Access to this video is a benefit for members through
Up Next
Back to Show
Poetry in America
The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus
Season 1
Episode 12
Host Elisa New rediscovers the freshness and the still-potent charge of Emma Lazarus’s iconic sonnet alongside singer-songwriter Regina Spektor, activist and founder of the United We Dream Foundation Cristina Jiménez, President of the American Federation of Teachers Randi Weingarten, financier and philanthropist David Rubenstein, and poet Duy Doan.
Support Provided By
Season
Unlock with PBS Passport
24:42
Play hooky with Frank O’Hara’s “Lunch Poems.” Poets and NYC-lovers join host Elisa New.
Unlock with PBS Passport
25:21
Poet Martín Espada worked manufacturing legal pads, and the job is burned into his memory.
Unlock with PBS Passport
25:43
Murray Bartlett, Laurie Santos, and more guests join Elisa New to read Wallace Stevens.
Unlock with PBS Passport
25:21
Drive through West Texas with Tracy K. Smith, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and host Elisa New.
Unlock with PBS Passport
25:21
David Axelrod, Bill Kristol and Andrea Mitchell read Robert Lowell with Elisa New.
Unlock with PBS Passport
25:21
Consider the poetics, and politics, of fungi with poems by Sylvia Plath and Kay Ryan.
Unlock with PBS Passport
25:21
Read the elegiac poetry of Joseph Brodsky, a Cold War Russian exile, with host Elisa New.
Unlock with PBS Passport
25:21
Poems by Wheatley with Amanda Gorman, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Richard Blanco, and more.
Unlock with PBS Passport
25:41
Leslie Jamison, Olivia Gatwood, & more read a sonnet by Millay with host Elisa New.
Unlock with PBS Passport
25:14
Linda Hogan & Alberto Ríos explore their poems with host Elisa New, Jeff Corwin & more.
Unlock with PBS Passport
25:38
Elisa New, Emily Oster, Sharon Olds, & Bernadette Mayer explore poems on motherhood.
Unlock with PBS Passport
25:21
Caroline Kennedy, Tracy K. Smith & more read Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” with Elisa New.