Poets & Writers Theater

“As poets, our job is to make all the music complete on the page.” In this video, U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón presents a keynote speech on the power and beauty of poetry, and speaks with Dr. Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, about the intersections between art and science at the 2024 South by Southwest festival.

In this Poetry of Resilience interview, U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón reads from her collection The Hurting Kind (Milkweed Editions, 2022) and speaks about the emotions she writes from and the importance of poetry for healing with hosts and poets Danusha Laméris and James Crews.

In this 2020 Academy for Teachers craft talk, former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins discusses his theories on how poems find their way to an ending and discusses the works of David Berman, Wisława Szymborska, Tom Wayman, and others.

“The best things that happen in poems are discoveries, they’re accidents; what comes out of our imagination, out of our deepest self, out of our memory.” In this 2007 PBS NewsHour interview, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Charles Simic speaks about his childhood in Yugoslavia, writing about war, becoming a U.S. poet laureate, and the freedom in poetry. Simic died at the age of eighty-four on January 9, 2023.

In this 2016 lecture for the Greater Good Science Center’s conference, former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass discusses the history of awe and wonder in world literature, the root of the word “catharsis,” and the power poetry has to captivate and transform its readers.

In this interview for MSNBC’s American Voices, Ada Limón speaks to host Alicia Menendez about becoming the first Latina U.S. poet laureate, her journey to a writing career, life in Kentucky, and how poetry can bring people together in “those moments when we can put everything down for one minute and just see ourselves, each other.”

“That’s one of the reasons I write. I’ve needed to create the narrative of my life, its abiding metaphors, so that my story would not be determined for me.” In this 2022 video, former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey delivers the annual Windham-Campbell Lecture “Why I Write” for the prize ceremony at Yale University.

“Poetry is a place where both grief and grace can live, where rage can be explored and examined, not simply exploited.” In this 2018 PBS NewsHour video, Ada Limón shares her opinion on why she sees more and more people turning to poetry in the search for “radical hope” in the digital age. Limón was named the twenty-fourth poet laureate of the United States today.

“I still believe that we listen more closely to a whisper than to a shout.” In this PBS NewsHour interview with Jeffrey Brown, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Rita Dove speaks about history, rage, the power of poetry, and her latest collection, Playlist for the Apocalypse (Norton, 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.

“I’m carrying this for America, but for Indigenous peoples in particular,” says Joy Harjo about what it means to be the first Native American to serve as the poet laureate of the United States in this 2019 PBS NewsHour interview with Jeffrey Brown. A Q&A with Harjo about her new memoir, Poet Warrior (Norton, 2021), appears in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“When you’re judging a contest I’m looking for something to just knock me over, and that’s what happened when I read Natasha’s manuscript,” says Rita Dove about first encountering Natasha Trethewey’s poetry while judging a book contest. In this 2011 conversation at Emory University, the two former U.S. poets laureate discuss writing, mentorship, and literary ancestries. 

“At some level, I’m never quite sure how the poem is going to resolve itself and that I'm always in some way surprised—I make a discovery in the poem as I write it,” says former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove in this 2009 interview for Big Think, in which she answers questions about poetry and her writing process.

“If we could just stop, and listen,” begins Joy Harjo in a conversation about how stillness, gratitude, and kindness can help heal America in this Super Soul Sunday video with Oprah Winfrey.

“Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you. / Remember language comes from this.”​ In this video from the Academy of American Poets, Joy Harjo reads her poem “Remember” from her 1983 collection, She Had Some Horses. Harjo has been appointed to serve a second term as poet laureate of the United States and is the first Native American to hold the post.

“This is how the past interrupts our lives, all of it entering the same doorway…” In this clip from PBS’s Articulate, former poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey reads her poem “Letter to Inmate #271847.” An interview by Joshunda Sanders with Trethewey about her new book, Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir (Ecco, 2020), is featured in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this video, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and translator Robert Hass reads “Okefenokee: A Story,” “Pertinent Divagations Toward an Ode to Inuit Carvers,” and other poems from his book Summer Snow (Ecco, 2020) at the 2019 Sewanee Writers’ Conference in Tennessee. The book, Hass’s seventh poetry collection, is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Is this love the trouble you promised?” Tracy K. Smith, who has been named the twenty-second poet laureate of the United States, reads her poem “Wade in the Water,” which will be published in a poetry collection in 2018.

Allen Ginsberg’s anti-war poem “Hum Bom!” is read by Bono and then discussed by U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera and Harvard professor Elisa New. New is the creator of Poetry in America, a multi-platform digital initiative that offers professional development classes for educational practitioners, as well as free online poetry courses.

"Dinky planet on a skateboard of dynamite / Oh, what to do..." Juan Felipe Herrera, who has been appointed a second term as poet laureate of the United States, speaks about meeting young poets and reads from his most recent collection, Notes on the Assemblage (City Lights Publishers, 2015), at the 2016 AWP conference and book fair in Los Angeles.