Poets & Writers Theater

“The shiver underneath / my ruined shirt, the worm / eating of things in the dirt / the dead and the living.” In this 2019 video taken during his residency at Further Troutbeck: The Poetry Society, Justin Phillip Reed reads “I Have Wasted My Life” from his second collection, The Malevolent Volume, out today from Coffee House Press.

“I was so struck by ‘Snow Drops’—it became sort of my prayer toward healing.” Leila Chatti talks about her connection with Louise Glück’s Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, The Wild Iris, and reads the poem “Snow Drops” for the Poetry Foundation’s Ours Poetica video series.

“It looked like a pancake, / but it was creation flattened out— / the fist of God on a head of wheat.” This Motionpoems short film, directed by Dan Sickles, features the titular poem from Melissa Studdard’s debut collection, I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast (Saint Julian Press, 2014).

“I know crying / Is a skill / I automatically wipe / My eyes even though I know / Crying / Is a skill.” In this 2017 video, Nikki Giovanni reads her poem “I Married My Mother” from her collection A Good Cry: What We Learn From Tears and Laughter (William Morrow, 2017).

“Poetry exists in a relationship so that it can speak to your interior life. That’s why I believe that reading is relationship.” In this 2019 5x15 Stories video, Edward Hirsch, whose latest collection Stranger by Night is out now from Knopf, speaks about the craft of writing poems and how “poetry exists to inspire the reader.”

“Her odes to Inanna mark the first time an author writes using the pronoun ‘I,’ and the first time writing is used to explore deep, private emotions.” This animated TED-Ed lesson by Soraya Field Fiorio explores the writings of Enheduanna, a high priestess in ancient Mesopotamia who is widely considered the world’s first author and wrote forty-two hymns and three epic poems by the time of her exile.

“The orchard grew excellent, // Good mass of apples assembling, one angel burned, looped / On the wire fence, in a bowl of gold most satisfactory.” Stephanie Burt reads Lucie Brock-Broido’s poem “Posthumous Seduction,” which first appeared in the Summer 2012 issue of Paris Review, for the new Poets on Couches series where poets read and discuss favorite poems that get them through during difficult times.

“The street shines with / mannequins in rhinestone. We walk / as if just friends.” In this Ours Poetica video, Oliver Baez Bendorf reads Rane Arroyo’s poem “Details as Revelations.” For more Bendorf, read his installment of Ten Questions.

John Murillo reads “Trouble Man,” a poem from his first collection, Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher Books, 2010), and a poem by Etheridge Knight for the P.O.P series, shot and edited by Rachel Eliza Griffiths in partnership with the Academy of American Poets. Murillo’s second collection, Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way Books, 2020), is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“The rain will eventually come, or not. / Until then, we touch our bodies like wounds…” In this Mellon Foundation video, Natalie Diaz reads the title poem from her forthcoming collection, Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf Press, 2020). A Q&A with Diaz by Jacqueline Woodson appears in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

At Brazos Bookstore in Houston, Angela So and Monica Sok read from their work and talk about displacement, what it means to be children of refugees, and the search for home. Sok discusses her debut poetry collection, A Nail the Evening Hangs On (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), in “First” by Rigoberto González in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Whatever shall i do with my dead / my tombs & mausoleums / these potted plants tended by strangers...” Mahogany L. Browne reads “for my dead & loved ones” and “Blood Rhythms - Blood Currents - Black N’ Blue Stylin’” by Ntozake Shange, and her own poem “Black Girl Magic” at a tribute for Shange at New York City’s 92nd Street Y.

“Each winter a new storm bent on our shoreline and damage / bloomed wild. When the neighbors left, we stayed / watching the seawall recede stone by stone.” Meghann Plunkett’s poem “South County” is featured in this Motionpoems short film directed by Kenneth Kegley.

In this 1981 Brockport Writers Forum interview, June Jordan reads “A Poem about Intelligence for my Brothers and Sisters,” and speaks about how she came to poetry and fell in love with “the possibility of language.”

“We are all writing about each other // in chorus, an out loud wince...” Maggie Glover reads poems from her debut collection, How I Went Red (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2014), and speaks about her writing in this interview with Lisa Grove for Poetry.LA.

“A detail in a pool of blood / the body gathered in an awkward kink / I dress myself in easy anything…” In this Ours Poetica video, Chase Berggrun reads “Chapter XXI” from R E D (Birds, LLC, 2018), a book of erasures of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

“Black women are crafting a collective response / to centuries of being under everybody’s water / We are a rising tsunami of fury come back / to take back what was carried away/without consent....” Staceyann Chin reads “Tsunami Rising” from her debut poetry collection, Crossfire: A Litany for Survival (Haymarket Books, 2019), for the Unbound series in Brooklyn, copresented by BAM and Greenlight Bookstore.

“And I dreamed of our world, a spinning ball of confusion, heart-wrenching injustices…” Patti Smith reads a poem and performs a cover of Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush” in this video from the Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Smith’s new memoir, Year of the Monkey, is out now from Knopf.

“Reading Borges, you might catch a glimpse of infinity too.” In this TED-Ed animated short film, the work of Jorge Luis Borges and the way his essays, poems, and stories helped pioneer the magical realism genre is explored by Ilan Stavans. 

“In 2020 I’m trying to remember joy, the same way I remember pain....” In this video, Yaw Kyeremateng performs “Ode to 2020” with fellow poets from Write About Now Poetry, a community-oriented collective in Houston.