POETS HOUSE GUIDESTARS

Poets House Celebrates Charles Olson

Sat, 04 Dec 2010 14:03:30 -0500

In celebration of the upcoming 100th anniversary of Charles Olson’s birth, Poets House is currently hosting an exhibit composed of prints of Olson’s poems and a large selection of his books.

Charles Olson was a Herculean figure in mid-century, American poetry. Immense in stature, wide-scoped, dauntless, “and possessed of an alphabet / before the Greeks”, Olson wielded all of the data that fell within his vast reach to architect his poetry. As his essay, “Projective Verse”, explained, his poems proceeded from his breath, becoming an effect of the body. Here collected are a number of rare Olsonic texts; view their typography and understand what it meant to compose by field.

- Joseph Fritsch, Anna Hezel, and Jon Picco

Why I Love Poetry

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 16:41:35 -0400

Ever since the seventh grade when it was demanded that I “take this kiss upon the brow,” I have possessed an undeniable devotion to poetry. You see, writing has always been my medium of choice when it comes to self expression (unlike dance and painting – my other outlets, writing can be done anywhere, anytime). Poetry always served me best because it allowed me to write free of inhibition. Stories demanded plot arcs, climactic revelations, and surprise cliffhanger endings (it was a dream!) all welded by the strength of a hero. Articles demanded exposure, fact, and an authoritative tone that I never seemed to possess. And essays, well, they reveled in the five paragraph format with meticulous, I-read-this-five-times, proofread punctuation.

Poetry freed me of all of this restraint. A poem can have one or one hundred characters, ranging from a forgotten lover to the sound of the leaves in fall. It can be written entirely free of punctuation or even a title if that is what the author decides. A poem about a flower can actually be written in the shape of a flower, using metaphor for the petals and scattering alliteration along the stem. Poetry demands nothing of its writer except creativity.

As a young teen I also used to favor diaries, an adolescent storage space for my secret thoughts (which at that time consisted of a crush on my science partner and my dislike of my Spanish teacher’s shoes). Yet, the company of an over-curious brother and my tendency to misplace things made this a difficult possession. Poetry, with its linguistic freedom that implores the use of metaphor and simile, offered me abstraction. I once wrote an entire poem about a family member, which he accidentally read and never even knew he was its primary subject because I compared him to an apple (thank you, Sylvia Plath). There you have it, poetry = abstraction. Poetry allows me to disguise my writing so that I can write freely, releasing my mind and creativity.

Poetry is not only my confidante, but also my greatest representative, ensuring that I appear graceful, eloquent and well-composed at all times. To give you an example, say one day I get really mad at my friend because she keeps borrowing my clothing without asking and always ruins whatever she borrows, I might want to vent about my anger by writing down what and how I feel. A diary entry might produce something like: “Dear diary, I don’t know why Jessica keeps borrowing my clothes without asking. I have told her a billion times not to borrow my clothing because she NEVER takes care of it. Next time she does it I swear I am going to scream for an hour.” An article might consist of Ten Things Your Friends Do That Really Piss You Off. Both make me appear brash and dramatic, but not poetry. With its offerings of various writing techniques, decorated language and obscurity, poetry manages to keep me sounding eloquent and thoughtful when writing about even the most irritating of subjects. On this same topic of my friend borrowing my clothing, poetry might produce something like: “You snatch away the habitants of my closet with secrecy in your glide, I know when the fabrics have been yours for you decorate them with holes and remnants of last night’s dinner”. I could even express myself through a short haiku: Don’t take my clothing. / You put holes in the fabric. / Is that my sweater?

Poetry is an excellent way to vent and has gotten me through some rough points in my life. From family problems, to tearful goodbyes, to stress at school, stanzas, quatrains, metaphor, have allowed me to gently and thoughtfully express myself and cope in a way that was comfortable, creative and even therapeutic. That is not to say that poetry is reserved only for darker moments. In reverse, poetry is actually one of the ways to record happy memories and to project dreams for the future. I have written countless poems about unforgettable trips I have gone on, happy romances and long lasting friendships, when compiled create an almost literary photo album of my life, that I can always look back on if I want to smile.

-Sofije Brija

A New Season for Poetry

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 11:10:12 -0400

With the end of September rapidly approaching we New Yorkers can feel the oncoming fall blowing in gently (or like a tornado, as the past weeks have shown us). School has started for college students, high schoolers and kindergartners alike. Boots and coats are being showcased in storefronts. Along with the arrival of cold air and crunchy fallen leaves also comes a new calendar of events at Poets House.

