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Poetry in America
Fast Break by Edward Hirsch
Season 1
Episode 2
Edward Hirsch’s poem, “Fast Break,” captures a single slow-motion play on a basketball court. Join Hirsch, host Elisa New, NBA players Shaquille O’Neal, Pau Gasol, and Shane Battier, and a group of pick-up basketball players as they use basketball to understand poetry—and poetry to better understand the game of basketball.
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25:21
Poet Martín Espada worked manufacturing legal pads, and the job is burned into his memory.
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25:43
Murray Bartlett, Laurie Santos, and more guests join Elisa New to read Wallace Stevens.
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25:21
David Axelrod, Bill Kristol and Andrea Mitchell read Robert Lowell with Elisa New.
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25:21
Consider the poetics, and politics, of fungi with poems by Sylvia Plath and Kay Ryan.
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25:21
Read the elegiac poetry of Joseph Brodsky, a Cold War Russian exile, with host Elisa New.
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25:21
Poems by Wheatley with Amanda Gorman, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Richard Blanco, and more.
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25:41
Leslie Jamison, Olivia Gatwood, & more read a sonnet by Millay with host Elisa New.
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25:14
Linda Hogan & Alberto Ríos explore their poems with host Elisa New, Jeff Corwin & more.
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25:38
Elisa New, Emily Oster, Sharon Olds, & Bernadette Mayer explore poems on motherhood.
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25:21
Caroline Kennedy, Tracy K. Smith & more read Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” with Elisa New.