Poets & Writers Theater

“More people are turning to [poetry] for truth,” says Patricia Smith in this 2018 interview with Lauren K. Alleyne for The Fight & The Fiddle, the quarterly online publication of the Furious Flower Poetry Center. For more on Smith, read “Unshuttered: Patricia Smith’s Journey Into the Aperture of History” by Tyehimba Jess in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Watch this 2018 reading and conversation with Nobel Prize–winning author Annie Ernaux celebrating the English publication of her book The Years, along with translator Alison L. Strayer and Seven Stories Press publisher Dan Simon at the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris, France.

“What does it mean to write something urgent right now?” Don’t Be Nice is a 2018 documentary directed by Max Powers that follows a group of poets from the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City’s East Village who grapple with the political climate punctuated by the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements as they prepare for the National Poetry Slam championship during the summer of 2016.

“Poetry is a place where both grief and grace can live, where rage can be explored and examined, not simply exploited.” In this 2018 PBS NewsHour video, Ada Limón shares her opinion on why she sees more and more people turning to poetry in the search for “radical hope” in the digital age. Limón was named the twenty-fourth poet laureate of the United States today.

“I’m just a series of words on pieces of paper.” In this interview with John Yau for the New York Foundation for the Arts, the poet and art critic speaks about his family, art, and cooking, which have all influenced his writing. Yau is the recipient of the 2018 Jackson Poetry Prize.

“I should share with you that I did not intend to be a fiction writer, I did not intend to write a historical novel…I did intend to always, however, tell the truth,” says Min Jin Lee about writing her novel Pachinko (Grand Central Publishing, 2017), which has been adapted into a television series, in this 2018 reading and conversation with Claire Messud at Harvard University.

“The face of Chinatown returns its color, / plucked from July’s industrial steamer,” reads Jenny Xie from her poem “Chinatown Diptych,” published in her collection Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018), in this video directed by Jean Coleman and produced by the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation for their Read By poetry film series.

“The conundrum of a writer’s life, particularly that of a poet’s, is learning to embody a paradox,” says Rita Dove, winner of the 2018 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, in this recording of the Denham Sutcliffe Memorial Lecture at the Kenyon Review Literary Festival. “One has to be fierce and tender at the same time. Loud and quiet. Brash and introspective.”

“Quiet thinking is like a current in the sea and moves freely until it’s disturbed by its own voice, and then it becomes a music each individual sings when speaking. This is what we hear when we hear Ilya read,” says poet Fanny Howe introducing Ilya Kaminsky at this 2018 reading of his poetry collection Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019) at Harvard University’s Woodberry Poetry Room.

“I pick up the phone and send you some words / about my trans body,” reads J. Jennifer Espinoza from her poem “My Trans Body,” included in her collection Outside of the Body There Is Something Like Hope (Big Lucks, 2018), in this installment of Ours Poetica, a video series produced by the Poetry Foundation in collaboration with Complexly.

“The first was that I was very busy. // The second—I was different from you: whatever happened to you could not happen to me, not like that.” In this 2018 video for Bloodaxe Books, Marie Howe reads “Magdalene—The Seven Devils” and other poems from her fourth poetry collection, Magdalene (Norton, 2017).

“A life is not / this supple, // it is not meant / to fold, to be / drawn through // a narrow ring,” reads Monica Youn from her poem “Portrait of a Hanged Woman” in this 2018 reading and conversation with Robert Pinsky for the Twenty Summers arts center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

“I believe that the best books aren’t those that entertain us. The best books are those that hurt us.” In this 2018 interview at the Louisiana Literature festival in Denmark, Italian writer Domenico Starnone talks about the pleasure and exhaustion of writing and refers to a letter Kafka wrote about the importance of writing books “that are like an axe that breaks the frozen chest.” Starnone’s novel Trust (Europa Editions, 2021), translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri, is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I’ve turned old. I ache most / To be confronted by the real, / By the cold, the pitiless, the bleak.” In this 2018 video from the 92nd Street Y, Tracy K. Smith reads her poem “Annunciation,” which appears in her new collection, Such Color: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2021). Smith’s fifth poetry collection is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“You, a wild orchid and me, a rice picker. I pluck you as if you were a food to eat.” In this 2018 Button Poetry Live performance, Melania Luisa Marte reads her poem “Adam Be a Migrant Farmer.”

In this 2017 craft talk for Hugo House, Terrance Hayes reads from his book American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin Books, 2018) and discusses the work and writing strategies of the late poet Lynda Hull.

“Great blue mountain! Ghost. / I look at you / from the porch of the farmhouse / where I watched you all summer / as a boy,” reads the late Donald Hall from his poem “Mount Kearsarge” in this 2018 PBS NewsHour video commemorating his death at the age of eighty-nine. For more Hall, read “Fleeting: In Memory of Donald Hall” by Christopher Locke.

In this 2018 video, novelist Anne Garréta answers a series of questions at Albertine Books in New York City. Garréta’s new novel, In Concrete (Deep Vellum, 2021), translated from the French by Emma Ramadan, is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I spent the first two years reworking the first twenty pages of this novel, over and over and over again,” says R. O. Kwon about writing her debut novel, The Incendiaries (Riverhead Books, 2018), in this 2018 Asian American Writers’ Workshop event with Alexander Chee. “I realized at the end of those two years that you can’t build a foundation if you don’t know what that house will look like,” says Kwon. “Am I building an opera house? Am I building a skyscraper?”

“Sometimes I feel like I’ve already seen everything that’s gonna happen. And it’s a nightmare.” Watch the trailer for Cherry, a film adaptation of Nico Walker’s 2018 debut novel of the same name, starring Tom Holland as a young man who ends up robbing banks to support his drug addiction.