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“Poetry is the tempo of one’s temperament.” In this 2015 event for the House of SpeakEasy’s “Seriously Entertaining” series, Rowan Ricardo Phillips talks to a live audience about the nature of poetry and his memories of the 1980 film Altered States. Phillips discusses his role as editor of the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets in a Q&A in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“One of the reasons that we write is to see the world reflected in a way that makes sense to us.” In this Furious Flower interview from 2015, Camille T. Dungy speaks about how editing the anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (University of Georgia Press, 2009) helped articulate her views on nature poetry. A profile of Dungy by Renée H. Shea appears in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“I’m not convinced by myself as a writer,” says Adam Mars-Jones in this London Review Bookshop video about his slightly negative writing process and the origins of his memoir Kid Gloves: A Voyage Round My Father (Particular Books, 2015).
“I’m no moaning bluet, mountable / linnet, mumbling nun. I’m / tangible, I’m gin. Able to molt / in toto, to limn.” In this short film, Paisley Rekdal, who served as the Utah state poet laureate from 2017 to 2022, recites her poem “Self-Portrait as Mae West Anagram” for the Utah Division of Arts and Museums.
“I love the deep attribute of poetry to pause, to look, to listen, to respect, to pay attention to variety and learn something new.” Naomi Shihab Nye, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Jane Hirschfield discuss poetry and the poet’s role in America at the 2015 National Book Festival in this video from the Academy of American Poets.
For a haunting Halloween treat, watch the trailer for Bones and All, a film adaptation of the award-winning 2015 novel of the same name by Camille DeAngelis. Directed by Luca Guadagnino with a screenplay by David Kajganich, the film stars Taylor Russell, Timothée Chalamet, and Mark Rylance.
“I wanted to tell people how I became this woman with razor blades between her teeth.” BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez, directed by Barbara Attie, Janet Goldwater, and Sabrina Schmidt Gordon, chronicles the life and work of poet and political activist Sonia Sanchez, including her emergence as a seminal figure in the Black Arts Movement, her tireless political activism, and a poetry career so great Maya Angelou called her “a lion in literature’s forest.” Sanchez is the recipient of the 2022 Jackson Poetry Prize.
“I had a dream of having poetry at the intersections of New York, where all kinds of people pass through daily,” says Marie Howe, former New York State poet laureate, in this 2015 video about the inspiration for the Poetry in Motion: The Poet Is In festival. The annual National Poetry Month event is hosted by the Poetry Society of America and MTA Arts & Design, and features poems written on request by award-winning poets.
“This is not a work of history. It is a report full of holes,” reads the late C. D. Wright from her book One With Others: [a little book of her days] (Copper Canyon Press, 2010) in this 2015 recording of an event at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.
In this 2015 reading at Harvard University’s Woodberry Poetry Room, poet Jackie Wang introduces Bhanu Kapil, who reads from her book Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat Books, 2015), and Fred Moten, who reads from his collection The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions, 2014).
