We are happy to announce that the Guerilla Poetics Project archives have been acquired by The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. They are part of co-founder Bill Roberts' amazing Bottle of Smoke Press archives.

Guerilla Poetics Project

The Guerilla Poetics Project mission was simple: Returning poetry to the people by subversively putting it into their hands.

GPP operatives covertly smuggled over 50,000 poem broadsides into select books in bookstores and libraries all over the world. The broadsides are still being found today. Look around—a GPP broadside is waiting to be discovered in a book near you!

The Guerilla Poetics Project launched a year before the first iPhone was sold. There was no Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, WeChat, or Snapchat. YouTube and Reddit were less than a year old. Facebook wasn't yet open to the public.

It seems absurd in retrospect that at that time we set out to launch an interactive site to track where little cards were found around the world. But no one told us we couldn't do it, so we made it work somehow. And it still works if you find a Guerilla Poetics Project broadside today.

Imagine what the GPP could be with modern phones! A broadside finder could scan a QR code or barcode, and the find could be logged with a couple of clicks. Or no clicks. The mind boggles.

Someone should get that going. We showed you how to do it old school. Go make it better.