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A curated selection of videos, including book trailers, brief interviews, and other literary curiosities updated daily.
Michael McClure, whose poetry Allen Ginsberg described as "a blob of protoplasmic energy," performs one of his poems as well as one by Emily Dickinson in this clip from 2007. McClure's Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems, which includes an introduction by the late Leslie Scalapino, is out this month from the University of California Press.
The folks at McSweeney's Quarterly Concern put together this audio-visual preview of their thirty-sixth issue, which was published last month and features more than five hundred pages of stories and artwork contained in a box more or less the size of a human head.
Two history teachers from Honolulu, Hawaii, have spent the past year or so creating a series of videos that use tailored versions of popular songs to deliver history lessons. Here is a bit about The Canterbury Tales set to "California Dreamin'" by the Mamas and the Papas. Check out the historyteachers channel on YouTube for dozens more.
The folks at the independent Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, put together this tongue-in-cheek video to introduce the fictional television station HBTV—the store's new YouTube channel featuring clips of staff members recommending books.
Half in Love: Surving the Legacy of Suicide by Linda Gray Sexton, the daughter of poet Anne Sexton, was published last week by Counterpoint. In this clip, which was produced shortly after the publication of Diane Middlebrook's 1991 biography of the poet, Anne Sexton reads her work and appears in home movies taken before her death in 1974.
The book trailer for The Memory Palace, Mira Bartók's memoir about growing up with a mother who suffered from schizophrenia, features music and paintings by the author. The Memory Palace will be published next week by Free Press.
Author Kwame Dawes recently appeared on the PBS NewsHour to discuss his experience in Haiti, where he has traveled over the past year to report on and write poems about life after the earthquake last January. After you watch the clip, check out Kevin Nance's article "Haiti Noir, Haiti Light" in the new issue.
This short film, directed by Alex Markman, starring Tom Shillue, and produced by Electric Literature, takes a look at how well the big books of 2010 would protect you in the event of a shooting.
Bob Holman reads "Happy New Year Poem" at the 37th annual New Year's Day marathon reading at the St. Mark's Poetry Project in New York City.
Ander Monson's video interpretation of one of the essays in his 2007 collection, Neck Deep and Other Predicaments (Graywolf Press). "Best watched in the dark, lights off, January in Michigan, real cold," Monson writes on his YouTube channel.
