This proposed session engages with the aesthetic and political implications of Lorenzo Thomas’s statement to the effect that, “[b]ecause they were all outsiders in an immigrant community, the avant-garde artists became a community. Because those who were African Americans came there to become artists, not to avoid being black, there was a kind of integrated society that did not seem to exist elsewhere” (“Alea’s Children, 576). Whether it was through meeting spaces like Amiri Baraka’s “salons” or Tom Dent’s loft where the Umbra Poets held their weekly workshops, through the poetry readings scene, from Café Les Deux Mégots to Le Métro and finally to the St. Mark’s Church Poetry Project, or through the collaborative initiatives like The Floating Bear edited by Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) and Diane DiPrima, Yugen edited by Jones and his then-wife Hettie, or Umbra Magazine that published black and white poets, the interracial dynamics that the Lower East Side creative environment and performance spaces permitted, allowed for these friendships and collaborations to blossom into cross-fertilizing poetics and political and aesthetic exchanges. In many ways, these initiatives illuminate the trajectory of how Black poets like Baraka, A.B. Spellman, and the Umbra group, important actors in the vibrant liberalism of the Village-Lower East Side artistic and bohemian scenes, were active participants in this “kind of integrated society.” As James Smethurst adds, the downtown scene provided “African American artists [the chance] to hear the work of the various countercultural ‘schools,’ to present their poetry, and to meet like-minded black contemporaries,” (Black Arts, 41). These meetings were instrumental in fostering a spirit of collaboration and poetic interexchange that defined the sixties and seventies. The session proposes to think about and through relationships and collaborations that poets fostered. While Aldon L. Nielsen will speak to how Baraka (Leroi Jones) reconfigured his poetic project as he moved from the Lower East Side to Harlem, Lauri Scheyer will historicize the moments Calvin Hernton and A.B. Spellman will move East to develop several life-changing collaborations and poetic perspectives. giovanni singleton will discuss the aesthetic innovations of N.H. Pritchard as a consequence of his experience on and of the Lower East Side. Finally, Jean-Philippe Marcoux will study the poetic cross-fertilizations between David Henderson, John Harriman or Jackson Mac Low as products of the reading scenes in NYC. The rationale for organizing a session on this topic is to illuminate how all these collaborations and initiatives can be seen as artistic and political emancipatory strategies of resistance against mainstream publishing cultures and institutionalized hegemonic discourses about poetry and poetics, a topic that is often acknowledged but rarely exemplified. This special session proposes to engage with some of these collaborations as they reveal a fuller story of the Lower East Side as a space of artistic exploration, aesthetic and political possibilities, and cross-cultural and interdisciplinary exchanges, a story that Daniel Kane has begun and that each panelist wishes to contribute to. Interweaving literary history and engagement with Black poetics, each panelist seeks to unpack some of the aesthetic innovations as they reveal a broader writing politics that was aligned with the proliferation of Black liberation movements. Black poets like Baraka, Spellman, Henderson, Hernton, and Pritchard all contributed to the Lower East Side’s performative spaces in which multidisciplinary artists from The Living Theatre, the Beats, Black Mountain, and New York School, to name a few, congregated to experiment and engage with forms and subject matters. Each paper wishes to show concrete examples of how these experiments manifested on the page in an effort to create a larger discussion among panelists and with the audience about the continued influence of this seminal moment in Black Literary History. Building on the literary historicization of these movements by James Smethurst, and addressing a significant lacunae in the field of black experimental poetics of the 1960s, each presenter invites reconsiderations of this important phase of innovation and development in Black poetics both as artistic and political forms of resistance and as countercultural assertion of a distinctive Black cultural identity within the ebullient creative spaces of the Lower East Side in the 1960s. Through a diversity of voices across generations and backgrounds, the panel will engage with the following questions: how has the Lower East Side informed and influenced the innovation and refiguration of Black poetics and politics in the 1960s, and vice-versa? How have cross-pollinating artistic experimentations symbolic of the Lower East Side scene helped in shaping a new avenue for the performance and dissemination of Black poetry?