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“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.
“My mother thought that if she taught me to read, I would become interested to read my books and leave her alone,” says Jamaica Kincaid about her experience reading as a child and how it influenced her as a writer in this interview from the 2021 Louisiana Literature Festival at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.
“Alzheimer’s patients sing every lyric to their favorite songs, / and this casual act becomes a dance with defiance.” In this video, Theresa Lola reads “Sing With Me and Do Not Die of Thirst” from her debut poetry collection, In Search of Equilibrium (Nine Arches Press, 2019), for Ours Poetica, a series produced by the Poetry Foundation in collaboration with Complexly.
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).
In this video, Tom Sleigh reads “The King’s Touch,” the title poem from his new collection published by Graywolf Press this month. The video is part of a series called “Age of Wonder” directed by filmmaker Ed Robbins which features Sleigh reading selections from the book.
In this 2017 event, poet and novelist Fanny Howe reads from her rewritten novel, The Wages (Pressed Wafer Press, 2018), and poet and fiction writer John Keene reads from his story collection, Counternarratives (New Directions, 2015), for the Woodberry Poetry Room’s Vocarium reading series at Harvard University.
“The first was that I was very busy. // The second—I was different from you: whatever happened to you could not happen to me, not like that.” In this 2018 video for Bloodaxe Books, Marie Howe reads “Magdalene—The Seven Devils” and other poems from her fourth poetry collection, Magdalene (Norton, 2017).
“A life is not / this supple, // it is not meant / to fold, to be / drawn through // a narrow ring,” reads Monica Youn from her poem “Portrait of a Hanged Woman” in this 2018 reading and conversation with Robert Pinsky for the Twenty Summers arts center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
“Poetry is mere reality. No proof, just be here,” reads Alice Notley, author most recently of For the Ride (Penguin Books, 2020), in this reading held at the Poetry Project in New York City.
In this 2018 Intelligence Squared video, a friendly and impassioned battle between nineteenth-century novelists Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy is carried out and argued by professor John Mullan and historian Simon Schama with readings by actors Zawe Ashton, Tom Hiddleston, Kit Kingsley, Julia Sawalha, and Timothy West.
