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“So few grains of happiness / measured against all the dark / and still the scales balance.” In this video produced by the Academy of American Poets, Jane Hirshfield reads “The Weighing” from the new anthology, Here: Poems for the Planet, which will be published this week by Copper Canyon Press. The anthology includes poems by Margaret Atwood, Kwame Dawes, Ross Gay, Nikki Giovanni, Robert Hass, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Mary Oliver, and others.
“I begin with love, hoping to end there. / I don’t want to leave a messy corpse.” Jericho Brown reads “Duplex” from his third poetry collection, The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“Look at the old house in the dawn rain / all the flowers are forms of water…” In this excerpt from the documentary Even Though the Whole World Is Burning, the late W. S. Merwin reads his poem “Rain Light.” Merwin’s final collection, Garden Time (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), was featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“There is nothing one man will not do to another.” Carolyn Forché reads “The Visitor” and “The Colonel” from her second poetry collection, The Country Between Us (Copper Canyon Press, 1981), which bore witness to her travels in El Salvador in the late 1970s. Forché’s debut memoir, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance (Penguin Press, 2019), documents that same period of time and is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“Poses no significant litter problem. / Ranks as ‘not particularly outstanding,’ according to the Forest Service.” At the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, Forrest Gander reads from the opening of Casting Deep Shade (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), C. D. Wright’s posthumously published collection. The multigenre, three-panel, hardcover book is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“This brown girl from Chicago also loves the outdoors.” In the book trailer for her fourth poetry collection, Oceanic (Copper Canyon Press, 2018), Aimee Nezhukumatathil describes her motivation for writing and her passion for the natural world. Her illustrated collection of nature essays, World of Wonder, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions.
Brenda Shaughnessy reads her poem “I Have a Time Machine” and discusses the role that poetry can play in recovering from traumatic experiences for a TEDx event at Harvard University. Shaughnessy is the author of Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon Press, 2012) and So Much Synth (Copper Canyon Press, 2016).
In this Motionpoems film, Matthew Zapruder’s poem “Albert Einstein,” from his collection Sun Bear (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), is animated by John Akre. Zapruder’s most recent book, Why Poetry (Ecco, 2017), explores what poems are and how all readers can enjoy them.
In this animated short film by Phil Borst, which was commissioned by the Washington Post, Victoria Chang reads the conclusion of her poem “The Boss Calls Us at Home.” Chang’s fourth book of poetry, Barbie Chang (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“In between, your mind is full of trees. / And it’s quite dark despite the moon.” This short film of Laura Kasischke’s poem “This Is Not a Fairytale” was created by Laurent Barthelemy and Shizuka Kusayanagi for Motionpoems. Kasischke’s most recent collection, Where Now (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), is longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award in poetry.
