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“For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” In this moving video series, filmmaker Jennifer Crandall travels throughout Alabama to capture local residents reading the verses of Walt Whitman’s iconic 1855 poem “Song of Myself.”
“The systemic structure built to keep me in place is the stage I dance on. Black, and woman.” This short film featuring principal ballerina Misty Copeland is paired with a poem by Saul Williams for Under Armour’s online ad campaign, “Unlike Any,” which highlights women athletes performing to poems.
A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 science fiction fantasy novel about a thirteen-year-old girl who travels through space and time in search of her scientist father, has been adapted into a feature film. Directed by Ava DuVernay, the film stars Mindy Kaling, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Chris Pine, Storm Reid, Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, and Zack Galifianakis.
“Every time someone goes to see a Shakespeare play in Russia or in Italy or in Brazil...what they’re actually getting is a version of Shakespeare that some translator has interpreted.” In this video, translator Daniel Hahn talks about the universal elements of Shakespeare’s plays. Hahn is donating part of his award money from the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award, which he won with author José Eduardo Agualusa, to help establish a new prize for debut literary translation in the U.K.
“In Borne I’m really talking about how we interact with wildlife and animals in an urban space...” Jeff VanderMeer visits the landscapes of northern Florida that inspired his novel Borne (MCD, 2017) and his novels from the Southern Reach Trilogy.
“Honestly I think that the reason his head was in my brain was because of that hair metal band Tesla...” Samantha Hunt reveals the inspiration behind her second novel, The Invention of Everything Else (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008), which fictionalizes the last days of inventor and engineer Nikola Tesla’s life. Hunt’s first story collection, The Dark Dark (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Program assistant for Readings & Workshops (East) Ricardo Hernandez blogs about an evening at Bryant Park’s Reading Room series in New York City, co-curated by Poets & Writers.
Since 2003, the Reading Room at Bryant Park has hosted established and emerging poets at an “open air” reading series held in the heart of Manhattan. This summer, the Readings & Workshops program was offered the opportunity to co-curate an evening of this series. Against a backdrop of jugglers, double-decker buses, and the New York Public Library’s Main Branch, Oliver Baez Bendorf, Elana Bell, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, and Duy Doan shared their work.
Opening the evening, Baez Bendorf read poems from his book, The Spectral Wilderness (Kent State University Press, 2015), many of which interrogate and obfuscate masculinity. In one, the speaker directed us to call him, “giddyup and Tarzan, riot boy/ and monk, flavor-trip and soldier and departure,” each image bucking against what Judith Butler, quoted in the poem’s epigraph, calls “the ambivalent process” of identification.
Next, Bell read one poem written from a hilltop overlooking the settlement of Neve Daniel on the West Bank, dedicated to a woman named “Amal, whose name means hope.” With a piercing eye, the speaker outlines the differences between herself, who has “never drunk rain/ collected from a well dug by [her] own hands,” and Amal, who “moves/ through her land like an animal” and “laughs with all her teeth,” resulting in a tender ode to domesticity and diversity.
Boyce-Taylor read from her latest collection, Arrival (Northwestern University Press, 2017), which tells the story of a recently immigrated Trinidadian girl, her parents, and her stillborn twin brother. In one of the most poignant moments of Boyce-Taylor’s reading, the speaker imagines a moment of kindness in the womb, before her twin’s death: “He handed me the soft bread of his lips. ‘Sell it if you ever need shelter.’ Then he was gone.”
Bringing the reading came to an end, Doan shared poems from his manuscript, We Play a Game, selected by Carl Phillips for the 2017 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. In the poem “Love Trinkets,” Doan’s speaker presents his experiences with love in a poignant litany, detailing lovers who had spurned him; who had deceived him; and one who “was kind, so kind, in kissing/ [him] at all.”
Poets & Writers is thankful for the opportunity to collaborate with the Reading Room, and a special thanks to each of our featured readers!
Support for the Readings & Workshops Program in New York City is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, with additional support from the Frances Abbey Endowment, the Cowles Charitable Trust, and the Friends of Poets & Writers.
Photo: (left to right) Duy Doan, Oliver Baez Bendorf, Elana Bell, and Cheryl Boyce-Taylor (Credit: Ricardo Hernandez).Diksha Basu, author of the debut novel, The Windfall (Crown, 2017), answers eight book-related questions, including her favorite book to give as a gift. Basu is featured in “First Fiction 2017” in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Allegra Goodman introduces and reads from her novel The Cookbook Collector (Dial Press, 2010) at the 2010 National Book Festival. Goodman’s sixth novel, The Chalk Artist (Dial Press, 2017), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“Every day after school, the factory men yell / mamacita, / make noises like sucking / mangos.” Erika L. Sánchez reads the poem “Hija de la Chingada” from her debut poetry collection, Lessons on Expulsion (Graywolf Press, 2017), for the Palabra Pura bilingual reading series. The collection is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
