You don't see many poets on late-night talk shows. You don't see many writers of fiction or non-fiction either. But poets are the rarest writers for that particular medium. So, I am always pleased to see and hear a poet on a show that gives the poet and poetry a wider audience.
I saw Clint Smith on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and I will admit that I did not know Clint or his writing at all. It is particularly good to discover a new poet this way. I found a variety of his poems online and picked up his latest poetry collection for this week's reading.
Clint Smith is the author of the narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times bestseller, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, the Stowe Prize and selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2021. He is also the author of the poetry collection Counting Descent, which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
In this video, he talks about what poetry can mean to people and how a teacher's encouraging words to a student can stay with them for a long time. He reads the first poems in his new collection, "All at Once." The poem alternates good and bad things happening all at once around the world - "The river that gives us water to drink is the same one that might wash us away." His latest collection of poems is Above Ground.
While we are all at home quarantining and poets are doing readings online and a few writers are doing their "book tours" virtually. I have been watching the daily videos from Billy Collins. They are very informal conversations and he reads his poems and poems by others. It's a low-tech iPhone production, but then so are some major newscasters and late-night TV guests.
At the end of today's "broadcast" (his term), he gave an "assignment" to read a poem before the Friday session. He said this was the poem he used when asked that impossible question "What is your favorite poem?"
I was surprised that his choice is "This Lime-tree Bower my Prison" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I had never read the poem before, but I can see that it is appropriate to a time when we are separated from friends and perhaps from nature and experiences.
You might want to read the poem and then join the live Facebook broadcast on Friday and add your comments.
Our April writing prompt is closed and we're putting together the next issue of "Odes to Common Things" and a new prompt for the merry month of May (at least we hope it might be merrier than April). You probably have been online more than usual and I don't encourage more screen time but there are lots of good poets reading their work on YouTube and the audio alone might be a good spring tonic. Of course, it's always nice to see a poet reading - in-person readings are best but video is an alternative even in non-pandemic times.
The Writer's Almanac (TWA) has started posting videos of poets whose work has been on the radio/podcast show reading poems that were used on the Almanac. (check out the full TWA playlist) It is great because you can see and hear the poet, and for almost all the poems you can find the poem text online at the TWA website. This might be useful for those of you teaching online or doing some homeschooling. Most of the videos are homemade using phones and webcams - which doesn't look so homemade anymore since national correspondents are doing the news from their homes too.
Here are a few examples - and I will also just point you at two of my own poems that are there - one poem is light and one is dark, so choose your mood.
The "Master Class" is something I associated with acting, but now there are ones on many of the creative arts, especially online. In his MasterClass on "Reading and Writing Poetry," Billy Collins covers some of the basics like subject and form, rhyme and meter. But you can tell (even in this excerpt) that he's more interested in the pleasures of a well-turned poem.
Collins is one of the best-selling contemporary poets in the United States. That works for and against him with critics who sometimes see his persona and humor as almost "too accessible." I think they are wrong.
Besides being called “America’s Favorite Poet” by the Wall Street Journal, he served two terms as U.S. Poet Laureate and is also a former New York State Poet Laureate. He’s been honored with the Mark Twain Prize for Humor in Poetry. He’s taught at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, and for much of his life at Lehman College, and is a distinguished professor at the City University of New York.
The MasterClass syllabus reads:
• Using humor as a serious strategy
• The fundamental elements of poetry
• Billy’s writing process
• Turning a poem
• Exploring subjects
• Rhyme and meter
• Sound pleasures
• Finding your voice
• Using form to engage readers
• The visual distinctions of poetry
Of course, these classes have a cost, but there are lots of free "classes" online too. Just staying in the Collins section of YouTube, you can hear him on the great poets.
Five of Collins' poems were the inspiration for animated films, which might seem like an odd way to look at poetry. Here he talks about the films in a TED Talk.
If you're like me, any good poetry reading is a kind of class. I always find myself inspired and making notes at readings of things that I should try to write about in my own poetry.
Here is a full reading by Billy Collins at the Strand Book Store in 2012 at the time of his collection Horoscopes for the Dead. If you have never had the chance at hearing Collins live, this is a good alternative. I think you may be inspired to write.