Our new schedule includes readings and conversations with Marie Howe, W. S. Merwin and Gerald Stern, as well as many others. These evening events cover topics from “The Art of Losing” to “Radical Poets and Secular Jewish Culture,” from “The Lost Poetry of World War II” to “Poetry for Children.” Poets and poetry lovers are welcome to come to any and all events and we frequently invite our guests to participate with the authors, providing a Socratic feel, rather than a lecture or traditional reading.

We also have a series of open-enrollment six-week seminars to help writers explore their craft in new ways. You’ll have the opportunity to learn such things as finding the deep core of a poem with Neil Shepard and ways to refresh your style with Patricia Spears Jones.

In addition to these events our library is still open as usual with new books coming in every day and the 2010 showcase collection displayed near the main collection. We also have rotating poetry-related art exhibits throughout the library and in our Cheney Chapel floating exhibition space.

-Sophie Bloomfield

Worth Their Salt: Poems Against the Recession

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 08:46:00 -0400

When I deal with poetry, I know what I want. And I’m never disappointed when I get it, since I want what I need and what’s good for me. If I don’t need it, I don’t want it. I can’t speak so boldly outside of literature, where my ambitions, once I decide to express or attain them, undergo trial-and-error for life. Like Kafka’s protagonists, they are barraged by interrogations, accusations, proofs and reproofs that are subject to change and backfire. Unless my desires remain isolated creatures, they’re free to revolt against me, to betray how stale and profitless they are. They’ll never be at peace. I don’t know if I’d have it otherwise. Then again, as I implied, outside of literature—outside of art—I don’t know what I want.

Today more than ever, I’m seeking poems that strike me as true without having to be tried. They must be worth their salt. By that I mean poems embodying the literary virtues of verbal resourcefulness and economy; grounded on a music and intelligence that is alert, poised and resilient. They mustn’t result from brute chance or lethargy, which is also to say that poems relying solely on their good intentions don’t count. Like Yeats’s work according to Auden, the poems must have been “hurt into being.” Don’t give me poetry that wears its heart on its sleeve, but poetry that is “palpable and mute / like a globed fruit” (MacLeish). I don’t want poems to be made fools of; they must be, in Frost’s words, “like [pieces] of ice on a hot stove that ride on their own melting” and run “from delight to wisdom.” Most poems can’t wake me up from the nightmare that’s the US economy, which is all too real—a world that’s too much with me—to be treated as a dream. But if I view the recession as a storm, then I’m bound to find poems that can wait it out with me.

I selected a few works from Poets House to discuss in the coming weeks on Tumblr. I’ll start with modern and contemporary poetry, such as Kay Ryan’s The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (Grove Press, 2010), which was featured in the Showcase opening in July. Ryan’s poems are quick, thin, pure as stones in melody and form; but contain the gravity of a philosophical treatise, and can stab like a shard of wit I wish I’d delivered myself. In the poem “Nothing Ventured,” for example, Ryan unpacks a timeless adage—nothing ventured, nothing gained—and makes it timely and new:

Nothing Ventured

Nothing exists as a block
and cannot be parceled up.
So if nothing’s ventured
it’s not just talk;
it’s the big wager.
Don’t you wonder
how people think
the banks of space
and time don’t matter?
How they’ll drain
the big tanks down to
slime and salamanders
and want thanks?

For the poet, the act of withholding is not only as much of an expense as a blatant act of generosity or speech, but poses a greater risk than the second gesture which is just cheap talk and no “big wager.” How is it possible to ignore what is absent and unfelt when negation—Ryan refers to cleaning up a pollution site or oil spill—often demands more energy than creation? Further, isn’t destruction an inevitable step in the dialectic of artistic creation, and thus deserving of “thanks”?

Deliberate silence is a special element in English prosody, and a form of aesthetic discipline that strong writers strive to perfect. Consider the caesuras in Old English poetry, the volta in a Petrarchan sonnet, the Dickinsonian em-dash and the vigorously logical grids suppressed in modernist masterpieces such as Stein’s Tender Buttons and Joyce’s Ulysses. Ryan draws her poems from the same vein, regarding “the banks of space and time” to be as necessary as solid matter. Her work can be godly without seeming it; and exemplifies making the best of what one has, even if that means starting from zero.

