Poetry in America

Explore Walt Whitman’s “The Wound-Dresser,” set in the battlefield infirmaries and operating theaters of 1860s Washington, D.C. Actor David Strathairn, playwright Tony Kushner, composer Matthew Aucoin, opera star Davóne Tines, physician-writers Rafael Campo and Abraham Verghese, and historian Drew Faust join Elisa New to discuss how the trauma of the Civil War shaped American history.

Richard Blanco's poem "Looking for The Gulf Motel" transports readers to 1970s Florida, recalling a Cuban American family’s vacations on the sparkling sands of Marco Island. Blanco and international superstar Gloria Estefan join Elisa New and a chorus of Cuban American adults in Miami and middle school students in New York City to reflect on family and what it means to call a place home.

Picking up a hand-sized stone near a rushing waterfall, the speaker of A.R. Ammons’s poem “Cascadilla Falls” is catapulted into the cosmos. Planetary scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton, composer DJ Spooky, geologist Daniel Schrag, poet Joshua Bennett, CEO Larry Berger, and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein join host Elisa New to consider Ammons’s window onto the vast workings of the universe.

Billie Holiday’s haunting song “Strange Fruit” winds beneath the unsettling, satiric humor of Evie Shockley’s poem “you can say that again, billie.” Shockley, jazz singer Cassandra Wilson, historian Robin D.G. Kelley, actor LisaGay Hamilton, novelist Beverly Lowry, and radio host Nick Spitzer join Elisa New to discuss the history of racism, violence, and artistic tradition in the American south.

Do good fences really make good neighbors? Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” asks surprising questions about the role of walls in civil society. Host Elisa New gathers Ambassador Caroline Kennedy, author Julia Alvarez, political commentator David Gergen, Frost biographer and poet Jay Parini, poet Rhina Espaillat, and former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith to delve into this classic poem.

Sharon Olds’ “The Language of the Brag” and Bernadette Mayer’s “The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters” are exuberant, boisterous tributes to motherhood. Both poets join host Elisa New, actor Donna Lynne Champlin, writer Emily Oster, activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, obstetrician Lorna Wilkerson, and co-founders of Our Bodies Ourselves to explore the miracle, and mess, of creating new life.

Two poems, by Linda Hogan and Alberto Ríos, follow wolves, jackrabbits, and other animals across the harsh Great Plains and Sonoran Desert. Both poets join wildlife biologist Jeff Corwin, film director Chris Eyre, Native American scholars Philip Deloria and Stephanie Fitzgerald, and a chorus of students to discuss how the poems call back difficult histories of human migration in the American west.

In 1920s Greenwich Village, Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote sonnets that toppled clichés of love and romance. To probe this unsentimental break-up poetry, host Elisa New speaks with musician Natalia Zukerman, poet Olivia Gatwood, New York Times advice columnist Philip Galanes, writer Leslie Jamison, scholar of Greenwich Village Jeffery Kennedy, and a chorus of National Student Poets.