Poetry has from the beginning been an oral/aural art. We heard poems long before we wrote poems. And we must have seen poets perform those poems long before we saw them on a page.
Some poems have greater impact being heard. Some work better on the page. Sme poets are great readers. Some poets are great performers of their poetry. Some are not so great to see and hear read their work.
Poetry online at YouTube and other sites has been happening ever since video went online, but has really exploded with the advent of more ubiquitous broadband connections that allow smoother streaming, and with the dominance of smartphones.
Video is also being used by poets and publishers to promote poetry. For a publisher, this is an intentional way to get a poet's face and vice in front of potential readers. Sure, you still need to do tours and readings and book signings, but video has greater reach.
Sometimes the promotional aspect if more accidental. In 2014, an unpublished poet from Toronto named Sabrina Benaim took the stage at the semifinals for the National Poetry Slam in California. he looked and sounded really nervous, but the nervousness played well into her poem, “Explaining My Depression to My Mother.”
I have read that this was her first time performing it aloud (though I wonder how she made it to the semi-finals). She performs it in a rush of words, short of breath. She has said that she can’t remember the performance because she was really was that nervous and panicked.
It was videotaped and put online and that performance went viral. It has currently more than 6 million views on YouTube and an estimated 50 million views across all social media platforms. You can't plan a video to go viral. It just happens.
Sabrina Benaim had no book to promote and no publisher who wanted to promote her at that time. She worked on a poetry manuscript after that performance. She also stayed in contact with people who discovered her through the video. many of them were young people dealing with depression and parents who saw something in her poem about their own child's struggle with it.
Social media is still a part of her poetry life, but she has a first book of poems. Depression and Other Magic Tricks has “Explaining My Depression to My Mother” at its heart.
The small poetry press Button Poetry shot and uploaded her video back in 2014 and released her book three years later. The video certainly played a role in the book's publication and success. Preorders on Amazon were more than 5,000 and Button Poetry had to up their first of 25,000 copies with a second run of 15,000.
Button Poetry itself started with poets sharing performance poetry videos online. It didn’t start publishing books until 2013.
Movie trailers have long been used in theaters and now are even more important online. Novels often have a trailer nowadays. Poetry collections are playing catch-up in this area of promotion, though there are lenty of poets reading onlie that act as promotion for the poet, their work or the venue where they were reading.
The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival has been using video since its early days. At one time that vide would get some airplay on PBS TV stations. That's a distinguished place to be, but a limited audience. They moved much of that video in recent years online and their YouTube channel offers hundreds of poems free to people who will probably never have the chance to attend the festival or even see these poets read in person.
I was at several Dodge Festivals and heard Stanley Kunitz read, but now that he is gone, I am glad that video cameras were there to preserve the readings.
Not very reading captured on video is a performance in the way that we now think about "performance poetry," but every reading is a performance of a kind.
Do you know of a poetry performance on video that you think works really well for that medium? Share the link with all of us here.
With all the Oscar buzz this week, a nominated animated short film this year has a poetry connection. Max Porter and Ru Kuwahata's Academy Award Nomination for Best Animated Short with "Negative Space" is based on a poem of the same name by Ron Koertge.
Ron's prose poem (flash fiction?) begins:
My dad taught me to pack: lay out everything. Put back half. Roll things
that roll. Wrinkle-prone things on top of cotton things. Then pants, waist-
to-hem. Nooks and crannies for socks. Belts around the sides like snakes.
You can see how the filmmakers use the poem for their animated short. Here is the trailer for the film:
Ron Koertge's poem was published in his collection, Sex World(2014, Red Hen Press).
To supplement this month's sonnet writing prompt, here is poet Linda Gregerson discussing the history of the sonnet at Poets Forum in New York City in 2015.
Billy Collins isn't particularly fond of social media. You don't find him in person on Twitter or Snapchat or Facebook or YouTube, but you will find lots of him and his poetry there via posts from others.
If you missed, the archive of the Internet has saved it for you.