-Sarah Bonifacio

Takin' Care of Business

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:23:00 -0400

Kate Mahoney’s current PH project uses technology to extend the reach of a poet’s words.

When I come into Poets House, I take up a post in the AV room or, as I’ve started to hear it affectionately dubbed, “the cave.” Here I’ve been importing the videos and recordings taken at all the events and readings from this past year and editing them in iMovie. Once I edit any video, I post it online, specifically onto Poets House’s page on Blip TV.

This process has been eye-opening and great for increasing my exposure to video editing strategies (and undoubtedly, to events I sadly missed this year). Truth be told, I have never seriously worked on movie editing programs and don’t edit my own videos, let alone post them online. And although I did take a multimedia class for half a year in high school, this project did initially feel a bit like foreign ground.

On another note, it is also a project that calls for, if not screams for, a tremendously patient individual so I feel well-suited to it in more ways than I initially believed. The amount of time it takes for one video to be completely established on Blip TV is (I would estimate) around an hour and a half. Time must be allowed for the video to be imported into iMovie, edited, exported from iMovie, and then finally uploaded onto Blip.

Needless to say, producing something that others can watch and that is somewhat tangible is rewarding. And to think I’ve had a little hand in bringing Poets House up-to-speed and into the virtual world is exciting.

-Kate Mahoney

My Journey to Poets House

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 17:22:00 -0400

I am convinced we are all on a journey and the lucky ones among us are willing to record and remember our stories from these journeys. My journey is defined in part by my journey to Poets House. It began on a Friday morning last September when I opened The New York Times.

I was holding the morning edition during a post-run breakfast when I stumbled upon the first write-up about the library in its new location in Battery Park City. I devoured the article, musing all the while about how phenomenal it would be not only to spend time at such a place in the greatest city in the world, but also to be able to work there.

Despite clipping and saving that particular article, I put the library out of my immediate thoughts for a few weeks, accepting the truth of my situation at the time. Being at school in Allentown, Pennsylvania and competing in cross-country meets every other weekend were not conducive to spending time getting lost among shelves of poetic works and cases of chapbooks—not to mention the difficult commute which would have been easier had I been living at home.

It would be a few weeks later when I regained footing on my journey to Poets House. I was inspired to investigate the poem “Invictus” largely as a result of the then impending release of the movie of the same name. While falling in love with Henley’s words, I stumbled upon Poets House’s website where I gleefully realized I could intern there. Shortly after, I started pulling things together; revising and updating my resume, drafting a cover letter, and getting in touch with Mike Romanos, the intern coordinator, to set up an interview for a position, all before I left for five months of study abroad in Scotland.

I took the train from my hometown into midtown the first Saturday of my winter break to interview. I remember trudging through the wind-whipping snow along River Terrace, fearing I was going to be late. In the end, perhaps needless to say, all went tremendously well; Mike offered me a position for the summer and I was squared away with an exciting prospect that would make my ultimately sad and difficult leave of Scotland that much more endurable in June.

This journey to Poets House is now a story I enjoy sharing. The sheer serendipity of my reading an article about a poetry library and then landing an internship there is almost too good to believe. And yet it encourages me to reflect on what really was at work to make it jive so smoothly. My gut feeling is that luck was (thankfully) not a major factor. I would pin down the success of this journey to my passion for poetry, my wanting to learn about the world around me, my growing capacity to plan ahead and act on prospects that matter to me and my interaction with today’s technology.

So, in the end, at risk of sounding like a broken record, I say that our journeys truly are about getting places and those critical steps in between, poetic in nature or not. But perhaps the true expression of such journeys is the final key component. Because, really, who can feel, experience, wander, trek, travel, endure, without feeling subsequently and undeniably compelled to ignite that same flame of adventure and intrigue in others?

-Kate Mahoney

On August 15 some of the Poets House staff and Interns took an...

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 11:29:18 -0400

Poetry on the Steps at Central Park Zoo

dive-bombing bird

sleepy polar bear

snow leopard was elusive; poetry wasn't

Mike Romanos, Carlin Wragg & Jean Cornel

On August 15 some of the Poets House staff and Interns took an excursion to the Central Park Zoo to explore the poetry we’ve put up around the animals. Despite the rain we had a great time.

