Blog Post A Statement from Elisa New, Founder & Director of Poetry in America by Caitlin Ballotta Rajagopalan
Episode Fast Break Join poet Edward Hirsch, host Elisa New, NBA players Shaquille O’Neal, Pau Gasol, and Shane Battier, and a group of pick-up basketball players as they read Hirsch’s “Fast Break”…
Episode The Emperor of Ice-Cream, Motive for Metaphor Modernist poet Wallace Stevens balanced his long career as an insurance executive with a thrilling life of the imagination. Actor Murray Bartlett, ice cream maker Gus Rancatore, cognitive scientist…
Episode Finishing the Hat In this musical theater episode, Broadway stars Raúl Esparza, Melissa Errico, Donna Lynne Champlin, Kerry O’Malley, Andrew Arrow, and writer Adam Gopnik contemplate Stephen Sondheim’s singular ability to blend…
Blog Post Poetry in America Comes to Texas by Gideon Leek 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…
Episode Cascadilla Falls Picking up a hand-sized stone near a rushing waterfall, the speaker of A.R. Ammons’s poem “Cascadilla Falls” is catapulted into the cosmos. Planetary scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton, composer DJ Spooky,…
Educational Program POETRY IN AMERICA FOR HIGH SCHOOLS Poetry in America courses for K-12 students combine the flexibility of distance learning with a rigorous academic experience--all within a framework that supports and empowers local learning communities.
Episode Mushrooms, Weakness and Doubt Poems by Sylvia Plath and Kay Ryan take the peripheral status of the fungal kingdom as an invitation to consider the scientific knowns and unknowns, and cultural significance, of…
Episode Urban Love Poem Join poet Marilyn Chin, memoirist Maxine Hong Kingston, investor Randy Komisar, and Bay Area residents to discuss Chin’s love poem to San Francisco.