During the first two weeks of May, the Poetry in America team hit the road, filming classrooms at Greenwich Country Day School and Success Academy Charter Schools. The project? A new educational series on the Poetry of Art, Sport, and Play designed to help teachers and their students explore the intersections of poetry and other kinds of creativity– whether artistic or athletic– and to read with an eye toward fostering play and fun.
Read More
Poetry in America believes that anyone can have a conversation about a poem. Here are some of the distinguished guests who have spoken with us so far.
Read More
Last month, the Poetry in America team headed to Washington DC for one of our most exciting conversations yet: a discussion with Vice President Joe Biden on Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays.”
What would the Vice President have to say about the father/son relationship in Hayden’s poem?
When we began filming the core segments for our Modernism course, the production team knew that we wanted to move beyond the one-note aesthetic of previous edX Poetry in America modules. We wanted to marry our visual approach to the mold-breaking spirit of Modernist poets themselves. Because the structure of the videos themselves wasn’t something we could experiment with, we turned to production design to explore the individual tone of each week.
Read More
UNC Soccer has an incredible history of winning– 22 NCAA championships over the last 36 years. While filming practice last month, we got to witness first-hand the speed, strength, and grit of these champions, followed by a discussed of Coleman Barks’ “Glad” with the team, its legendary coach Anson Dorrance, and Macarthur Genius Angela Duckworth. How would a championship team respond to a poem in which the speaker’s team loses ten-zip?
Read More