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“Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.” In this video for “Incredible Bridges: Poets Creating Community,” a project developed by the Academy of American Poets in partnership with EDSITEment, Elizabeth Alexander reads “Praise Song for the Day,” a poem commissioned for the first inauguration of president Barack Obama.
"And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I / thought, This / is the world I want to live in. The shared world." Naomi Shihab Nye reads her poem "Gate A-4" as part of "Incredible Bridges: Poets Creating Community," a project developed by the Academy of American Poets in partnership with EDSITEment, the educational website of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
“A lot of poems for me begin in the sense of feeling annihilated in some way or another.” Idra Novey discusses her poetic beginnings at the Academy of American Poets’ 2014 Poets Forum. Her debut novel, Ways to Disappear (Little, Brown, 2016), is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“Comrades, be not in mourning for your being...” C. D. Wright reads “Like Hearing Your Name in a Language You Don’t Understand” as part of the Academy of American Poets’ Dear Poet project. The poem is from Wright’s collection Rising, Falling, Hovering (Copper Canyon Press, 2008).
“The asking was askance. / And the tale all told. / So then, in tandem, / Anathema and anthem.” Hannah Sanghee Park reads “And a Lie” from her poetry collection The Same-Different (Louisiana State University Press, 2015) in this video from the Academy of American Poets’ 2014 Poets Forum. Park is one of the debut poets featured in “Fractures Through Time” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“There is a kind of formlessness to poetry, as much as everyone is obsessed with form.” Ken Chen, the executive director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, talks about his personal relationship to poetry in a discussion at the Academy of American Poets’ 2013 Poets Forum. Chen is featured in “AAWW Continues the Conversation” by Arvin Temkar in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
"What puts the mean in some of us?" Ada Limón reads her elegy, "Marketing Life for Those of Us Left," in this video for the Academy of American Poets. Limón's fourth poetry collection, Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions, 2015), is a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award.
“You can be honest. This / is Godspeed-less, workaday chatter.” Sandra Beasley reads her poem, “The Conversation,” at the National Archives, which has partnered with the Academy of American Poets to present original poems inspired by the holdings of the National Archives. Read “Mermaids and Matryoshkas: The Secret Life of a Poetic Sequence” by Beasley in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“I find that I’m looking for violence in the poems that I read.” Camille Rankine reads her poem “Little Children, My Apologies” and speaks about the types of poems she admires as part of the P.O.P. video series, which was shot and edited by Rachel Eliza Griffiths in partnership with the Academy of American Poets. Rankine’s debut poetry collection, Incorrect Merciful Impulses (Copper Canyon Press, 2015), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
"My father wanted me to become a boxer, my mother wanted me to become an engineer, and I think I found a way to mix those two visions together—in poetry." Rigoberto González, recipient of the 2014 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, is featured in "The Way of the Workshop" in the current issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
