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Poetry in America
You and I Are Disappearing, by Yusef Komunyakaa
Season 2
Episode 6
Yusef 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, Komunyakaa himself and a chorus of veterans discuss the mingled beauty and horror of war-- and the challenge of making art of it.
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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.