The series premiere spotlights Emily Dickinson. Host Elisa New, actor Cynthia Nixon, cellist Yo Yo Ma, dancer-choreographer Jill Johnson, and poet Marie Howe explore the challenges of art and audience across time, space, and artistic medium.
Poet Edward Hirsch, host Elisa New, NBA players Shaquille O'Neal, Pau Gasol and Shane Battier, and a group of pick-up basketball players read Hirsch's "Fast Break" and use basketball to understand poetry—and poetry to understand the game of basketball.
Vice President Joe Biden; Inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander; and psychologist Angela Duckworth.
Bono; US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera; the “Hymmnn” from Kaddish; and the anti-war chant “Hum Bom.”
The rise of skyscrapers and the emergence of the modernist poem. Includes architect Frank Gehry; Chinese visionary and real estate developer Zhang Xin; poet Robert Polito; and student poets from around the United States.
President Bill Clinton; pianist and composer Herbie Hancock; poet Sonia Sanchez; and students from the Harlem Children's Zone
Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power; journalist and ethicist David Brooks; and poet, professor, and painter Peter Sacks.
Fashion designer Johnson Hartig; Bergdorf Goodman's Betty Halbreich; shoe designer Stuart Weitzman; and with fashion and poetry students from the New School.
Senator John McCain; playwright and activist Anna Deavere Smith; and poets Reginald Dwayne Betts and Li-Young Lee.
Evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson; poet Robert Hass; environmental photographer Laura McPhee; naturalist Joel Wagner; and children at an Audubon Society summer camp.
Hip hop artist Nas; music executive Steve Stoute; and scholar Salamishah Tillet.
Emma Lazarus's iconic sonnet of immigration. Also includes Regina Spektor; United We Dream Foundation Cristina Jiménez; American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten; philanthropist David Rubenstein; and poet Duy Doan.
The episode explores San Francisco's history from the Gold Rush and early Chinese immigration to the rise of Silicon Valley, through Marilyn Chin's "Urban Love Poem". In this series opener, host Elisa New brings together acclaimed memoirist Maxine Hong Kingston, tech investor Randy Komisar, and four Bay Area residents on a rooftop in Chinatown to discuss the love of a great city.
“The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” Bishop wrote in the poem, "One Art", universally considered one of her greatest. Journalist Katie Couric, media executives Sheryl Sandberg and Yang Lan, singer/songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter, poet Gregory Orr, and others discuss Bishop’s masterpiece on losses, great and small.
This environmental science-themed episode explores Moore’s great poem of marine life, titled "The Fish". Vice President Al Gore, poet Jorie Graham, and scientists from Conservation International dive into Moore’s portrayal of the ocean’s always-changing history, and its future in a warming world.
Series creator Elisa New talks with poet Mark Doty, psychologist Steven Pinker, choreographer Bill T. Jones, design maven Simon Doonan and designer Jonathan Adler about “This Your Home Now,” where a visit to the barber shop sparks a meditation on love, the AIDS crisis, and the satisfactions of getting older.
Stephen Sondheim is widely hailed as the greatest modern American musical theater composer. Series creator Elisa New speaks with Broadway stage actors and writer Adam Gopnik to explore Sondheim’s singular ability to blend lyrics and music, using “Finishing the Hat,” from Sondheim’s Pulitzer Prize-winning musical "Sunday in the Park with George", as their case study.
Former Secretary of State John Kerry, director Julie Taymor, composer Elliot Goldenthal, and writer Yusef Komunyakaa talk about the beauty and horror of war.
Insight into what may or may not lie beneath William Carlos Williams' brief tribute to marital relations; guests include actor John Hodgman, poet Rafael Campo and poet Jane Hirshfield.
Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, playwright Tony Kushner and poets Mark Doty and Marilyn Chin celebrate the work of Walt Whitman.
“The Wound-Dresser,” set in the battlefield infirmaries and operating theaters of 1860s Washington, D.C. Actor David Strathairn, playwright Tony Kushner, composer Matthew Aucoin, opera star Davóne Tines, physician-writers Rafael Campo and Abraham Verghese, and historian Drew Faust join Elisa New to discuss how the trauma of the Civil War shaped American history.
Richard Blanco's poem "Looking for The Gulf Motel" transports readers to 1970s Florida, recalling a Cuban-American family’s vacations on the sparkling sands of Marco Island. Blanco and international superstar Gloria Estefan join Elisa New and a chorus of Cuban American adults in Miami and middle school students in New York City to reflect on family and what it means to call a place home.
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, geologist Daniel Schrag, poet Joshua Bennett, CEO Larry Berger, and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein join host Elisa New to consider Ammons’s window onto the vast workings of the universe.
Billie Holiday’s haunting song “Strange Fruit” winds beneath the unsettling, satiric humor of Evie Shockley’s poem “you can say that again, billie.” Shockley, jazz singer Cassandra Wilson, historian Robin D.G. Kelley, actor LisaGay Hamilton, novelist Beverly Lowry, and radio host Nick Spitzer join Elisa New to discuss the history of racism, violence, and artistic tradition in the American south.
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, author Julia Alvarez, political commentator David Gergen, Frost biographer and poet Jay Parini, poet Rhina Espaillat, and former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith to delve into this classic poem.
