The Poetry Place in Jerusalem is a non-profit literary project working out of a municipal community center, located in the (poetic) narrow streets of the (poetic) labyrinthine neighborhood on the edge of Jerusalem’s (poetic) open-air market, Mahane Yehuda. The Hebrew word for ‘address’ is Ketovet, which is also the name of the diverse band of poets who founded Poetry Place: Shai Dotan, Gilad Meiri, Lyor Shternberg, Dorit Weisman and Ariel Zinder, who have many books to their credit and are the winners of numerous literary prizes. In addition, the group now serves as a cooperative national editor for the Israeli pages of the Poetry International Web, a Dutch Internet project for world poetry in translation (and a sister project of the veteran Rotterdam Poetry Festival), working with English editor, the poet and translator Lisa Katz. http://international.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=5 Poetry Place has not served as a private address, exclusive to the members of…

The Institution of Poetry in the Pop-poetic Era Poetry's Low Demand: Explanations and Solutions Gilad Meiri The lecture was held during the 26TH International Biennial of Poetry in Liege 1. Introduction I have been asked to lecture about models for drawing an audience to poetry-related activities, based on my experience as the director of "Poetry Place" (Makom Le-Shirah). Poetry Place is a literary institution that I established in Jerusalem with the "Ketovet" poets association in 2002. There are two fundamental and central assumptions that are the basis of the models I will present. The first is that poetry is in low demand, and the second is that from 1990-2010, poets and poetry institutions in Israel have sought ways of devising  strategies deriving from popular culture, both in generating the poetry and in the means of production [venue], in order to make poetry accessible to the audience at large. I will…