What are Langston's lessons? An examination of the work of Langston Hughes will help you learn more about America. It will help you explore the tough tapestry of race. His work will make you look into the mirror and see yourself. Are you ready? Who was this man who taught us how to dream? The life and work of Langston Hughes echoes the social transformation of America from the 1920s to the early 1960s. How did he put blues and jazz into his words? What was his secret? Come dance with the dreamer and discover how he changed literature.

In 1949 Harvard undergraduate John Ashbery wrote to Kenneth Koch about the poetry of a fellow student, Frank O'Hara: "I think we have a major competitor." Shortly thereafter Ashbery sent Koch a manuscript of O'Hara's poems, which Koch found not very interesting. But he took it with him when he went to France on a Fulbright and, when he read the manuscript again on a train ride through Austria, he was staggered by its dazzling energy. Thus began an inspiring, competitive literary friendship that helped both Koch and O'Hara become two of the greatest American poets of the 20th century.

Join us as we bid a fond farewell to 72 Spring Street, Poets House's home of nearly 20 years, with readings and impromptu toasts by over 20 poets and a host of festivities to commemorate our beloved Soho home and the community of friends that have gathered here. Champagne and poetic delicacies will be served, as we usher in the momentous year that will bring us to our permanent home in Battery Park City.

A multidisciplinary New York School soiree, featuring readings and performances by Kim Gordon, Wayne Koestenbaum, Bernadette Mayer, Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson, Yvonne Rainer and Carolee Schneemann.

Maggie Nelson sheds light on the trailblazing lives and artistry of Barbara Guest, Bernadette Mayer, Joan Mitchell, Eileen Myles and Alice Notley.

Part of Women and the New York School, an historic gathering that celebrates the myriad roles that women writers and artists have played in and around the "New York School" and expands our understanding of the vanguard circle that emerged in the 1940s and thrives in its second and third incarnations to this day.

Funded by the New York Council for the Humanities

Helen Frost, the award-winning author of novels-in-verse for children and young adults, treats us to selections from her books and offers inspirational advice to young writers just starting out.

Give the gift of poetry—to yourself, your family and friends. Our pre-holiday sale offers thousands of books at bargain prices. All books are duplicate copies from our 50,000-volume collection and all proceeds benefit the permanent collection of Poets House.

Poets House Members are offered a head-start, with special Election Day sale hours: Vote first, then peruse our volumes of verse. Poetry is, as Emerson once put it, "a candidate for truth."

Give the gift of poetry—to yourself, your family and friends. Our pre-holiday sale offers thousands of books at bargain prices. All books are duplicate copies from our 50,000-volume collection and all proceeds benefit the permanent collection of Poets House.

In his talk on Federico García Lorca's life and work, Edward Hirsch will explore Lorca's artistic sources, including native Andalusian music and the metaphorical style characteristic of the avant-garde Hispanic literary movement Ultraísmo, the intellectual community in which Lorca became a youthful prodigy, his complicated friendships with Salvador Dali and Luis Buñel, his place in Spanish literary history, his emotional and intellectual crises, and how he came to write what Hirsch considers to be one of the greatest books of poems ever written about New York City,

The greatest iconoclasts don't set out to. Take Emily Dickinson. She just couldn't do some things as others did them. She couldn't seem to manage to get saved despite great pressure from revival-happy Amherst; she couldn't bend her talent to write poems in any way that her time could accept as poems; she couldn't want fame if it meant publishing; she couldn't trade the intensity of her own mind for the busyness beyond her gate.