He reads several poems and talks about the writing process and the life of a poet - or at least his life as a poet.
"Lucky Cat" is a poem about one of his cats, Audrey, although Collins says he is "basically a dog person."
On how to be a poet, his main advice is to read. And practice.
"It's such dull advice. There's no key to it. It really lies in the simple act of reading tons of poetry. And I mean not just stuff you find in magazines but if you really want to be trained in poetry you need to read Milton — you need to read Paradise Lost. You need to read Wordsworth — you need to read Wordsworth's 'Prelude'... That's if you want to take it seriously. If you don't want to take it seriously, you can just get a 79-cent pen and express yourself. No one's gonna read it with any pleasure because ... you haven't paid attention to what happened in the past."
Unlike many poets, when Collins writes a poem he is hoping it is good enough to be published, but if it is not working, he doesn't "fret the poem" (as Robert Frost said) - he lets it go.
"The waste basket is the writer's best friend," he says.
A question that is often asked of poets and about poetry is "What's the difference in hearing a poem read aloud versus reading it silently?"
Collins also talks in greater detail about one of his poems, "Cosmology."
This poem begins before we had science to explain the universe and we looked for a visual representation of cosmology. Collins begins with and rejects the mythology of the Earth balanced "on the back of a sea turtle / who is in turn supported by an infinite regression / of turtles disappearing into a bottomless forever."
But his thoughts move towards a less scientific visual of the planet being balanced on Keith Richards' head.
Now that we are on the subject, my substitute picture would have the earth with its entire population of people and things resting on the head of Keith Richards, who is holding a Marlboro in one hand and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the other. As long as Keith keeps talking about the influence of the blues on the Rolling Stones, the earth will continue to spin merrily and revolve in a timely manner around the sun...
But the poems circles back to the opening thought as, like those turtles, he imagines Keith
standing on the other Rolling Stones, who are standing on the shoulders of Muddy Waters, and, were it not for that endless stack of turtles, one on top of the other all the way down, Muddy Waters would be standing on nothing at all.
The work of Anne Sexton reveals struggles with loneliness and depression, but she went before the camera to read her poems "Her Kind" and "Menstruation at Forty."
The second set of clips is from a 1966 visit to Sexton's home after the release of her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Live or Die. She tells the camera crew her husband hates the way she reads poems, but I have to disagree with him. Perhaps the most charming part of the clip is when Sexton loses her composure and snaps at her dogs. "What'd you do, tape me screaming at the dog?" she grins.
A fourteen-minute video split into two parts - Sexton at home reading, talking about poetry and about her family. Most of the material is showed in public for the first time. Spanish subtitles.
Part 1
Part 2
From a page at The Atlantic collecting rare clips of authors including Orwell, Beckett, Pynchon, Fitzgerald and Anne Frank.
Philip Levine, the 18th Poet
Laureate Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress, will connect
with high schools and public libraries via video conference to read and
discuss three of his poems: "Our Valley," "The Simple Truth," and "What
Work Is." The reading and discussion will be followed by an extended
question and answer period with video conference participants.
Event Date: Friday, May 4, 3 p.m. Eastern Time
Viewing
the Event: This event will be streamed live on the Web. A link to the
live video feed will be available from the Poetry and Literature Center
home page – http://www.loc.gov/poetry/
PHILIP LEVINE was born in Detroit in 1928, to Russian-Jewish
immigrant parents, and educated at Wayne University (now Wayne State),
the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Stanford University. He
is the author of twenty collections of poetry, and his honors include
the Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards, and two National Book
Critic Circle Awards.
A number of people have created videos to accompany poems. Not everyone gets the opportunities to go to festivals, workshops and reading and hear poets live, so sometimes video is the only alternative. And some videos are interesting films in themselves.
Four Seasons Productions has made short films set to classic poetry. There are 21 that have won festival prizes and produced a DVD. Their best “poem videos” are available on their YouTube channel. and include Langston Hughes’ “The Weary Blues,” “Only Breath” by 13th century sufi poet Rumi and “100 Love Sonnets IX” by Pablo Neruda in the original Spanish.
