Theater video tags: in memoriam

James Longenbach at the James Merrill House

Caption: 

“As I often tell students: What other people call revision, I call writing,” says poet, critic, and professor James Longenbach about writing his books The Lyric Now (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and Forever (Norton, 2021) as a writer-in-residence in this 2021 installment of James Merrill House’s video series Studio 107. Longenbach died at the age of sixty-two on July 29, 2022.

Genre: 

Seamus Heaney on Human Chain

Caption: 

“Now the oil-fired heating boiler comes to life / Abruptly, drowsily, like the timed collapse / Of a sawn-down tree, I imagine them.” In this 2011 PBS NewsHour video, the late Seamus Heaney reads from and speaks about his final collection, Human Chain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010). The Nobel Prize–winning poet died at the age of seventy-four on August 30, 2013.

Genre: 

That Word: In Memoriam Philip Levine

Caption: 

In honor of the seventh anniversary of poet Philip Levine’s passing, Tom Sleigh speaks about their friendship and reads “That Word,” a poem from his latest book, The King’s Touch (Graywolf Press, 2022), dedicated to Levine in this video directed by Ed Robbins. Sleigh says of Levine: “Phil’s intelligence was as brilliantly acerbic as it was heartbreaking.”

Genre: 

Remembering bell hooks

Caption: 

“There’s so many young people, the first time they start to think seriously about class, about sexuality, about gender, about identity, about vulnerability, about spirituality is through her work,” says Princeton University professor Imani Perry about the legacy of bell hooks in this PBS NewsHour video commemorating the influential critic, author, and feminist scholar and activist who died at the age of sixty-nine on December 15, 2021.

Greg Tate: What Is Hip Hop?

Caption: 

“Hip-hop is Ralph Ellison, who once said the blues is like running a razor blade along an open sore.” In this audio recording from the 1996 album Flippin’ the Script: Rap Meets Poetry released by Mouth Almighty Records, author and critic Greg Tate reads his poem “What Is Hip Hop?” The influential journalist and author of Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America (Simon & Schuster, 1992), died at the age of sixty-three on December 7, 2021.

Etel Adnan: Light’s New Measure

Caption: 

“Etel Adnan was trained as an academic philosopher but found her voice as a poet.” Watch this video for “Etel Adnan: Light’s New Measure,” a current exhibition of the artist’s paintings, tapestries, and works on paper at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Adnan died at the age of ninety-six on November 14, 2021.

Genre: 

Pages

Subscribe to in memoriam