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“I pulled down a book by Gayl Jones, Eva’s Man, and I sat down and didn’t get back up until I finished it—and I felt so haunted,” says Rachel Eliza Griffiths about what inspired her third poetry collection, Mule & Pear (New Issues Press, 2011), in this conversation at the 2013 Poets Forum for the Academy of American Poets.
“Green spring grass on / the hills had cured / by June and by July,” reads Forrest Gander from his poem “Wasteland: on the California Wildfires” for Dear Poet, the Academy of American Poets’ educational project for National Poetry Month.
“Now they have come home to roost—all the same kind at the same speed,” reads Kay Ryan from her poem “Home to Roost” in this installment of The Poet’s View, a film series produced by the Academy of American Poets, in which she is interviewed in her home and discusses being featured in the comic strip The Boondocks.
“I could say grace was a woman with time on her hands, or a white buffalo escaped from memory. But in that dingy light it was a promise of balance,” reads Joy Harjo from her poem “Grace” in this 2019 reading at the offices of the Academy of American Poets.
“Wait, for now. / Distrust everything if you have to. / But trust the hours.” Galway Kinnell reads his poem “Wait” in this installment of Poetry Breaks, a series created by Leita Luchetti in the late 1980s and early 1990s and presented in partnership with the Academy of American Poets.
“Don’t be afraid— / Someone has walked this way before / All the world’s music in her hands.” Patricia Spears Jones reads “Discovering America Again” by Lorenzo Thomas, her own poem “The Birth of Rhythm and Blues,” and talks about what it means to be a literary citizen. This video, part of the P.O.P. series, was shot and edited by Rachel Eliza Griffiths in partnership with the Academy of American Poets. Spears Jones is the eleventh winner of the Jackson Poetry Prize.
“Restless, I want to return and stand at the mouth where wild fig trees grow,” reads Anne Marie Macari in this installment of the P.O.P. series, shot and edited by Rachel Eliza Griffiths in partnership with the Academy of American Poets. Macari’s poetry collection Heaven Beneath (Persea Books, 2020) is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“So how do you discern a shape for / What is often called g-d.” Kazim Ali reads from his latest collection, The Voice of Sheila Chandra (Alice James Books, 2020), in this Academy of American Poets virtual reading and conversation with Joshua Bennett, author of Owed (Penguin Poets, 2020). For more from these poets, read what motivates Ali’s writing in Writers Recommend and about Bennett’s writing process in Ten Questions.
“Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you. / Remember language comes from this.” In this video from the Academy of American Poets, Joy Harjo reads her poem “Remember” from her 1983 collection, She Had Some Horses. Harjo has been appointed to serve a second term as poet laureate of the United States and is the first Native American to hold the post.
“Many people aren’t even remotely interested in [poetry]. But it’s so clear to me that, of course, it’s what you want to do.” Louise Glück ruminates about her writing process in this short documentary from the Academy of American Poets. Glück has been named the winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature.
