Poets & Writers Theater

“Revelation never comes as a fern uncoiling / a frond in mist; it comes when I trip on a root, / slap a mosquito on my arm,” reads Arthur Sze from his poem "Earthshine" in this 2008 video for the Lunch Poems reading series at the University of California, Berkeley. Sze’s latest collection, The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this 2018 video, Matthew Zapruder reads from his poetry collections Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon Press, 2012) and Sun Bear (Copper Canyon Press, 2015), and his book Why Poetry (Ecco, 2017) for the Lunch Poems reading series at UC Berkeley. Zapruder’s fifth poetry collection, Father’s Day (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this 2016 video, Carmen Giménez Smith reads from a selection of her poems for the Lunch Poems reading series at the University of California in Berkeley. Smith speaks about her fifth book, Cruel Futures (City Lights Books, 2018), in “The Love of Labor, the Labor of Love” by Rigoberto González in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this 2002 video, poet and essayist Mary Ruefle reads a selection of poems and prose pieces for the Lunch Poems reading series at UC Berkeley. Ruefle is the author of On Imagination (Sarabande Books, 2017), a chapbook-length essay exploring the act of writing.

"I’m so damned literary / and at the same time the waters rushing past remind me of / nothing..." Hilary Kaplan reads Frank O'Hara's "Poem en Forme de Saw" from Lunch Poems, first published in 1964 by City Lights Publishers. Angélica Freitas's debut collection, Rilke Shake (Phoneme Media, 2015), translated from the Portuguese by Kaplan, won the 2016 Best Translated Book Award in poetry.