“What makes the engine go? Desire, desire, desire.” Stanley Kunitz, who died in 2006, is seen here at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in 2000 reading “Touch Me.”

“How nice it is to disappear, float into a mist.” Musician and poet Lou Reed died on Sunday at the age of seventy-one. In this video, he recites the haunting and timely lyrics to “Vanishing Act.”

Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, died on August 30, 2013. This video features a compilation of excerpts from the many occasions the celebrated poet recited his popular poem, “Digging.”

“Hubert Selby was the underdog and the voice for the...downtrodden, and was marginalized because he spoke up for the little guy,” says Henry Rollins. “But you see the great humanity and the warmth and richness that he brought to things.” The author of nine novels who died in 2004 is celebrated by two of his greatest champions, Rollins and Amiri Baraka, in this video from Open Road Media.

Ira Glass, Calvin Trillin, and others are featured in this trailer for Rakoff’s posthumous book, Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish, a novel in verse forthcoming in July from Doubleday. One of the best and funniest essayists of our time, Rakoff died of cancer on August 9, 2012. He was forty-seven years old.

The acclaimed Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe died earlier today at the age of eighty-two. A statement released on behalf of his family described the author as one of the great literary voices of his time, whose wisdom was an inspiration to all who knew him. The Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan said Professor Achebe would live forever in the hearts and minds of present and future generations. BBC’s Bilkisu discusses his legacy with Stephen Sackur.

Poet Ron Silliman recently drew attention to this footage of Frank O’Hara from the 1966 TV series USA: Poetry. O’Hara died a few weeks after the filming was completed.

“What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.” Listen to a reading of “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart,” by poet Jack Gilbert, who died on Tuesday in Berkeley, California, at the age of eighty-seven. His Collected Poems was published by Knopf in March.

The author, who died on Wednesday at the age of ninety-one, is seen here in a 2009 conversation with Lawrence Bridges about his best-known work, the novel Fahrenheit 451. President Barack Obama noted yesterday that Bradbury’s “gift for storytelling reshaped our culture and expanded our world.”

This short film, directed by Aleksandar Kostic and narrated by Miki Manojlovic, was inspired by Danilo Kiš's story “A Tomb for Boris Davidovich.” Kiš, a Yugoslavian writer who was influenced by Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges, died in 1989.