Blog Post Welcome to the West Blog Post by Gideon Leek On April 13th, 2022, Arizona PBS presented a celebration of National Poetry Month, spotlighting the Arizona State University faculty who appeared in our third season.
Episode July in Washington Against the backdrop of 1964 Washington D.C., Robert Lowell wrote this timeless reflection on the contradictions between American idealism and American policy. Journalists Andrea Mitchell and Justin Worland, political…
Episode Mending Wall Do good fences really make good neighbors? Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” asks surprising questions about the role of walls in civil society. Host Elisa New gathers Ambassador Caroline Kennedy,…
FOR UNDERGRADUATE & GRADUATE CREDIT Led by Harvard Professor Elisa New, the Poetry in America course series chronicles the history of American poetry from the Puritans to the present day. Semester-long for-credit and non-credit…
Episode You and I Are Disappearing Yusef Komunyakaa, Senator John Kerry, director Julie Taymor, composer Elliot Goldenthal, and Vietnam War veterans discuss the awful mix of beauty and horror in war.
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,…
Episode Six Years Later, Epitaph for a Centaur Russian-born poet Joseph Brodsky wrote about the centaur as a Cold War self-portrait: a divided global refugee, created by a geopolitics of shifting borders and cultures. Theater of War…
Episode Musée des Beaux Arts Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, journalist and ethicist David Brooks, and poet, professor, and painter Peter Sacks join Elisa New to ponder W.H. Auden's World War II-era…