If you happen to find yourself in the Battery Park City neighborhood in New York — especially if you’re with a child (or more) — you might want to drop in to the new Poets House* to show them something they’ve never seen before: typewriters. These ones in particular were once owned by the late poet laureate Stanley Kunitz.
You’ll see new things, too (Philip Guston works, for one), about which more in a moment.
The two typewriters sit in the children’s room, and Lee Briccetti, the executive director, tells me that kids love them — along with the old card catlogues they can open and shut, finding poems in the drawers.
Those are just a few of the touches at the new Poets House, which has been around since 1985, mainly in a Soho loft. The opening of its beautiful building in Battery Park City in New York last weekend, heralded the other day in The New York Times, could well be a transforming event.
One of the things I love about the group is that, despite its flashy, elegant building, the first image on its home page is of its stacks (above) — they’re what counts. Poets House has some 50,000 volumes of poetry, counting books, chapbooks, journals, reading tapes, CDs and so on (all donated!). It’s open access, to all — you can roam. And though that picture doesn’t show them, there are comfortable couches and chairs on the right where you can sit and read poetry.
Another thing that picture doesn’t show is those Guston paintings and drawings.
They went straight from Guston to Kunitz, who co-founded Poets House with Elizabeth Kray — gifts, I recall, but am not sure. You can see them hanging on the walls near the reading area. In the quiet reading room, you’ll find wonderful photographic portraits of contemporary poets. And there’s that silvery Calder mobile hanging near the entrance, on loan from the Calder Foundation.
Another thing not in the picture is an oval gallery that will be home to archival exhibits. On view now are a sampling of rare first editions and well-thumbed reading copies, dated from 1927 through 2007. And there are books, programs and emphemera that belonged to Kunitz — his personal address book, a 90th birthday card hand-drawn by poet Sharon Olds, and an engagement book opened to March 7, 1968 for a dinner the Kunitzes had with Lionel and Diana Trilling, Saul Steinberg and Irving Howe, among them.
Admittedly, I am partial to Poets House — but if you’re in the neighborhood… If it’s a lovely day, so much the better, because it’s right across River Terrace from Rockefeller park.
At a dinner I attended a week before the opening, poet Robert Pinsky said, “God bless the caretakers; Poets House is a caretaker.” Amen.
Photo Credit: Jon Denham, Courtesy of Poets House
*Disclosure: I consult to a foundation that supports Poets House.