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Poetry in America
Steps
Season 4
Episode 8
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.
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25:21
Poet Martín Espada worked manufacturing legal pads, and the job is burned into his memory.
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25:43
Murray Bartlett, Laurie Santos, and more guests join Elisa New to read Wallace Stevens.
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25:21
Drive through West Texas with Tracy K. Smith, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and host Elisa New.
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David Axelrod, Bill Kristol and Andrea Mitchell read Robert Lowell with Elisa New.
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25:21
Consider the poetics, and politics, of fungi with poems by Sylvia Plath and Kay Ryan.
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25:21
Read the elegiac poetry of Joseph Brodsky, a Cold War Russian exile, with host Elisa New.
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Poems by Wheatley with Amanda Gorman, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Richard Blanco, and more.
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25:41
Leslie Jamison, Olivia Gatwood, & more read a sonnet by Millay with host Elisa New.
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25:14
Linda Hogan & Alberto Ríos explore their poems with host Elisa New, Jeff Corwin & more.
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25:38
Elisa New, Emily Oster, Sharon Olds, & Bernadette Mayer explore poems on motherhood.
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25:21
Caroline Kennedy, Tracy K. Smith & more read Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” with Elisa New.
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25:22
Cassandra Wilson, Elisa New & more read Evie Shockley’s “you can say that again, billie.”