In celebration of National Poetry Month, 16th Street will feature at least one poem every day (except Saturday) throughout the month of April. Some of these poems are well-known and beloved artistic testaments to Jewish experience. Others are more obscure literary treasures that were discovered in the partners’ collections. These poems have been living in draft books and journals, in the published pages of forgotten literary magazines, in letters to loved ones and in the loose sheets of human history, stuck in folders between newspaper clippings, secured to the inside of travel journals, carried in wallets, written on postcards, preserved as souvenirs of personal experience. They demand our attention to their beauty, to their truth, and, perhaps most of all, to the rich views they present of their time, their place and their poet. Artifacts of individual experience are the lifeblood of the partners’ collections. It is our pleasure and responsibility to present these poems to you.

In one of the collections we searched, a poet pasted an article about poetry onto the first page of his journal and underlined the sentences that explained: The poets’ business is not with his present time, but with a future one. We owe thanks to the archivists, librarians, staff-people and researchers whose hard work will allow all of us in “the future time” to inhabit these poems and their worlds—our legacy.