Poets & Writers Theater

“I never know what to say after someone says ‘that’s beautiful’ except to agree with them. For me, beauty is an end of conversation.” In this 2011 video for the Cortland Review, as a part of the documentary series Poets in Person, the late Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Dunn speaks about his writing practice from his home. Dunn died at the age of eighty-two on June 24, 2021.

“The art of poetry for me is the art of composing a sequence of vowels, consonants, and sentence sounds that will seem moving, meaningful,” says former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky in this 2014 episode of Cortland Review’s Poets in Person series, in which he discusses his beginnings as a poet and his philosophy behind writing.

The author of more than ten collections of poetry and several volumes of essays, criticism, and memoir, Orr welcomes viewers into his home (and his writing cottage) in Charlottesville, Virginia, in this video directed by Guy Shahar, part of the Cortland Review's series Poets in Person.