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Poetry in America
Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper
Season 4
Episode 7
Long before he won the National Book Award, Latinx poet Martín Espada worked after school in a factory making legal pads. Espada, 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.
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24:42
Play hooky with Frank O’Hara’s “Lunch Poems.” Poets and NYC-lovers join host Elisa New.
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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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25:21
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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25:21
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.”