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.
Sharon Olds’s “The Language of the Brag” and Bernadette Mayer’s “The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters” are exuberant, boisterous tributes to motherhood. Both poets join host Elisa New, actor Donna Lynne Champlin, writer Emily Oster, activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, obstetrician Lorna Wilkerson, and co-founders of Our Bodies Ourselves to explore the miracle, and mess, of creating new life.
Two poems, by Linda Hogan and Alberto Ríos, follow wolves, jackrabbits, and other animals across the harsh Great Plains and Sonoran Desert. Both poets join wildlife biologist Jeff Corwin, film director Chris Eyre, Native American scholars Philip Deloria and Stephanie Fitzgerald, and a chorus of students to discuss how the poems call back difficult histories of human migration in the American west.
In 1920s Greenwich Village, Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote Shakespearean sonnets that toppled clichés of love and romance. To probe this unsentimental break-up poetry, host Elisa New speaks with musician Natalia Zukerman, poet Olivia Gatwood, New York Times advice columnist Philip Galanes, writer Leslie Jamison, scholar of Greenwich Village Jeffery Kennedy, and a chorus of National Student Poets.
In 1770s Boston, Phillis Wheatley was at the same time enslaved and an international celebrity: a writer who mastered the most persuasive rhetoric of the day to publish enduring arguments about freedom. Inaugural poets Amanda Gorman and Richard Blanco, writer Clint Smith, and scholars Glenda Carpio and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. join host Elisa New to read two of Wheatley’s poems for public occasions.
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 productions artistic director Bryan Doerries, writer Yelena Akhtiorskaya, and scholars Sven Birkerts, Zakhar Ishov, Jonathan Brent, and Joseph Ellis read two poems by Brodsky: one about love; the other, exile.
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 mushrooms. Microbial ecologist Serita Frey, Chef Gabrielle Hamilton, Plant pathologist Barry Pryor, Health advocate Dr. Andrew Weil, Writers Maria Popova and Maria Pinto, and Journalist Frank Bruni join host Elisa New. 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 mushrooms. Microbial ecologist Serita Frey, Chef Gabrielle Hamilton, Plant pathologist Barry Pryor, Health advocate Dr. Andrew Weil, Writers Maria Popova and Maria Pinto, and Journalist Frank Bruni join host Elisa New.
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 commentators David Axelrod and Bill Kristol, scholar Sir Jonathan Bate, and psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison join host Elisa New.
God drives down from the mountains behind the wheel of a Jeep, in this poem by Tracy K. Smith, former U.S. poet laureate. Smith illuminates the ambrosial bounty of Texas Hill Country, where she’s joined by country music singer-songwriter Jimmie Dale Gilmore, members of both Christian and Jewish communities, and host Elisa New.
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 Laurie Santos, scholar Al Filreis, poet David Baker, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Bob Rubin, and the 2021 National Student Poets join Elisa New.
Long before he won the National Book Award, Martín Espada worked after school in a factory making legal pads. Espada, retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, economists Natasha Sarin, Betsey Stevenson, and Justin Wolfers, historian Jill Lepore, and actor John Turturro join Elisa New to reflect on social mobility, and what connects manual labor with the raw materials of poetry and law.
A portal into 1950s New York City, Frank O’Hara’s “Lunch Poems” have the feel of playing hooky: of roaming from museums to Central Park and sneaking into cinemas. Choreographer Mark Morris, poets Terrance Hayes, Robert Pinsky, Todd Colby, and Eileen Myles, and musical duo Rachael and Vilray join host Elisa New to read “Steps,” O’Hara’s ode to NYC art and dance.
