blueprints

178 | lee Briccetti
tion of poetries. The goal was to help audiences experience poetry through
the enthusiasm of poets and to make a bridge back to their own collections
of books, as we had been doing successfully at Poets House for years.
Poets House applied for and received funding from the Lila Wallace–
Reader’s Digest Fund and acted as the organizer for the project. In the vernacular,
we became the “poetry mommy.”
THE PLAN
As I have written in other places, our early mantra was “You can’t create
love. But you can create the conditions for love.” So too for poetry. And
the first condition is always exposure. This is what the PITB program
provided to each participating branch each year for three years:
• at least three public programs for adult patrons
• two after-school poetry writing workshops for young adults (multiple
sessions)
• support for marketing services and publicity
• a “special needs” budget for each site
• assistance in collection development and display
• professional development opportunities for staff
• system-wide training
• assiduous evaluation.
Each site was required to purchase at least $1,000 worth of poetry titles
during the course of a project year. Each branch was also required to aggressively
display poetry books from the collection throughout the year and to
integrate at least one book of poetry into every display presented in the
library. Poets House gathered a one-time “seed collection” of forty selected
titles at the beginning of the program so each branch could create an immediate
poetry presence on shelves and in displays.
In addition, Poets House did the following:
• created a name-capture mechanism, building a poetry mailing list
for each site that grew with each program
• developed support resource materials, tip sheets, project reports,
and evaluation materials
• provided extensive planning assistance to branch sites