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“There are kinds of knowledge, in both science and poetry, that can be made visible only by their enacting.” For this recording of the Academy of American Poets’ 2024 Blaney Lecture, Jane Hirshfield discusses the visible versus the invisible and examines poetry’s ways of naming through some of her favorite poems.
“Tonight I pray to the god / of small children and broken toys,” reads January Gill O’Neil from her poem “Prayer” in this installment of the P.O.P. series, shot and edited by Rachel Eliza Griffiths in partnership with the Academy of American Poets. O’Neil’s fourth collection, Glitter Road (CavanKerry Press, 2024), is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“in a documentary / they dove in / into the burble / of river, braiding / around each other....” Raymond Luczak reads and performs his poem “Otters,” which appears in his forthcoming collection, Animals Out-There W-i-l-d: A Bestiary in English and ASL Gloss (Unbound Edition Press, 2024), in this Academy of American Poets video. The poem is translated into American Sign Language (ASL) gloss, which uses English words and ASL idioms in the ASL sign order.
“It’s difficult to describe how I felt about the pictures I collected, how I continued to forge a link with them that I didn’t particularly understand.” Patricia Smith speaks about the photographs she collected over the course of twenty years that inspired her latest collection, Unshuttered (Northwestern University Press, 2023), for this recording of the Academy of American Poets’ 2023 Blaney Lecture. For more on Smith, read her conversation with Tyehimba Jess in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“Crisp new books fell open / in my tiny hands / like tomorrow’s gold...” In this video, Magdalena Gómez, former poet laureate of Springfield, Massachusetts, reads her poem “La Biblioteca Is a Doula” as part of Dear Poet, the Academy of American Poets’ educational project for National Poetry Month.
“What I’m hoping is, ten years from now, a young Puerto Rican poet on the island or somewhere else knows that this is a possibility, that living a life with and through poetry is an honorable way of engaging with the world.” Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, the first Latino executive director and president of the Academy of American Poets, reflects on why he began writing and the importance of expanding the linguistic diversity of poetry in this PBS NewsHour interview with Jeffrey Brown.
Watch this virtual multilingual reading of poetry in translation presented by Words Without Borders in partnership with the Academy of American Poets. Enjoy poetry in Arabic, French, Malay, Spanish, and English, with readings by poet Jeannette Clariond and translator Samantha Schnee, poet Zahid M. Naser and translator Pauline Fan, poet Samira Negrouche, and translator Kareem James Abu-Zeid.
“I left like a season’s first lover across a window, // slowly like a southern sun / diagonal on a work-back.” Tyree Daye reads “The Mechanical Cotton Picker,” which appears in his poetry collection Cardinal (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), in this Academy of American Poets video.
Poet Brian Blanchfield reads Carl Phillips’s poem “Corral” at the Tippet Rise Art Center in Montana in this short film directed by Matthew Thompson as part of the Above Strands of Earth series produced in collaboration with Tippet Rise and the Academy of American Poets, and commissioned by the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation.
“It seems to me that prose, it may be lyrical, but it isn’t meant to be sung.” In this 2014 Academy of American Poets event, Edward Hirsch discusses the history and practice of poets writing prose with Toi Derricotte and Claudia Rankine.
