Poets & Writers Theater

“Now the oil-fired heating boiler comes to life / Abruptly, drowsily, like the timed collapse / Of a sawn-down tree, I imagine them.” In this 2011 PBS NewsHour video, the late Seamus Heaney reads from and speaks about his final collection, Human Chain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010). The Nobel Prize–winning poet died at the age of seventy-four on August 30, 2013.

“In my own writing, I feel safest when I’m farthest from what I know.” Tracy K. Smith reads “Digging” by Seamus Heney, the poem she feels “invited her to start writing poetry,” and from “My God, It’s Full of Stars,” a poem she wrote about her father. This video, part of the P.O.P. series, was shot and edited by Rachel Eliza Griffiths in partnership with the Academy of American Poets.

“Masons, when they start upon a building, / Are careful to test out the scaffolding...” The late Seamus Heaney reads his poem “Scaffolding” on the occasion of his seventieth birthday in 2009.

"Late August, given heavy rain and sun / For a full week, the blackberries would ripen." The late Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney reads his poem "Blackberry-Picking."

Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, died on August 30, 2013. This video features a compilation of excerpts from the many occasions the celebrated poet recited his popular poem, “Digging.”