POETRY IN AMERICA Season 2


#201: “Urban Love Poem” – Marilyn Chin
The episode explores San Francisco's history from the Gold Rush and early Chinese immigration to the rise of Silicon Valley through Chin's poem of her San Francisco youth. In this series opener, New brings together acclaimed memoirist Maxine Hong Kingston, tech investor Randy Komisar, and four Bay Area residents on a rooftop in Chinatown to discuss the love of a great city.

#202: “One Art” – Elizabeth Bishop
“The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” Bishop wrote in this poem, universally considered one of her greatest. Journalist Katie Couric, media executives Sheryl Sandberg and Yang Lan, singer/songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter, poet Gregory Orr, and others discuss Bishop’s masterpiece on losses, great and small.

#203: “The Fish” – Marianne Moore
This environmental science-themed episode explores Moore’s great poem of marine life. Vice President Al Gore, poet Jorie Graham, and scientists from Conservation International dive into Moore’s portrayal of the ocean’s always-changing history, and its future in a warming world.

#204: “This Your Home Now” – Mark Doty
New talks with poet Mark Doty, psychologist Steven Pinker, choreographer Bill T. Jones, design maven Simon Doonan and designer Jonathan Adler about this poem in which a visit to the barber shop sparks a meditation on love, the AIDS crisis, masculinity, home, and getting older.

#205: “Finishing The Hat” – Stephen Sondheim
Sondheim is widely hailed as the greatest modern American musical theater composer. Series creator New speaks with Broadway stage actors Raśl Esparza and Melissa Ericco, writer Adam Gopnik, and others to explore Sondheim’s singular ability to blend lyrics and music—using as their case study this song from his Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Sunday in the Park with George.

#206: “You and I Are Disappearing” – Yusef Komunyakaa
Komunyakaa went to Vietnam as a journalist but he came home a poet. This episode explores what burns in memory and on the page, even decades later. Former Secretary of State John Kerry, film and theatre director Julie Taymor, composer Elliot Goldenthal, several Vietnam War veterans, and Komunyakaa himself discuss the mingled beauty and horror of war—and the challenge of making art from it.

#207: “This Is Just To Say” – William Carlos Williams
Just 28 words and mimicking the form of a refrigerator note, is “This is Just to Say” simply the short apology it pretends to be, or something more subtle and passive-aggressive? Join actor John Hodgman, poet and physician Rafael Campo, poet Jane Hirshfield, a chorus of couples, and New as they consider what may or may not lie beneath the surface of William Carlos Williams’s brief tribute to marital relations--and the savor of plums.

#208: "Whitman"
In 1855 Walt Whitman declared “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.” Poetry In America celebrates the 200th anniversary of Walt Whitman’s birth with Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, playwright Tony Kushner, poets Mark Doty and Marilyn Chin, and a chorus of National Student Poets, discussing Whitman’s powerful and timeless work.