“It’s part of an effort to make Lower Manhattan an arts community,” said David Emil, president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. Mr. Emil brought Poets House programming downtown years ago in his former role as president of the Battery Park City Authority.  “It gives us an anchor in the creative arts,” said Warrie Price, the founder and president of the Battery Conservancy. “Melville lived here, Eugene O’Neill — our landscape has hosted great writers. To have Poets House create a center is in a sense going back to that history.”  Poets House loyalists were attached to the former space, but are also excited about building audiences in the new location and about the stability of a long-term home. “Poets House always felt a little provisional because it always seemed they might lose their lease,” said Edward Hirsch, a poet and the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, which awards fellowships to artists, scientists and scholars. “Now there is the sense that something solid and permanent is there.”  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.”  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.” Ms. Briccetti said the new Poets House, with interiors designed by the architect Louise Braverman, evokes that transparency. (Polshek Partnership designed the building.)  Glass walls surround the entryway — in which a Calder mobile floats — and enclose the second-floor exhibition space. The blocklong second-floor reading room offers views of trees and water and is punctuated by nooks and a quiet reading space — no talking allowed — with photographs on the walls of contemporary poets taken by Lynn Saville.  The center — which expects to achieve LEED gold certification from the United States Green Building Council — features a beechwood floor from a Pennsylvania sustainable forest in the public programs room. It seats 105 and opens onto a courtyard designed by the landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh, which can accommodate additional seating.  The children’s room — named by a donor, Laura Baudo Sillerman, in honor of her friend Constance Laibe Hays, a reporter for The New York Times who died in 2005 — contains old card catalogues with poems in the drawers, and is to feature special programming, beginning in April.  The staircase is wired for sound, so when people pass, a motion sensor might trigger a spoken line from a poet like Robert Frost.  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.”  Mr. Kunitz, who became the United States poet laureate at 95 and died at 100 in 2006, is a huge presence in the new space. The conference room bears his name. His library was donated to Poets House and fills the shelves. His collection of paintings by the Abstract Expressionist painter Philip Guston — many featuring lines from Kunitz poems — hang on the walls.  Poetry has a history in Battery Park City. Poets House has held outdoor poetry readings there. New York Waterway has adorned a handful of its ferries with verse from the poets featured in those readings. On either side of the lily pond in Rockefeller Park, just a few yards south of Poets House’s entrance, poems are engraved on the stones: Seamus Heaney’s “Death of a Naturalist” and Mark Strand’s “Continuous Life.”  In nearby North Cove lines from Whitman and Frank O’Hara are welded into the fencing that surrounds the harbor. 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.)  Some people may never recognize the literary treasure trove in their midst, Mr. Murray added, just as most people walk by St. Patrick’s Cathedral “or use it as a place to light a cigarette or make a phone call.”  But those who find themselves in the vicinity of Poets House will “be right next to this sort of human church,” he added. “There’s a possibility. That’s all you can do is create a possibility.”  A version of this article appears in print on September 25, 2009, on Page C29 of the New York edition with the headline: Transparent New Home For Poetry. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
For nearly 25 years Poets House has been an anchor for poets and poetry lovers. It now opens a spacious new home in Battery Park City.