Since its inception, the Philoctetes Center's poetry program has been actively supported by Eamon Grennan, Edward Hirsch and Marie Ponsot. They have used their experiences and insights as poets to shed light on great poems that have influenced them, in addition to reading some of their own work. With Michael Braziller, the publisher of Persea Books, as moderator, these three major American poets closely explored the lives and poetry of John Donne, Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Czeslaw Milosz, W.B. Yeats and others. This event celebrates the poetry of Grennan, Hirsch, and Ponsot. After an introduction by Mr. Braziller, each poet will read selected works. A wine and cheese reception will follow.

Admission: $25 contribution to support the Philoctetes Center's ongoing poetry series.

Eamon Grennan is the author of seven volumes of poetry, including Still Life with Wateraff (Winner of the 2002 Lenore Marshall Prize), The Quick of It, and Matter of Fact. His volume of translations, Leopardi: Selected Poems, won the PEN prize for poetry in translation, and Oxford recently published his translation (with Rachel Kitzinger) of Oedipus at Colonus. He is also the author of a collection of critical essays, Facing the Music: Irish Poetry in the Twentieth Century. He is Emeritus Professor of English at Vassar College, and currently teaches in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University and New York University.

Edward Hirsch has published seven books of poems: For the Sleepwalkers, Wild Gratitude, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Night Parade, Earthly Measures, On Love, Lay Back the Darkness, and Special Orders. He has also written four prose books, including How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, a national bestseller, and Poets Choice. He edits the series The Writer's World (Trinity University Press). He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and a MacArthur Fellowship. He taught creative writing at the University of Houston for eighteen years and now serves as president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Marie Ponsot, Professor Emerita of Queens College, CUNY, presently teaches at The New School and the Poetry Center of the YMHA. Her awards include the National Book Critics Circle, the Shaughnessy Medal of MLA, and the Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement. This spring, she receives the poetry award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in the fall Knopf will publish her sixth book of poems, Easy.