Poets & Writers Theater

“A poem is an utterly free space for language,” says Kathleen Ossip in this 2017 lecture at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. “That is what makes it indispensable to me, and also what makes it political.” Ossip’s fourth poetry collection, July (Sarabande Books, 2021), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“It matters what you call a thing,” reads Solmaz Sharif from her poem “Look” in this 2017 reading and conversation with Evie Shockley for the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. For more Sharif, read “Shadows of Words: Our Twelfth Annual Look at Debut Poets” from the January/February 2017 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this 2013 Woodberry Poetry Room video, Mary Ruefle reads twenty-eight short meditations from her essay collection Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012) with subjects including Shakespeare, Socrates, Van Morrison, the dead, hypocrisy, and loneliness. Ruefle received the 2020 Arthur Rense Poetry Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Brenda Shaughnessy reads her poem “I Have a Time Machine” and discusses the role that poetry can play in recovering from traumatic experiences for a TEDx event at Harvard University. Shaughnessy is the author of Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon Press, 2012) and So Much Synth (Copper Canyon Press, 2016).

In this Poetry in America video, hip-hop artist Nas sits down with Elisa New, professor of American Literature at Harvard University, to discuss his approach to writing and break down his lyrics. Poetry in America, created and directed by New, is a multi-platform initiative that encourages the spread of poetry through classes, conversations, and digital outreach.

“The dog kept at it, each bark, one right after the other, loud as gunshot, its face a box of jowl and jaw more massive than bloodhound.” At Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, ZZ Packer reads from and discusses her novel-in-progress, The Thousands, which chronicles the lives of black, white, and Native American families shortly after the Civil War, through Reconstruction and the Indian Campaigns in the Southwest.

"The best way to find an agent is a referral." For an event at Harvard University, Betsy Lerner, a partner with the literary agency Dunow, Carlson & Lerner, offers essential advice to writers on how to find an agent and get published. "Rock, Paper, Scissors" by Lerner, an essay on being an agent, writer, and editor, is in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

"Education is no equalizer. Rather, it is the sleep that precedes the American Dream." At the Harvard Graduate School of Education's 2016 graduation ceremony, Donovan Livingston delivers a passionate spoken word poem titled "Lift Off" to his classmates as his commencement speech, which gained attention on social media.

With animation by Isaac Holland, this video features the poem “Smell” by William Carlos Williams, and is narrated by the poet. The Poetry of Perception short animation series focuses on representations of sensory perceptions and is produced for Harvard University's Fundamentals of Neuroscience course.

“I’m making an argument with my body and the ground about our bodies and the ground.” At Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Ross Gay, author of Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), discusses the implications of being a black poet who writes about flowers in a lecture entitled “A Book of Flowers.”

This video, animated by Sophie Koko Gate, features an excerpt from the poem “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman, and is narrated by Peter Blegvad. Produced for Harvard University's Fundamentals of Neuroscience course, the Poetry of Perception animated series looks to poetry to explain sensory perceptions.

Featuring the poem “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark” by Emily Dickinson, narrated by Anna Martine, this video was animated by Hannah Jacobs for Poetry of Perception, a series of scientific animated short films.