PEOPLE’S POETRY GATHERING FILM FESTIVAL
PEOPLE’S POETRY GATHERING FILM FESTIVAL
October 24 & 25, 2026, Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue, New York, NY 10003
As part of the Festival, Anthology hosts a weekend of programs featuring films about poetry, including an encore screening of Alystyre Julian’s portrait of Anne Waldman, OUTRIDER (which we premiered in the spring of 2025); Chuck Smith’s FUGS FILM! (which has not been shown in NYC since its premiere at the DOC NYC); Steven Zeitlin and Amanda Dargan’s IN THE MOMENT: WORLD POETRY DUELS AND IMPROVISATIONS; and Roland Legiardi-Laura’s AZUL (1988), a meditation on the legacy of Nicaraguan modernist poetry, shot on the battlefront with the Sandinista forces. Proceeding some of the films is AFTER BASHŌ, a series of animated poems by Bob Holman and Richard Levine. {TICKETS}
Sat, Oct 24 at 6:00pm. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Penny Arcade, Steven Taylor and other participants from the film!
FUGS IN PERSON WITH PENNY ARCADE! / 2025, 84 min, DCP
Formed in late 1964 by Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, alongside drummer Ken Weaver – anarchic East Village beat poets who could barely play their instruments – The Fugs are credited as the first true underground band. Their lo-fi folk music could be challenging and weird but they had a knack for catchy pop songs, such as “Supergirl” and ‘Slum Goddess.” One of the most crucial figures in countercultural history, Sanders founded the Peace Eye bookstore and the arts journal “F*** You: A Magazine of the Arts,” and, among other late-1960s antics, attempted to levitate the Pentagon and staged a funeral for flower power in San Francisco. Chuck Smith’s vital documentary features eye-popping archival footage and interviews with Sanders, Aline & R. Crumb, Lenny Kaye, Penny Arcade, Jeffrey Lewis, and many others, to tell the story of NYC’s original punks.
FILMMAKERS IN PERSON! – Alystyre Julian and Anne Waldman. 2025, 100 min, DCP. With Anne Waldman. Producer: Sarah Riggs; Executive Producer: Martin Scorsese.
Poet/filmmaker Alystyre Julian’s OUTRIDER is a kinetic portal into fast-speaking poet Anne Waldman’s transcendent role as a visionary word-worker, from her “hearthome” in Greenwich Village and The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, and outwards to Big Sur, Morocco, and Mexico. OUTRIDER is a portal to her path of imagination, her vow to poetry and activism, and her vortex of artists/collaborators: Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, Thurston Moore, Meredith Monk, Allen Ginsberg, Laurie Anderson, Douglas Dunn, Eileen Myles, Amiri Baraka, James Brandon Lewis, Cecilia Vicuña, Pat Steir, Ha-Yang Kim, Daniel Carter, Eleni Sikelianos, Bob Holman, Janice Lowe, No Land, Akilah Oliver, Lee Ann Brown, Brenda Coultas, and many others. Guided by ancestors of the Beat generation and poetic kinships with radical female musicians, OUTRIDER channels the ancient, bardic tradition – celebrating the thunderous power of poetry.
Sat, Oct 24 at 8:30 pm. Followed by a Q&A with Alystyre Julian and Anne Waldman!
IN THE MOMENT: WORLD POETRY DUELS AND IMPROVISATIONS
FILMMAKERS IN PERSON! – Steven Zeitlin & Amanda Dargan, Producer/Directors . 2022, 60 min, DCP
IN THE MOMENT features charismatic poets and musicians who are masters of the art of improvisation, dueling with one another and commenting on the meaning of these traditions and of life itself in improvised rhymes. The film introduces viewers to payadores, emboladores, decimistas, band bertsolari poets, as well as freestyle rap. The poets hail from Argentina, Canary Islands, Brazil, Portugal, Italy, Trinidad, the Basque region of Spain, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and the U.S.
Sun, Oct 25 at 5:30. Followed by Q & A with Steve Zeitlin and Amanda Dargan!
FILMMAKER IN PERSON –Producer/editor Joanna Kiernan. By Roland Legiardi-Laura. 1988, 104 min, DCP
AZUL is a documentary about the poetic soul of Nicaragua. Twenty-four poems
interweave with interviews to create a narrative of Nicaragua’s poetry and the
historical contexts and individuals who formed it. With poems from the creator of Modernismo Rubén Darío, to Ernesto Cardenal, Carlos Rigby and Gioconda Belli, to people reciting spontaneously in the street, and soldiers workshopping poems on the frontlines, AZUL reveals a nation alive with the creative spirit and a profound belief in poetry as a crucible for change and expression. Originally filmed during the height of the Contra War, the film has been restored digitally. Director Roland Legiardi-Laura, Co-Producer and Editor Joanna Kiernan.
Sun, Oct 25 at 7:30 pm. Followed by Q & A with Joanna Kiernan!
Richard Levine. 2026, 8 minutes, DCP
Twenty haikus by Bob Holman, written while he was following “A Narrow Path Into the Interior,” the walk that Japan’s National Poet, Matsuo Bashō, took in 1689. The poems are the starting point of this animated collaboration by filmmaker Richard Levine, musician Phillip Johnston, and poet Bob Holman. The poems originally appeared in The New Yorker magazine.
Sat, Oct. 24 preceding “Outrider,” Sun, Oct. 25 preceding both films.
The People’s Poetry Gathering, founded as a biennial event in 1999 by City Lore and Poets House, with the Bowery Poetry Club joining soon after, assembles poets from New York City and beyond to pursue discourse, exchange, and cultural preservation through poetry. In 2026, as the U.S. marks the 250th anniversary of its founding, the Gathering returns to Lower Manhattan for the first time in twenty years, in collaboration with the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage at the Smithsonian Institution. It will feature performances and workshops by an array of artists, including indigenous, folk, youth, and literary poets and musicians, as well as collaborations with iconic venues and restaurants, free writing workshops, and a POEMobile initiative that will visit all five boroughs projecting poems onto walls and buildings alongside live readings, films, and music. Additional support by New York State Council on the Arts with the support of NY Governor and the New York State Legislature.
These programs have been guest-programmed by Ram Devineni and Bob Holman, and are organized by and co-presented with City Lore and the Bowery Poetry Club. Special thanks to Joanna Kiernan and To Be Heard Foundation Inc.; Richard Levine; Alystyre Julian; Chuck Smith; Anne Waldman; and Steve Zeitlin & Sahar Muradi (City Lore).
