Friday September 25, 2009, 4:38 pm
Marie Howe, a poet and professor at Sarah Lawrence College, said she planned to bring her students to Poets House. “They should have a huge sign outside: ‘Rest is here. Safety is here. Nourishment is here,’ ” she said. “It’s the water of life, but so rarely do we get to drink from it. It’s the song of the human soul.”

Friday September 25, 2009, 4:38 pm
In the preface of his “Collected Poems,” Stanley Kunitz, a founder of Poets House in 1985, said, “I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through it and see the world.”

Friday September 25, 2009, 4:40 pm
But on a recent afternoon before Poets House had officially opened, the pristine space was missing something. “It needs a human presence,” Mr. Hirsch said. “It’s only a building, and it’s only an organization. It needs the warmth of poetry itself, and it needs the warmth of people who come together in the spirit of poetry.”

Ms. Briccetti said she hoped to animate the space with an expanded roster of programs, including the coming discussion on the psalms by the poet Norman Fischer and the performer Meredith Monk; series on Latino and Polish poetry; and John Felstiner’s seminars, “Can Poetry Save the Earth?”

“The bricks and mortar are beautiful,” Ms. Briccetti said. “But what’s really important is what happens here.”

Friday September 25, 2009, 4:42 pm
And lines from Marianne Moore and Claude McKay are etched at Stuyvesant Plaza. “Poets need a refuge — they need a hideout, a clubhouse,” said the actor Bill Murray, who gave the lead gift to create a catalog for Poetry House and participates in its annual Poetry Walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. (Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is among the poems read aloud.)