What are some of your favorite poems (or animals!) in Central Park?

-Sophie Bloomfield

Some shots surrounding our first ever Staff and Volunteer Poetry...

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 11:29:09 -0400

Greg, modeling good patron behavior

Greg's snazy face

The writer at work...

Sofije and Kate: pre-reading butterflies

Sofije models our multimedia collection

Jan waxing poetic

our anonymous fans

debriefing and eating after our reading

Some shots surrounding our first ever Staff and Volunteer Poetry Reading, Thursday August 12, 2010!

On August 12th, we held our first (and hopefully annual) intern...

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 11:29:00 -0400

On August 12th, we held our first (and hopefully annual) intern and staff reading. We got to hear personal works as well as everyone’s favorite poetry. Enjoy!

Staff and Interns Surface From the Underground

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 11:28:00 -0400

It is assumed that Poets House has a sort of gravitational pull for those who write poetry. Yet while the patrons wear their poetic lives on their sleeves as they scribble in notebooks and flip through journals, the writing brains of my fellow interns remain undisclosed- well at least they did until last night. Each of the interns and staff gives off a sense of ennui: we all seem to embrace the writer’s detached and questioning relationship with culture and society. Philosophical blips arise during lunchtime conversation about Lady Gaga, and silly literary puns creep into our jokes as we set up for events. After a summer of sensing this strange aura in the Poets House staff room, the interns decided to hold a public reading of the creative work that we each do on our days off from Poets House. We took over Elizabeth Kray Hall and Rebecca, our AV intern, caught us on film as we read our own work and work of our favorite poets. Of course, we still had to set up and clean up…but it was nice to be the stars of a Poets House party for once. Please stay tuned for photos and excerpts from the reading!

-Alyssa Rapp

Showcasing Poets Lost to AIDS

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 12:52:00 -0400

A few weeks ago, the Poets House Showcase season came to a bitter-sweet close. A sense of nostalgia hung in the air like the parting phrase of a musical piece, its chords slowly straining towards quiet. Yet it was only after the poets began to speak that I understood the origins of these somber notes. Dedicated to poets lost to AIDS, the last reading of the series conveyed that the showcase was more than a celebration of new literary feats. Published this year, Persistent Voices: An Anthology of Poets Lost to AIDS (Alyson Books) revisits recent history that affected the New York poetry scene: the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. Yet the reading did not focus on the sickness itself, but highlighted the lives and poetic accomplishments of poets such as Reginald Shepherd, Tim Duglos, Paul Monette and Tory Dent—to name a few . It also gave their friend a chance to muse and to mourn. Star Black, who knew many of the poets in the anthology, prefaced her reading, saying “I find myself missing so many people. I came to New York in 1978. I was here when nobody knew what was going on.” As she read Paul Monette’s work, she shared with the audience that Paul and his partner Rodger both suffered from AIDS, but while Rodger died immediately, Paul lived and wrote for nine more years. As Black told us that Paul, blind, would write as he sat next to Rodger’s grave, she contributed to the depth of lines such as “love needs no eyes”. Mortality and undying love are perhaps the two most popular themes in writing. Yet, knowing that each of the poets in the book so deeply understood the value and fleeting nature of life, the poems contained the uncanny pathos of the odes of Horace. I walked out with Jean, my friend and fellow intern. We found it hard to say anything to each other, both having witnessed something sacred in the minds of those forced to look beyond this life. Finally, Jan broke the silence: “It is just so hard to comprehend how people can suffer so much by wanting to be close to one another.” This tragic irony makes the AIDS epidemic too sublime for twenty-somethings to grasp until we hear the poetry of its witnesses. As they voiced their friends’ words, the readers in Kray Hall at the last showcase reading demonstrated the healing power of language— its ability to both acknowledge loss and mend with beauty.

-Alyssa Rapp

Photo

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 18:07:00 -0400

ingredients +

more ingredients

= Carlin's intern treats

and more intern treats

our flag

Alyssa blogging it..

Carlin and Elizabeth brainstorm.

epic moments

Recharging at the Bridge Walk

Is Poetry Dead?

