This is a workshop about writing poems from the post September 11th, post Madrid train bombing, post-Charlie Hebdo world. The Muse and the Banshee are both welcomed. We will be looking at both historical and contemporary poems—like those of Andy Young, Cynthia Hogue, Gregory Pardlo, Peter Covino, and Steve Fellner—and considering notions of Gaston Bachelard's "The Poetics of Space" and poem as a place for the imagination to dwell.

How can we create momentum across a series of poems while holding onto the original big idea? A linked sequence creates its own terms for existence, and those terms may be formal, rhetorical, metrical, emotional, or a combination—or something else! This workshop will engage in exercises designed to develop and sustain a serial poem. Possible course texts include readings from Alice Notley, Dawn Lundy Martin, Roland Barthes, and Rickey Laurentiis. Students will emerge from this workshop with a draft of a six-poem sequence.

Beginning with a look at a poem by Sterling Brown, this interactive craft lecture with 2014 Kingsley Tufts Award winner Afaa Michael Weaver will consider the challenges and rewards of using vernacular language, including the resulting identity processes and perceptions of both writer and reader.

Presented as part of the Emerging Poets Fellowship public lecture series, with support from the Jerome Foundation.

Current Radcliffe fellow Renee Gladman, award-winning Guggenheim fellow Ben Lerner, and New York School legend Eileen Myles, all celebrated writers of both poetry and prose, discuss their experiments with and between forms as well as their work in editing and publishing transgenre works.

Part of Other Impulses: Poets Writing Across Genres

Please join soprano Sharon Harms and the musicians of Zentripetal (Lynn Bechtold, violin and Jennifer DeVore, cello) for an afternoon of poetry and music.

Join Charles Waters for a morning of humorous poetry that's off the page and off the wall. We’ll write comical poems together and act them out on stage.

Charles Waters is a children's poet, actor and educator who has performed in schools and universities across the country. His work has appeared in various textbooks and anthologies including National Geographic.

Stretch and surprise your one-of-a-kind mind in this writing workshop for middle-schoolers. We'll play with magic word tickets, zany prompts, dares and double-dares, and ripped-paged writing experiments.

The author of Leap Write In! (2013), Rip the Page! (2010), and forthcoming in September, Write Back Soon! Adventures in Letter Writing, Karen Benke is a creative writing coach for kids and kids-at-heart and a California Poet in the Schools.

Use your imagination to design and build an interstellar creation - a dwelling for alien life forms, a colony for a distant planet, a spaceship that can survive asteroid impact - it's all up to you. We'll get inspired by poems about outer space and write poems about worlds beyond our own.

ArchForKids provides young people with hands-on, minds-on projects grounded in architecture and design

Recommended for children ages 6 and above plus their caretakers

In celebration of Valentine’s Day, Poets House presents Albert Lamorisse’s timeless children’s film classic The Red Balloon. Afterward, children will make their own floating valentines in the form of hot-air balloon mobiles.

Join our hosts, spoken word artist Mahogany Browne and Brooklyn Poet Laureate Tina Chang, and students from Third Street Music School Settlement to celebrate spring in the new Winter Garden, Brookfield Place’s spectacular glass atrium with views of the new World Trade Center and the Hudson River. Performances include poetry by local schoolchildren, songs from classic New York City musicals and Pete Seeger, as well as percussion and original compositions by Third Street students.