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Poetry in America
The Wound-Dresser, by Walt Whitman
Season 3
Episode 1
Episode 1 explores 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.
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24:42
Play hooky with Frank O’Hara’s “Lunch Poems.” Poets and NYC-lovers join host Elisa New.
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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
Drive through West Texas with Tracy K. Smith, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and host Elisa New.
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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.