PrintPoets House, one of the largest public collections of poetry in the United States, has been homeless since the end of 2007. In the past, Poets House was home to over 200 public programs, over 50,000 volumes of poetry, and ongoing workshops and master classes. With the promise of a rent-free location in beautiful Battery Park City for the next 60 years, however, Poets House is now on the brink of a rich rebirth. Zach Dyer chats with Lee Briccetti, the executive director of Poets House, about the history of the House, the new location, and an exciting opportunity for poets taking place this weekend.
What exactly is your role and history with Poets House?
I am the longtime executive director. I have been here for many, many years, and have seen the organization grow from a two-person organization in a home economics room in a high school to an organization that is about to have a world-class, major facility on the banks of the Hudson that will become our permanent home.
I understand the late Stanley Kunitz, a then-professor of the Columbia writing department and an extraordinary poet in his own right, was somehow involved. In what way?
Stanley Kunitz was the founder, along with Elizabeth Kray, who had been the longtime executive director of the Academy of American Poets. She felt there needed to be a place for poetry that was tantamount to the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts—a place people could go to, where they could learn more about poetry and they could have their own practice nurtured. She pulled Stanley Kunitz in as co-founder, and he was so beloved by the community of poets that they made a fantastic team, and they became the organization articulating the mission to a very wide group of poets.
What is the mission of Poets House as it prepares to move into its new locale?
We are a place for poetry that invites everyone into the living tradition of poetry, so that they can explore it with pleasure and understanding. We are a library, a meeting place, a program presenter, that really tries to get people into the world of the varied traditions of poetry, and to document those traditions. ... We are not telling people “this is good, and this is bad,” we’re trying to create a place and an ethos where people can come in and have all the resources at their fingertips to explore the widest expression of the art.
You mentioned Poets House as a library. What makes its collection particularly special?
It is a 50,000-volume poetry collection. It is one of the greatest poetry collections in the country in open stacks, meaning there may be other quite great comprehensive poetry collections in universities, but this is really one of the great ones in the country that is open to anyone, free of charge, so that the idea of people bumping into books—the living and the printed meeting each other— is something that is for everyone, not just for matriculated students.
We have many, many poets and poet practitioners come and use the collection, but one of the things that make it really fun is that it’s open for everyone—so you can see high school students working on a project side-by-side with the U.S. poet laureate.
What does the new space mean for Poets House—besides an incredible view?
This is an extraordinary amount of security for the programs and for the library, and what that means as we are building together—staff, board, a community of people who care—we know that we are building together something that is going to last and speak across generations.
The space will give us room for the library to grow, in one of the most beautiful parts of the city. There are views of the Hudson River in every window of the new library. There is a wonderful program space that will ... allow us to do indoor and outdoor programming, Tanglewood-style, which is excellent for us. We will have a new exhibition space where we can mount exhibitions specifically about the relationship between poetry and the visual arts. ... There will also be a wonderful children’s room that will help youngsters experience poetry. Write it, experience it, read it, have fun with it, have fun with language.
More practically, it is right across the street from where the NY Waterway has just instituted its new ferry terminal, which will bring in about 30,000 people a week from New Jersey. So, really, it is the first time we will not be in a secret location. Poetry will now have a much more public role in our cityscape, so it will be a prominent place with a ground-floor presence. We are reaching out to all our cultural friends in lower Manhattan. The NY Waterway wants to work with us and put poetry on their ferries. They have already wrapped some of their boats with lines of poetry! The programmatic possibilities are pretty much endless.
What opportunities or programs do you offer for students who want to get involved with such a worthy project?
First of all, if anyone is interested in poetry, we have a program coming up over the weekend. Our showcase, which is a display of all the year’s new books of poetry, is one of the great first stops to get a sense of the entire annual production of our field. There is nothing like it anywhere. You walk in, and you see the 2,000 books that have been produced this year, and there is a catalogue, as if it was an art show, and you walk through with the catalogue and really learn about the kinds of poets and presses that are out there. If you are a practitioner, it is a great way to learn what the field looks like...
The event lasts a week and generally we do it in our own space, but because we’re space-less at the moment, we are doing it at a partner library—the Jefferson Market Library—and it opens on Saturday. It’s a great way for people to get a glass of wine and look at some poetry!
If people want to volunteer or intern, there are tons of opportunities; and specifically, when we are moving into the new space, there are going to be lots of opportunities to greet people, learn about the space, give people tours of our incredible, new, green, LEED-certified facility. We will need people to volunteer in the library, and also we’ll need people to interact with our many, many new visitors.