For the Artists

When he arrived in Manhattan's East Village in the mid-1970s, Greg Masters pounded rock and roll drums in basement dives, "alternative" spaces, CBGB and Irving Plaza and attended readings and workshops at The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. He co-edited the poetry magazine Mag City from 1977-1985. In 1977-78, along with a crew of poet comrades, he produced Public Access Poetry, a series of readings by "downtown" poets broadcast on a nascent cable station. Preserved on tape and digitized four decades later, the shows are now viewable on the websites of The Poetry Project and Penn Sound. From 1980-83, he edited The Poetry Project Newsletter. Over the past decade, he has published more than a dozen books under his imprint Crony Books, including Collaborations, poems written in the late 70s-early 80s with a dozen other East Village poets; You Among the Coordinates, a collection of stories; At Maureen's, a double journal written with Bernadette Mayer; and four volumes of poetry: What All the Songs Add Up To, It Wasn't Supposed to Be Like This, The Complete Thoughts of Greg Masters and A Million Revolutions.