Episodes
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Steps
S4 E8 - 24m 42s
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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Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper
S4 E7 - 25m 21s
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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Emperor of Ice Cream, Motive for Metaphor
S4 E6 - 25m 43s
Modernist poet Wallace Stevens balanced his long career as an insurance executive with a thrilling life of the imagination. Actor Murray Bartlett, ice cream maker Gus Rancatore, cognitive scientist Laurie Santos, scholar Al Filreis, poet David Baker, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Bob Rubin, and the 2021 National Student Poets join Elisa New.
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Hill Country
S4 E5 - 25m 21s
God drives down from the mountains behind the wheel of a Jeep, in this poem by Tracy K. Smith, former U.S. poet laureate. Smith illuminates the ambrosial bounty of Texas Hill Country, where she’s joined by country music singer-songwriter Jimmie Dale Gilmore, members of both Christian and Jewish communities, and host Elisa New.
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July in Washington
S4 E4 - 25m 21s
Against the backdrop of 1964 Washington D.C., Robert Lowell wrote this timeless reflection on the contradictions between American idealism and American policy. Journalists Andrea Mitchell and Justin Worland, political commentators David Axelrod and Bill Kristol, scholar Sir Jonathan Bate and psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison join host Elisa New.
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Mushrooms, Weakness and Doubt
S4 E3 - 25m 21s
Poems by Sylvia Plath and Kay Ryan take the peripheral status of the fungal kingdom as an invitation to consider the scientific knowns and unknowns, and cultural significance, of mushrooms. Microbial ecologist Serita Frey, chef Gabrielle Hamilton, plant pathologist Barry Pryor, health advocate Dr. Andrew Weil, writers Maria Popova and Maria Pinto, and journalist Frank Bruni join host Elisa New.
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Six Years Later, Epitaph for a Centaur
S4 E2 - 25m 21s
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.
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Phillis Wheatley: To the University
S4 E1 - 25m 21s
In 1770s Boston, Phillis Wheatley was at the same time enslaved and an international celebrity: a writer who mastered the most persuasive rhetoric of the day to publish enduring arguments about freedom. Inaugural poets Amanda Gorman and Richard Blanco, writer Clint Smith, and scholars Glenda Carpio and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. join host Elisa New to read two of Wheatley’s poems for public occasions.
Extras + Features
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Season 4 Preview
S4 - 30s
Performers, public figures and everyday Americans join host Elisa New to read and discuss unforgettable American poems. The poems in Season 4 take us from colonial Boston to the halls of Congress, from Texas Hill Country to Central Park. Guests range from poets to celebrity chefs, from actors to ice cream makers, from political strategists to preachers and more.
Schedule
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