Poets & Writers Theater

“Instead of scanning newspaper headlines, / I spend the morning reading names / of flowers and trees in the botanical garden.” Harryette Mullen reads a selection of poems from her collection Urban Tumbleweed: Notes From a Tanka Diary (Graywolf Press, 2013) at Beyond Baroque in this Poetry.LA video.

In this 2002 interview, Guadeloupean novelist Maryse Condé talks with Ann Armstrong Scarboro, who wrote the afterword to Condé’s novel I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (University of Virginia Press, 2009), translated from the French by Richard Philcox, about uncovering truth in her writing. Condé is the winner of the inaugural New Academy Prize in Literature, which was established this year as an alternative to the Nobel Prize in Literature.

T2 Trainspotting is the sequel to director Danny Boyle’s 1996 film, Trainspotting, an adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s debut novel of the same name. The sequel, based on Welsh’s novel Porno (Norton, 2002), takes place twenty years later and reunites cast members Ewen Bremner, Robert Carlyle, Kelly Macdonald, Ewan McGregor, and Jonny Lee Miller.

The Handmaiden, directed by Park Chan-wook, is a South Korean film adaptation of Sarah Waters’s crime novel Fingersmith (Riverhead Books, 2002). The film, which premiered at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, transfers the setting of the Victorian era story—about an orphaned pickpocket hired to pose as a maid for a wealthy heiress—to Korea under Japanese colonial rule in the 1930s.

"The dangerous undertow will return you home. One bite of anything can kill." Jim Harrison, author of more than three dozen books, including the novella Legends of the Fall (Delta, 1979), reads a selection of poems and speaks with Peter Lewis for the Lannan Foundation in 2002. Harrison passed away on March 26 at the age of seventy-eight.

"Your life is your life.​ / ​know it while you have it.​ / ​you are marvelous​ / ​the gods wait to delight​ / ​in you.​" ​In this short film, Charles Bukowski's poem "The Laughing Heart," from his poetry and story collection Betting on the Muse (Ecco, 2002), is read by Tom Waits and animated by Bradley Bell.

"I ain't afraid to die anymore. I done it already." The Revenant, based on Michael Punke's 2002 novel of the same name, follows one man's journey across the frozen American West to avenge the murder of his son. Directed by Academy Award-winner Alejandro G. Iñárritu, the film will be released in December 2015.

In this 2002 CBS Sunday Morning interview with Martha Teichner, Salman Rushdie discusses living in New York City, his upbringing in India and England, and the controversy over his 1988 award-winning novel, The Satanic Verses.

"I have not seen my own face in ten years, but this is not about me." In this video clip from 2002, veteran slam poet Katie Makkai performs "Pretty," which confronts the harsh reality of how our culture perceives women and appearances.

Lukas Fiala and Nicole Schmitt recently partnered to create this animated look at Charles Bukowski's rather ecstatic poem, which appears in Burning in Water Drowning in Flame: Selected Poems 1955-1973 (Ecco, 2002).

Shot and produced by Almudena Toral, this video documents seventy-six-year-old New York poet Jack Agüeros's struggle with Alzheimer's disease. Agüeros, a community advocate who directed El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem for eight years, is the author of four poetry collections, including Lord, Is This a Psalm? (Hanging Loose Press, 2002).