Poets & Writers Theater

“I never felt that I wrote [my poems] anyway. I would feel them coming from way off, and then they would come toward me and if I didn’t catch them, they went through me and went on. So I just figured they were part of the universe and not me.” In this excerpt from the 2017 film In Person: World Poets, a collaboration between Bloodaxe Books and filmmaker Pamela Robertson-Pearce, the late poet Ruth Stone reads her poems from her home in Vermont.

“These poets really took me on a journey. Through each of their poems you got to essentially travel across L.A. into different neighborhoods, into different people’s spaces,” says director Carlos López Estrada about meeting the twenty-seven spoken word poets from the nonprofit Get Lit who cowrote and are featured in his new film, Summertime.

“My father was raised in Calcutta, in the neighborhood where all of these Bengali films were shot,” says Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jhumpa Lahiri about growing up surrounded by Bengali cinema and how it influenced her second novel, The Lowland (Knopf, 2013), in this 2017 interview for Criterion Collection.

“We were in love with the world / and then we weren’t...” Mathias Svalina reads an excerpt of his poem “From Thank You Terror” at the Silo City Reading Series with music by the band Cages and visual art by Mary Helena Clark. Svalina is the author of The Wine-Dark Sea (Sidebrow Books, 2016) and travels to cities in America by bicycle delivering personalized poems to subscribers of his Dream Delivery Service.

In Neruda, a film directed by Pablo Larraín, an inspector hunts down Nobel Prize–winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who becomes a fugitive in his home country for joining the Communist Party. Part fact, part fiction, the film stars Gael García Bernal and Luis Gnecco.

Written and directed by James Sadwith, and based on his own quest to find J. D. Salinger in his youth, Coming Through the Rye is a film about a teenager who writes a play adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye. Before staging the play, he seeks the approval of the reclusive author, played by Chris Cooper.

Author, dancer, and scholar Barbara Browning plays Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger” on the ukulele for this video to promote Two Dollar Radio’s micro-budget film division.

In celebration of Emily Dickinson's 184th birthday today, we share this collage of clips from films featuring her famous poems. The video accompanied a talk at the Emily Dickinson Museum with Jerome Charyn, author of the novel The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson (W.W. Norton, 2010) in 2011.