Whose Words These Are
Our series on poetry in our time: where does it come from? and where is it going?
Harold Bloom: On the Playing Field of Poetry
Harold Bloom, in conversation about his famous Anxiety of Influence among poets, says it’s “no different at all” from what Mickey Mantle experienced playing in Joe DiMaggio’s Yankee centerfield — a mix of love (never without ambivalence) and then robust self-investment…
Anna West: Poetry That’s “Louder than a Bomb”
Poet and teacher Anna West is showing us how performance can be a bridge between high school students and poetry.
Whose Words… (36) Alex Charalambides: “Look at Me!”
Slam poet Alex Charalambides performs and discusses his work, leading up to the Massachusetts Poetry Festival.
Whose Words These Are: January O’Neil’s Underlife
January O'Neil's poetry is about "everywoman" themes: parents, children, food, sex, femaleness and race.
C. D. Wright in Triumph: One With Others
C. D. Wright, poetry's offbeat oracle of the Arkansas Ozarks, is reading from her semi-documentary history of a small-town's civil rights trial.
Whose Words These Are: Christian Wiman’s “Wound of Being”
Christian Wiman didn’t plan it this way but his poetry is now entwined with his grave illness and his engagement with God and faith.
Lydia Davis: Miniatures from a Mind on Fire
Lydia Davis writes the shortest, most shrewdly honed and poetic stories in the language -- portraits of a modern mind in overdrive.
Rainer Maria Rilke for Beginners: Whose Words These Are (31)
Rainer Maria Rilke resurfaces in conversation with translator Damion Searls as a poet, like Walt Whitman, for all time and all readers.
C. K. Williams on Whitman’s Music: Whose Words These Are (30)
C. K. Williams, a much decorated poet himself, explains Walt Whitman anew to himself: a magical musical gift transformed Walt in mid-life.
Whose Words These Are (29): the Haunting of Peter Balakian
Peter Balakian, poet and historian of the Armenian genocide in Turkey in 1915, goes back to ancient Ur, and forward to 9.11 New York, in his new long lyric on catastrophe: "Ziggurat."
