Poets House

Poets House will preserve analog and digital content documenting the nation’s poetic activity over the past 80 years. The archival materials include Poets House’s own program history, historical recordings from live events at the Nuyorican Poets Café, a New York venue for slam and performance poetry; radio broadcasts of poets reading their works from the 1940s and 1950s and recordings of other poetry venues from the 1990s and early 2000s. Project staff will repair and digitize video and audio recordings currently housed on aging hard drives and digitize hundreds of analog recordings. The museum will index and cross-reference the materials with the rest of its media collection and add them to its digital catalog. The project will support long-term preservation, while providing insights into poetry traditions, aesthetics, and contemporary poetry collections for poets, scholars, and the public.