About Mark Perlberg's community of poets

Your sayings, nameless calligraphers, penny metaphysicians, painted on rocks at the lake's edge in colors that shine in rain!

Mark Perlberg wrote poetry whenever and wherever he found time in his eventful life. He also demonstrated a commitment to the art and his fellow poets.

Founders of the Chicago Poetry Center
The Poetry Center in 1974
Founder Paul Carroll and board members Lisel Mueller, Mark Perlberg,
and John Rezek; Guiding Councilors Barry Schechter, Bill Knott,
Paul Hoover, Michael Anania, Bill Hunt, Candance Rackenger, Rich Friedman,
Peter Kostakis, John Rezek, Neil Hackman, Rose Simon, and Maxine Chernoff.

In 1980, Perlberg was elected president of The Poetry Center of Chicago. He served in that role for 14 years. He and the other poets who ran The Center brought significant American and world writers to read their work and engage with Chicago audiences.

Over the years, The Poetry Center hosted many Pulitzer Prize winners and several Nobel Prize winners, including Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott, Saul Bellow and Czeslaw Milosz.

An Allen Ginsberg event at the original Museum of Contemporary Art had people lined up around the block: the reading was delivered twice in the same evening to accommodate the crowd. Another memorable reading was a tribute (reading in Russian and English) to the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova.

The Poetry Center also featured young poets who were not as yet established and set up workshops, thus promoting the reading and writing of poetry in Chicago.

A highly regarded and prize winning Poetry Center program is Hands On Stanzas. Co-sponsored with the Chicago Public School System, the program brings young poets into Chicago classrooms to teach kids of all ages to read and write poetry. At the end of each year, the students' work is produced in an anthology for distribution to its young authors, and their teachers and parents.

Mark Perlberg reading

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