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 18:40:48 -0400

Is poetry dead? The quickest answer to this question: walk into Poets House, turn right, enter the Showcase room, and apologize for even asking the question. A better answer, though, would acknowledge the fact that poetry might not seem as much of a focus in our world now as it did in past centuries. The issue is not that poetry is slowly dying; to me, poetry has been a continuous exploration of ourselves throughout history, and I doubt that we’ve become uninterested in ourselves. Here’s both a comforting and depressing fact for writers: Emily Dickinson published only seven poems in her lifetime. Given Dickinson’s current reputation as one of poetry’s most recognized voices, that fact might seem surprising, but it’s important to recognize that poetry takes hold slowly over years. As it ages, it is reassessed, responded to, and transformed. As forms of literature go, poetry doesn’t make the headlines too often; I can’t even remember the last time I saw a paparazzi shot of W.S. Merwin. In pop culture, poetry is not so loud spoken. The average person has a basic knowledge of poetry as taught in school: Shakespeare wrote sonnets, Whitman did not; Yeats loved a woman, and Robert Frost loved a good stroll. After school, however, many can simply avoid poetry if they don’t sniff it out. Instead of several hugely famous poets with whom to situate themselves in the world of poetry, there are thousands of poets, poems, words, making small but important dents in the canon of poetry. To me, poetry has always seemed like the most direct way that we deal with ourselves in writing; writing prose for me is a different process, with its own joys and frustrations. With poetry I can isolate a certain moment or mindset and capture it as a single frame in time. I’m not sure people understand what they mean when they say that poetry is dead. Many books of poetry are published each year, so are they referring to the quality of that poetry? Reading poetry is a personal and subjective process, so it would be hard to make such a broad statement about its quality. Poets House itself is the best evidence of my claim, an establishment that continues to answer the question “is poetry dead?” with a quick “no.”

-Greg Nissan

Freehand

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 18:39:19 -0400

In the earliest days of my writing, I remember the giddy excitement of a new journal- the crisp, lined paper; stiff binding; the pleasant heft and solidity of a book I could call my own. It’s been years since I carried a notebook with me; and while I’ve tried time and time again, with marbles and moleskins, legal pads and leather-bound diaries, I can never will myself to use such books as they deserve.

My fingers itch for the decisive click of the computer keyboard. Each time I set myself to a task, the steady clatter of the plastic eggs me on, assuring me that my pace is swift and fluid. When I begin writing a poem with pen and pencil, my hands go stiff and my palm cramps up within minutes. The words appear childish, smudgy and cramped and overly loopy as I scrawl them across the bald, judgemental surface of the paper. What has my writing come to, that I shy away from its most natural form?

In an age where technology advances by the day, it would seem my generation made the last great stand for freehand writing. I graduated from an elementary school system that still treated cursive as a serious and necessary skill. I practiced penmanship for whole class periods so that I could do proper service to the English language. Now, I couldn’t write a full sentence in script if you paid me. The people ten, even five years younger than me, have never even encountered a teacher who demanded an assignment in such an archaic structure. Yet, sadly, this desertion of elaborate penmanship is an American phenomenon. While we churn through a growing vocabulary of lol and brb, Asia and Europe still appear to be producing students with a respect for the art of handwriting and the skills to match.

What is the harm in the loss of freehand? To the everyday person, perhaps nothing. Typing is faster, more efficient, more permanent. With spell check, email, and texting, the human hands have become adept at commiting thoughts to tiny, perfect font that can be sent anywhere at anytime. However, the writing community still mounts a brave defense on behalf of the printed word. My most recent creative writing professor insisted that first drafts always be attempted on hard paper. She told the class that typing allowed for too much detachment from the physical and emotional investment of poetry, and for far too much self editing.

And it’s true; there’s something fundamentally inorganic and cold about watching words fall out in seamless, characterless computer fonts, spreading out in flat, regimented lines in which every word is open to flourescent-back-lit scrutiny. I often find I can get no farther than a paragraph while typing before I jump backwards and begin tweaking, tugging, picking and mending. This is no way to write any draft, save the final one, because it renders our own words a foreign and expressionless entity. Handwriting, dexterity and use of the page, attention to grammer and structure- these are things that are unique to each writer and make each line of poetry an extension of the pen, the hand, the person. We betray our own instincts and our own creative nature when we sucumb to the spell check, the blaring underline of an improper grammatical phrase, the automatic reformating of the paragraph, the capitalization of the first letter of every sentence. The process of poetry is one of release, of letting the mind slip slowly, tentatively into the sea of language where you let your hands guide you to the word you know is true. Freehand allows you to fumble through, make mistakes, space the words as you see fit, and let them come into being in the way that no one else can duplicate. So recently I have forced myself to write my poetry on real paper, feeling the weight of the pen in my hand, its humble, limitless potential, a real tool for a real task. I let my handwriting become part of the art itself- a visceral experience rather than a disengaged electronic one.

