Poets & Writers Theater

“These poets really took me on a journey. Through each of their poems you got to essentially travel across L.A. into different neighborhoods, into different people’s spaces,” says director Carlos López Estrada about meeting the twenty-seven spoken word poets from the nonprofit Get Lit who cowrote and are featured in his new film, Summertime.

“Trucks cruisin’ down the avenue / carrying nuclear garbage right next to you / and it’s legal.” In this installment of Poetry Spots, a WNYC television show produced by Bob Holman between 1987 and 1993, June Jordan reads her poem “Song of the Law Abiding Citizen.”

“I have a bad habit of using random facts as a coping mechanism.” Watch this short film directed by Ryan Boyland featuring his poem “Rue,” which won the 2020 Button Poetry Video Contest for Emerging Writers.

“To love yourself so much you don’t wanna exploit anybody. Can you imagine not wanting to exploit anyone?” says Sonia Sanchez in her lecture to students in this 1991 episode of Writers Uncensored presented by the Lannan Foundation. This vintage episode features Sanchez and Lucille Clifton reading from their work and talking about their respective paths as poets.

“My mother doesn’t write recipes, / she just knows. // Braised pork and eggs, / rice cleaned thoroughly.” Joshua Nguyen, author of the chapbook, American Lục Bát for My Mother (Bull City Press, 2021), reads two poems in this video for the Write About Now Poetry reading series in Houston. 

Directed by Academy Award winner Martin Scorsese, Pretend It’s a City features the return of sardonic writer and public speaker Fran Lebowitz in conversation with the director as she shares anecdotes about her early life and career in New York City in the 1970s. The Netflix series continues the partnership of the longtime friends, who worked together on the 2010 HBO documentary Public Speaking.

“My poetry, never a quiet moment. You are mine, and you are content with the idea of having nowhere to go.” In this video, Marlon Lizama reads “Poetry” for the Write About Now Poetry series in Houston.

“Say it. / That every day is a toast / to living. An ode to the way we / made resilience an art...” In this lecture for the Chautauqua Institution, Joshua Bennett reads a selection of his poems and meditates on his father’s life and the history of the spoken word tradition. Bennett speaks about his latest poetry collection, Owed (Penguin Poets, 2020), in an installment of Ten Questions.

“Sometimes I too want to be a poem. / I don’t want to be this pain, / but the language used / to unearth it.” In this Button Poetry video, Michael Lee reads “Just Yesterday” from his debut poetry collection, The Only Worlds We Know (Button Poetry, 2019).

“My mother carries three girls and a boy, like the tethered, like a reckoning.” In this Write About Now Poetry video, D. Colin reads her poem “The Girl Dream” at the unofficial Women of the World Poetry Slam cypher in Dallas.

“I orchestrate brutality but I never wanted to compose this symphony. We batons fell into the role masterfully though as the blue Beethovens adorned in badges used us to keep the beat on black notes....” In this video, Kofi Dadzie reads his poem “Baton” at Button Poetry Live in Saint Paul, Minnesota in 2018.

“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.

“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.

“The men in my family wear masculinity like war medals. From birth, deem themselves protectors, providers, kings of everything their light touches....” In this Button Poetry video, Jordan Bailey reads his poem “Men in My Family” at the 2019 Rustbelt Poetry Festival in St. Louis, Missouri.

“Today, today I said I would write my own healing.” In this 2015 video, Camonghne Felix reads her poem “Presence” at the Strivers Row’s Poetic Soul live performance series. Felix is the author of Build Yourself a Boat (Haymarket Books, 2019) and is featured in “Poetic Lenses: Our Fifteenth Annual Look at Debut Poetry” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“When I did not feel anything, I begged you for mercy, for myself, a form of forgiveness that always comes in muscle memory.” In this Write About Now Poetry video, Christopher Diaz performs his poem “again” at AvantGarden in Houston.

“I wanna be / all the girls I’ve ever loved / mean girls, shy girls, loud girls, my girls, / all of us angry on our porches…” Olivia Gatwood reads poems from her debut collection, Life of the Party (Dial Press, 2019), at the Bell House in Brooklyn.

“What we can contribute is an open space that’s really excited about learning and welcoming poets and writers from across different communities of literature in New York.” In this BRIC TV video, Rachel Valinsky, the artistic director of the Brooklyn nonprofit Wendy’s Subway, talks about the organization’s history and programming, and how it functions in the community as a reading room, event space, and publisher.

“My mama’s tongue is a telegram from her mother / decorated with the coqui’s of el campo...” Denice Frohman reads her poem “Accents” for this animated TED-Ed short film directed by Kapwa and Robertino Zambrano.

“There are two types of survival, there’s a kind that eats people alive and the kind I’m lucky enough to do by default.” Mason Granger, executive director of Bowery Poetry, reads his poem “Two Types of People” at the 2019 Bigfoot Regional Poetry Slam in Portland, Oregon.