Beginning in February 2005 , Staten Island teens and adults will be doing what Poetry in The Branches was designed for: bumping into poetry and discovering its delights. The pilot year of this program will see Staten Island branches of The New York Public Library hosting six poetry-writing workshops for teens, and, for adults, a series of readings by stellar poets of their own and their favorite poets’ work. On a Spring afternoon or evening, when a trip on the ferry adds an extra note of pleasure to your day, come hear these readings.

Derek Walcott and Glyn Maxwell discuss poetry and cultural politics in the United States and the Caribbean in an annual program honoring the late Katharine Washburn, co-editor of the anthology World Poetry and acclaimed translator.

In this talk, Vijay Seshadri will examine the origins and the scope of Bishop's visionary ambitions, her complicated, paradoxical relationship to the religious traditions that shaped her thought, and, finally, her ability to expose, in small poems and large, the fundamental questions underlying our experience.

A joint initiative with the Poetry Society of America, Branching Out: Poetry for the 21st Century is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Amber Flora Thomas, winner of the 2004 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, will read from her work, along with judge Harryette Mullen, and finalists Dawn Lundy Martin and Gregory Pardlo.

Iraqi poet Fadhil al-Azzawi, South African writer Breyten Breytenbach, and Spanish poet Joan Margarit Consarnau will gather at Poets House to read their work and discuss the role of poetry in the world today.

This reading by established and emerging Canadian poets celebrates the donation of an extensive collection of Canadian poetry to the Poets House library.

Beginning in February 2005 , Staten Island teens and adults will be doing what Poetry in The Branches was designed for: bumping into poetry and discovering its delights. The pilot year of this program will see Staten Island branches of The New York Public Library hosting six poetry-writing workshops for teens, and, for adults, a series of readings by stellar poets of their own and their favorite poets’ work. On a Spring afternoon or evening, when a trip on the ferry adds an extra note of pleasure to your day, come hear these readings.

Come enjoy poetry and wildlife at the Central Park Zoo! Poets House has teamed up with the Wildlife Conservation Society to develop signage using poetry to elucidate the life of the wild and the urgency of conservation. This event celebrates the permanent installation of the signage. It will begin with the Feeding of the Seals and discussion with several of the zoo's naturalists, followed by readings by the poets.

In his talk, Carl Phillips will explore the ways in which Whitman is among the first to stake out forbidden territory (race, masculinity, morality) for American poetry and to find a form that persuasively enacts the poem's content. He will also consider the ways in which Whitman's poems continue to have a contemporary resonance and to illustrate what it has meant and continues to mean, on so many levels, to be American, for better and for worse.

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,