-Sarah LeWarn

Continuing the Craft: My Journey through Poetry

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 12:50:00 -0400

Even before I started school, my mother would take me to the library around the corner from my house, where we would sit for hours amidst the card catalogs in the old reading room reciting the poetry of Emily Dickinson out loud. My early understanding of the world around me was shaped by her language and painted in her metaphors. Sunrise became ribbons; snakes became narrow fellows. Though I tried my hand at sonnets, memorized Frost poems, and scribbled rhymes throughout my life (in handwriting I was often reprimanded for), at first I was more excited by the sparkle of a new notebook than the writing itself.

In high school, however, I was fortunate to have an incredible group of English teachers, from fiction writer Christine Schutt to life mentor Julie Whitaker who transformed books from The Odyssey to Crime and Punishment into beautiful worlds and sympathetic slices of life. I would stay up late and procrastinate studying for Physics tests to write poetry, sharing every scrap I wrote with Ms. Whitaker. By the end of senior year I had submitted a personal essay to Red, an anthology edited by Amy Goldwasser and had just completed a novel in poems called Mum’s the Word inspired by my discovery of contemporary poets like Jorie Graham and Anne Carson. My high school allowed me easy access to the Unterberg poetry center at the 92^nd Street Y and a weekend at the Bread Loaf Young Writers Conference.

After I graduated, I was able to pursue poetry in a slightly more intimidating setting—traveling on a whim to St. Petersburg after a Russian lit elective and independent project on Chekhov. After this writing honeymoon, my first months at college brought me back to earth. I was suddenly uncertain of my writing and startled as I found my bearings in a new avant-garde circle of writers at Brown University. Rejected by literary journals after serving as editor for Philomel, my high school’s magazine, was humbling but helpful. Though I struggled, I finally understood that poetry was not a hobby or a talent or a choice…it was my life, at least my perspective on life.

Eventually, I settled in at Brown with writer friends and literature courses, but I missed the New York poetry scene, so I spent some time seeking advice from my favorite teachers from Anne Carson to Mark Doty. Finally, last summer, I found Lee Briccetti, the Executive Director of Poets House, an organization I had never heard of, and a poet I had not known. She was teaching Advanced Poetry at an NYU summer session I had rashly enrolled in after my summer job in Brooklyn fell through. When I found an article about Poets House in which Lee quoted Emily Dickinson, I knew I had happened upon a wonderful match!

Passionate and practical, encouraging and determined, Lee reminded me of my origins in poetry while helping me transition my mentality from a wandering outsider with an aesthetic that did not quite fit in to a poet and part of the world of poetry at large. Lee even imparted some of her wisdom as I tried to found a literary community and publication at Brown, which became The Round Magazine, a magazine for writers at Brown and outside Brown across genre and style. Lee inspired in me the desire not only to nourish my own work, but also to provide a space for students at Brown akin to the home Poets House provides for so many poets and readers in New York.

-Elizabeth Metzger

One Foot in the Door

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 17:01:00 -0400

Interning. Something almost every college and high school student experiences, especially those in the arts. It’s how we get a foot in the door of The Industry, learn what will be expected of us, and begin to hone our professional talents. These “jobs” can range from the easy but mundane (filing payroll receipts seven days a week) to challenging and vitally important (interviewing, transcribing and writing for a magazine)—but they’re almost always valuable and provide much more than good references for our future employers.

Interning at Poets House certainly will help those of us who volunteer in our future career moves, but it also provides something more: we’re given opportunities to learn everything from ALA-standard cataloguing to video editing on programs such as Final Cut Pro to writing copy for event listings throughout various media. And while we might range in age and experience, none of the interns—or staff—at Poets House are lacking in spirit. As coworkers on projects and friends after hours we’ve formed a sort of family quickly.

Between our assignments, patrons, events, literary debates and after-hours adventures we Poets House interns, dubbed “Guide Stars” at the 2010 Bridge Walk (Poets House’s annual Gala), have accumulated plenty of stories to share. And here we’ll be doing just that.

-Sophie Bloomfield