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“One morning, I decide to spin backwards around the sun, says Earth. / One step behind / another behind another, I watch the chipper dance / of human beings in reverse.” In this Ours Poetica video, Mike Birbiglia reads the poem “Earth (in reverse)” by J. Hope Stein from their book, The New One: Painfully True Stories From a Reluctant Dad (Grand Central Publishing, 2020).
In this virtual event from the 2020 Cúirt International Festival of Literature, Kei Miller and Carolyn Forché read their poems and discuss the exploration of place, hope, and community in their work with poet Jess Traynor. Miller’s second essay collection, Things I Have Withheld (Grove Press, 2021), is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“To walk down the streets in the Bay Area is really to walk through a dystopia,” says San Francisco poet laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin about the rapid gentrification of his native city as he discusses how poetry serves as a tool for revolution in this installment of PBS NewsHour’s “Brief But Spectacular” series.
“The next time you stop speaking, / ask yourself why you were born,” reads Naomi Shihab Nye from her poem “Separation Wall” in this episode of Ours Poetica, a series produced by the Poetry Foundation in collaboration with Complexly.
“It is a wonderful gift to be able to swim in rivers, especially on bright, clear days like these. You step into an inverted version of the world,” says poet Alice Oswald about the connection between water and grief in this 2020 virtual lecture for the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities. “The water fits around you like a velvet suit, and you float along seemingly decapitated by reflections.”
“Is it not enough to enter ending, one self in the halving road, and the fires in us blot the coasts that reject us...” In this short film by Lior Shamriz and Chloé Griffin, poet Canisia Lubrin reads from her collection The Dyzgraphxst (McClelland and Stewart, 2020), for which she won the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize.
“Didn’t they know, low in their bones, that as long as they moved and the land unfurled, that as long as they searched, they would forever be searchers and never quite lost?” reads C Pam Zhang from her debut novel, How Much of These Hills Is Gold (Riverhead Books, 2020), in this conversation with writer and comedian Karen Chee hosted by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.
“Minor feelings are also the emotions we are accused of having when we decide to be difficult—in other words, when we decide to be honest,” reads Cathy Park Hong from her essay collection, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (One World, 2020), in this Yale Review video from their two hundredth anniversary festival in 2020.
“If we are always the threat / To whom or where do we turn for protection?” In this Litquake festival video from 2020, Pamela Sneed reads from her book Funeral Diva (City Light Books, 2020), for which she won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award’s lesbian poetry prize, and speaks with Tommy Pico about breaking apart genres and writing about pandemics.
“I write, I free write, I type it in a computer, and then I start over from the beginning and then I add to it.” In this 2017 City of Asylum video, Yona Harvey speaks about her revision process, self-censorship, and the difference processes for writing poems, essays, and comic books. Harvey’s second poetry collection, You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love (Four Way Books, 2020), won the 2020 Believer Book Award in poetry.
