ON 12th Street between Avenue A and First Avenue in the East Village, there is an empty lot, a dusty, fenced-in patch next to a school playground. On a recent sunny afternoon, some children were tossing around a baseball there, beneath two wildly flowering cherry blossom trees, oblivious to the history around them.


Though the precise location is lost, this was apparently where Lorenzo Da Ponte, the Venetian opera writer, was once buried. Da Ponte wrote the libretti to Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” “The Marriage of Figaro” and “Cosi Fan Tutte,” among others; he is credited with helping bring Italian opera and literature to America. He died in 1838, at age 89, after a colorful life that, in its way, prefigured the many striving artists who followed. Not that you’d know that now.


“I love that this has no sign of him — so unsentimental,” said Pejk Malinovski, a Danish writer, translator and poet, standing at the fence with a cigarette. Across the street, Mr. Malinovski pointed out another undesignated landmark, an apartment where Allen Ginsberg lived in the 1970s. It was a rough block then, and Ginsberg had a fourth-floor walk-up with a broken buzzer; when friends came by, he would throw his keys down in a sock. The building, at 437 East 12th Street, has a long history as a home for writers.


“It used to be called the poet’s dorm,” Mr. Malinovski said. “There’s still a lot of poets who live there.” The writer and musician Richard Hell is among them.


Mr. Malinovski, 35, a transplant from Denmark by way of London who has lived in New York since 2003, is behind a project that unites Da Ponte, Ginsberg and Mr. Hell, along with other downtown creative lights.


Billed as an East Village poetry walk, the project, “Passing Stranger,” is a site-specific audio tour that guides listeners through the history of the neighborhood’s interconnected writers and shakers, with interviews, archival recordings and recitations of poems. Narrated by the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, with music by John Zorn, it is a literary and geographic keepsake, a portrait of a bohemian community that still resounds.


On April 15, it will officially make its debut with a reading at the Bowery Poetry Club, the last stop on the tour, but the guide is already available as a free MP3 at eastvillagepoetrywalk.org. Listeners can download it and stroll through the tour anytime (or just imagine the sights mentioned from their couches).


The project, supported by the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, was five years and more than 40 drafts in the making, whittled from nearly 100 hours of tape, Mr. Malinovski, a freelance radio producer, said. The idea came to him when he first moved to the city, and lived in the East Village. He read Daniel Kane’s “All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s,” and walked around, envisioning the Beats and the generations of New York School poets who followed. A map began to form, and a natural chronicle.


“A poet like Frank O’Hara mentions the city all the time in his poetry,” he said. “He’s standing on this corner, meeting this other poet; he would write as he walked around town or during lunches or when he rode around in cabs somewhere. For me, it was like a way into the city.”


Catherine Halley, director of digital programs at the Poetry Foundation, said the walk fit with the organization’s aim, to promote poetry to a broader audience. It gives “a local context,” she said, “so that people who don’t necessarily read poems could be exposed to them, because they are interested in place.” In the years it took to produce the East Village walk, the foundation organized two other tours inspired by it, in Chicago and Washington. Both are popular, especially with schoolteachers for their students, Ms. Halley said.


“When you are walking around and you’re listening to a poem being read and you’re looking at the place where it was written or where the poet lived,” she added, “the poem, it enters your body, the rhythm of it, the life of it.”


“Passing Stranger” — the name comes from a Walt Whitman poem — covers a meandering two miles in about 90 minutes. (Anticipating his audience, Mr. Malinovski left a pause midway for a stop at a beer garden.) Mr. Kane, the author and historian, provides commentary. The tour includes familiar neighborhood sounds, like church bells ringing, but not loud enough to overwhelm the soundtrack of the streets; do the walk on a nice day and it all combines into a welcome, lively symphony.


There are scratchy vintage audio and peeks into unexpected places, like a school where the poet Kenneth Koch once taught. At Avenue C, there’s an excerpt of a Galway Kinnell poem, “The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ Into the New World,” and later, a few lines of Jack Kerouac’s series “American Haiku”: “Well here I am, 2 p.m. What day is it?” “In my medicine cabinet, the winter fly has died of old age.”


“Part of the editorial decisions were based on geography,” Mr. Malinovski said. “How long does it take to walk from this place to this place; we have 50 seconds here — what can we fit in?”


The tour starts at the longtime locus of the neighborhood’s poetry scene, St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, where W. H. Auden was once a parishioner and a plaque memorializes Ginsberg. (“I lift my voice aloud, make Mantra of American language now, I here declare the end of War!”)


Of course, many literary hangouts are now restaurants and boutiques, but often a trace of their counterculture incarnations remain. The poet Anne Waldman and her former husband, the writer and publisher Lewis Warsh, visited their old apartment, at 33 St. Marks Place, now the site of a piercing and tattoo parlor, hunting for a time capsule they left behind in the late 1960s: It contained a hit of acid, a Valium, a joint and a poem. (Somehow, it didn’t turn up.)