The poetry brothel and bla bla bla." The reason we created the Poetry Brothel is because we know that poetry goes over best one-on-one. We know that. And the reason we made the New York Poetry Festival is so that a lot of different people interested in different types of poetry could all come together and hear all of it and maybe learn about other scenes that are going on. Which, yes, entails some compromise, but look what everyone has to gain from it! 

Nick: Basically he said that poetry needs to be intimate and contained and not out in nature where there's loud noises and all this distraction. We read this article and were like "If you had gone inside the Poetry Brothel you would have gotten the most intimate one-on-one poetry experience of your life, but you just didn't.  

YBNY: Not being able to make everyone happy about everything is inevitable.  Can you talk about how you tried?

Nick: One of the central logistical problems we faced with the festival was how to reach the most people at once. Each of the reading series has a curator, and each curator has a point of view, and all of those points of view mashed together equals New York City poetry. The only way to have a New York City poetry festival is to have all of those points of view represented. It's like the most egalitarian thing possible slash if you hire thirty-five people who promote events who host a reading series and know how to manage their three or four or five poets then you can say to them - it's like a pyramid - we'll manage you thirty-five, you manage your five each, and the next thing you know we have a festival with a hundred and sixty poets reading.  

Stephanie: As soon as the buzz started to happen from all of these different series and everyone was hearing about it and strangers were contacting us about the criteria for being eligible to participate... It felt good to be running it from the top because it was as easy as just saying yes to everyone.

YBNY: It's like having a magazine and accepting every submission. Imagine that!

Nick: That's really what it was. And we even had an open-mic, which was pretty well attended.

YBNY: So next year. Plans are underway. What can we expect? 

Nick: Exactly what happened this year except with twelve months of planning instead of twelve weeks.  Next year is going to be about bringing a lot of people from the city to a place where they accidentally hear some poetry that they really like.

Stephanie: I'm very interested in talking to Governor's Island about having the whole island that weekend. So as soon as you get on the ferry there are poets reading, and as soon as you get off the ferry you're on this island and there are sirens everywhere, and there's poetry going on in every direction, completely immersive.

Nick: Like a magic island.

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Stephanie Berger is the author of In The Madame's Hat Box, a recent release from dancing girl press. Her poetry has appeared most recently in H_NGM_N, Coconut, Caper Literary Journal and other journals. She has a poem forthcoming in Bitch Magazine.  Stephanie Berger is the Executive Director of The Poetry Society of New York, producer of The Poetry Brothel and the New York Poetry Festival.  She edits Quartier Rouge and teaches in the English Department at Pace University.

Nicholas Adamski is the Co-Executive Director of The Poetry Society of New York, the group behind the First Annual Poetry Festival of New York on Governor's Island, as well as The Poetry Brothel, and Quartier Rouge, the first ever Video Literary Journal. He is also the author of the chapbook Inside Me a Whale is Taking Shape.

Peter Milne Greiner is a poet and co-creator of DrunknSailor, a Brooklyn-based writers' party and maker of event-specific publications.  His poems and short stories are forthcoming this fall in Fence, Diner Journal, and FAQNP.