Poets & Writers Theater

“There are days we live / as if death were nowhere / in the background from joy / to joy to joy, from wing to wing,” reads Li-Young Lee from his poem “From Blossoms,” included in his debut collection, Rose (BOA Editions, 1986), for this installment of Poetry Breaks, a series created by Leita Luchetti in the 1980s and 1990s presented in partnership with the Academy of American Poets.

“There’s nothing in this book that hasn’t happened already,” says Margaret Atwood in this 1986 interview for the “Worth Quoting” series sponsored by Florida State College at Jacksonville, in which she discusses the release of her award-winning dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, and the historic and current events that influence her writing.

“You will love again the stranger who was your self.” Dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson reads Derek Walcott’s poem “Love After Love” from Collected Poems: 1948–1984 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986) for a tribute to the poet and playwright. Walcott, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, passed away on March 17, 2017.

In this film adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 supernatural horror novel, It, seven children are terrorized by a shape-shifting being that appears in the form of an evil clown. Directed by Andrés Muschietti, the film stars Chosen Jacobs, Jaeden Lieberher, Bill Skarsgård, and Finn Wolfhard.