On Tuesday, April 4th, 2023, Poetry in America was thrilled to bring hiphop legend Flavor Flav to Harvard University. The multi-platinum Public Enemy rapper and reality TV star reached …
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At the top of Observation Hill, seven hundred feet above McMurdo Station, Antarctica, stands a wooden cross.
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Filming for Season Four continued this April in and around Austin, Texas. We filmed several Texas natives on Tracy K. Smith’s “Hill Country,” a poem that journeys through the complicated linkage between biblical text and the geography of “Jesus country.” What has been lost in translation (and gained in misprision) between ancient text and modern life?
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roduction for Season 4 of Poetry in America continues on location in the East Village with some exciting guests! On November 8th and 9th, our Host Elisa New and Producer Cathleen O’Connell went down to New York City to interview some exciting guests.
Read MoreOn Friday August 13th, we met up with a local film crew on Cape Cod not for a day of pina coladas, go-karts, sandcastles, lobsters, and waffle cones, but to continue filming season 4! We filmed three guests on Martín Espada’s poem of the invisibility of labor, and the nausea of looking back down the socioeconomic ladder, “Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper.”
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On Tuesday, July 20th, 2021, Poetry in America filmed two roundtable discussions in our Brighton, MA office. Footage from these roundtables will be added to a forthcoming Poetry in America course for high school students and other learners, which will cover American poetry from 1850 to 1945.
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Last week, host Elisa New and producer Cathleen O’Connell travelled down the East Coast to film several guests for Poetry in America Season Four!
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Each year, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers select five of the best and brightest high school poets in the country to serve as youth poetry ambassadors. Poetry In America has been proud to feature the distinguished members of this prestigious program as guest interpreters in our previous seasons. (You can see the National Student Poets of 2016 and 2018 in our “Carl Sandburg – Skyscraper” and “Walt Whitman – Leaves of Grass” episodes.)
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Poetry is evocative, ethereal, emotional, transportive, but right now, poetry for me is a traffic jam on Florida’s Route 1.
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Read below to hear from our Communications Intern Gideon Leek, a senior at Oberlin College. Gideon, an English and Politics major, has been the voice behind many of Poetry …
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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