Over the course of the past 30 years, Poets House has grown to meet the needs of ever-increasing audiences. We have traveled from humble origins in a New York City high school economics classroom, to a one-room loft in SoHo, to our permanent sunlit space overlooking the Hudson in Battery Park City. Our wide-ranging programs attract diverse audiences, and each day our library fills with poets and readers, making discoveries and finding inspiration amidst our 70,000 volumes of poetry. To continue serving the needs of the public, including those who cannot visit our physical space, we are expanding our digital home.
As part of our efforts to engage local, national, and global communities in conversation around poetry, we’ve updated our website. Our new website enables a deep level of content, including library and program materials, making our resources available to people who are unable to visit us on-site. It also allows us to launch new digital initiatives that complement our programs and library.
Some of these new initiatives include: This blog! We plan to bring you news about the organization; behind-the-scenes glimpses of our programs, exhibitions, and library collection; short essays by writers discussing seminal poets, poetry, and issues of importance to poetry; interviews with poets and poetry publishers; and more. As part of our blog debut, we welcome poet Camille Dungy, offering close readings of poems around the theme of (Feeling) At Home in America.
Another exciting initiative is the digitization of rare chapbooks from our special collection, to be added to our website later this fall. These digital facsimiles of chapbooks will assist us in preserving and protecting delicate and out-of-print literary works, while allowing students, writers, and readers to access them from around the world. Each chapbook will be accompanied by original scholarly commentary, historical context, and audio and visual media. Chapbooks by Kathleen Fraser and Bob Kaufman will be among the first to start off this project. We invite you to check back later in the season to discover these additions to our digital realm. Meanwhile, please explore our new website and make yourself at home!