Poetry Everywhere has 34 short videos of contemporary poets, one poem per video, hosted by Garrison Keillor, using footage from the Dodge Poetry Festival.
I actually have avoided writing and reading poems about politics. They usually don't work for me. But, the past few years, I have become more of a news junkie and politics (and economics) have started to get under my skin more and more.
Here are two poems by Naomi Shihab Nye that do work for me. The first is "Letters My Prez Is Not Sending" (the Prez being Bush 2 then) which just hits you in the face. Let me amend that - it throws punches at you, but just stops before it makes contact. But you will flinch and wince anyway.
The second poem is "Ted Kooser Is My President" and it is lighter and easier to take but closer to my own apolitical approach to political poetry.
A poet could avoid the dilemma by taking the position that poetry shouldn’t be “political.” But Nye’s poems are attempts to stay connected to the world and to others. She refuses to abandon the attempt despite the violence and injustice she must therefore bear witness to. It is almost as if she discovers how we are connected through the act of bearing witness. Perhaps for Nye poetry itself is our humanity’s survival mechanism.
Nye has also said the courage she most admires is that of people who keep giving attention to the simple acts of everyday life—talking over coffee, getting kids ready for school, sweeping the front porch stoop—while there is chaos and danger all around them.
You can find “Letters My Prez Is Not Sending” and “Ted Kooser Is My President” in her newsest collection, Honeybee.
This video was created for the AARP U@50 video contest. The technique is borrowed from an Argentinian political ad, but I really like what is done with it here.
This runs less than 2 minutes and it's worth watching. There's a great twist to it.
It would make for one tough writing prompt to use this technique.
For 25 years, Academy Award-nominated director Jerry Aronson accumulated more than 120 hours of film on Allen Ginsberg. The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg (Deluxe Two-Disc Set) (83 minutes) is the result of his editing and the film is a portrait of one of America's greatest poets, author of HOWL and other ground-breaking poems.
Cinetic brings audiences the latest, greatest and classic festival favorites from around the globe. From award-winners by veteran filmmakers to up-and-coming talent telling new stories, Cinetic prides itself on being at the forefront of quality indie film in the digital space. Cinetic brings the festival and arthouse experience to audiences on demand. http://www.cineticmedia.com
The first offerings are readings from the 2006 Dodge Poetry Festival – including Billy Collins, Linda Gregg, Ekiwah Adler Belendez, Jorie Graham, Mark Doty, Lucille Clifton, Ko Un, Linda Hogan, Toi Derricotte, Tony Hoagland and Taha Muhammad Ali – can now be seen on YouTube.
Dodge Foundation Poetry Festivals, some of which have been featured on PBS. Over the years a remarkable group of poets from around the world has read to enthusiastic audiences and discussed a broad range of topics related to poetry.
Beginning in 1986 multi-day Dodge Poetry Festivals have been held every other year, usually in the highlands of New Jersey, and they have always attracted a diverse audience of poetry lovers. Recent Festivals have drawn audiences numbering between fifteen and twenty thousand people.
Here's Mark Doty reading "House of Beauty" which is set at a fire in Jersey City, New Jersey - but, of course, being a poem by Mark Doty, it's about so much more.
Borders Books has a portion of their website devoted to Open Door Poetry. It's a project to move poetry off the page and into video and audio. The site includes Billy Collins, Paul Muldoon, Kim Addonizio, Donald Hall, Franz Wright, Jorie Graham and others reading their poems and talking about poetry
They also are sponsoring the BORDERS Open-Door Poetry Contest which will be judged by Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate.
The second Borders Open-Door Poetry Contest is open for submissions through July. The top 10 (5 adult, 5 student) poems submitted, in text or in video, will be published on their site alongside a poem by Billy Collins in an upcoming episode. Billy will also read and give feedback on the poems he selects as best. All finalists’ poems will be considered for publication in our annual “Best of” book, which will highlight the many talented poets in the Borders community.
animated at 
reading "Caravan" and "Eulogy" at the 2006 Dodge Poetry Festival.
(83 minutes) is the result of his editing and the film is a portrait of one of America's greatest poets, author of HOWL and other ground-breaking poems.