Access to this video is a benefit for members through
Up Next
Back to Show
Poetry in America
Six Years Later, Epitaph for a Centaur
Season 4
Episode 2
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 artistic director Bryan Doerries, writer Yelena Akhtiorskaya, and scholars Sven Birkerts, Zakhar Ishtov, Jonathan Brent, and Joseph Ellis read two poems by Brodsky: one about love; the other, exile.
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
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.
Unlock with PBS Passport
25:22
Cassandra Wilson, Elisa New & more read Evie Shockley’s “you can say that again, billie.”