NewsHour Poetry Series | PBS NewsHour | PBS

Ancient Afghan Poetry Form Adapts to Tell Story of Modern Life and Conflict

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:47:00 EDT

JEFFREY BROWN: And finally tonight, we end where we began, with Afghanistan, but this time through a very different lens, one of language and culture.

For many Americans, Afghanistan is a country shrouded in mystery, particularly its women, literally shrouded under a burka, silent and seemingly impenetrable.

ELIZA GRISWOLD, Journalist: As a Westerner, I would look for years at these blue burkas, thinking, those women beneath are chattel. They have nothing to say, because they're not -- I don't hear them saying anything.

JEFFREY BROWN: Journalist Eliza Griswold has reported from Afghanistan for the last 10 years. She wanted to get beyond the headlines, and especially to understand the lives of rural women, mostly illiterate Pashtuns living along the border areas with Pakistan, amid the daily realities of war.

Her way in was through short poems called landays, each just two lines long, with 22 syllables.

WOMAN: "Separation, you set fire in the heart and home of every lover."

ELIZA GRISWOLD: This is rural folk poetry. This is poetry that's meant to be oral. It's passed mouth to mouth, ear to ear. And the women have recited these poems for centuries.

So they have gone from talking about the riverbank, which is the place you gather water and, of course, the place men go to spy on the women they have crushes on, to Facebook, to the Internet. And so they really reflect the currents that women in Afghanistan are encountering today.

JEFFREY BROWN: A poet herself, Griswold collaborated with photographer and filmmaker Seamus Murphy. Poetry magazine is devoting its entire June issue to their work.

And as part of the project, Murphy has made a short documentary featuring the landays.

WOMAN: "I could have tasted death for a taste of your tongue, watching you eat ice cream when we were young."

JEFFREY BROWN: As with poetry everywhere, one theme is love. But there's a whole lot more.

WOMAN: Slide your hand into my bra. Stroke a red and ripening pomegranate of Kandahar.

ELIZA GRISWOLD: Pull that burka back, and she will talk to you about the size of her husband's manhood. She will go right for it: sex, raunch, kissing, rage. She will talk about the rage of what it is to be cast in this role of subservient, in a way that's really startling.

JEFFREY BROWN: The rage Griswold speaks of is another theme, aimed at the unequal and often harsh treatment of women.

WOMAN: "When sisters sit together, they always praise their brothers. When brothers sit together, they sell their sisters to others."

JEFFREY BROWN: Griswold says landays are a way to subvert a social code in which many rural women are prohibited from speaking freely.

ELIZA GRISWOLD: They're a way to be very outspoken, but not to own the authorship of that statement, because, being collective and anonymous, a woman can say this and she can say, well, of course, I just heard that on the phone, or I just heard that in the market. I didn't make that up.

JEFFREY BROWN: That's in a society where they are otherwise not allowed to speak, not allowed to write poems.

ELIZA GRISWOLD: At all.

JEFFREY BROWN: With real danger, dangerous consequences.

ELIZA GRISWOLD: Exactly.

JEFFREY BROWN: In fact, this project began after Griswold wrote a magazine article on a young woman who'd been beaten for writing poems, and later killed herself.

Given stories like that, it was also tricky to collect the landays.

ELIZA GRISWOLD: Frequently, to meet these women, I had to be undercover to some extent. I had to wear a burka of their request. "Please come dressed as one of us. We will gather on Saturday afternoon. Our husbands will be out."

We started in refugee camps around Kabul, and we would hit situations like -- first of all, Seamus and I were never able to work together, because it is impossible for him as a man to witness women singing or saying these landays.

JEFFREY BROWN: They just won't do it?

ELIZA GRISWOLD: They would be killed to be found out to do it.

JEFFREY BROWN: Another major theme of the landays is the pain and sorrow of war.

WOMAN: "In battle, there should be two brothers, one to be martyred, one to wind the shroud of the other."

ELIZA GRISWOLD: There's a lot of anger at the Taliban, a lot of rage at the hypocrisy of the Taliban, and an equal amount, if not more, rage at the hypocrisy of the Americans and what their influence has left behind.

Many of the women who were sharing them with us were survivors of very recent bombing attacks. One woman had shared a landay about her cousin, a Talib who'd just been killed by a drone strike.

WOMAN: "The drones have come to the Afghan sky. The mouths of our rockets will sound in reply."

JEFFREY BROWN: The mention of drones is also an example of how landays respond to changes in society. Verses that once mentioned the British now substitute Americans. And today, landays are shared on the Internet and in social media, and those new technologies make their way into the updated verses.

WOMAN: "How much simpler can love be? Let's get engaged now. Text me."

JEFFREY BROWN: What happens to this form in the future? What -- is it your sense that it might die off because of changes in the country? Or does it have a life?

ELIZA GRISWOLD: So, I asked one of the leading novelists in Afghanistan, a guy named Mustafa Salek, what he thought. What will happen to the landay now they talk about the Internet, Facebook, drones? It will kill them. And he said just the opposite. They're being traded and they are changing, right, being remixed like rap is, at a rapid speed, and people love them.

The landay is supposed to communicate in the most natural language the truth of Afghan life. So, I found my assumptions about the death of the landay being absolutely confounded by what Afghans said themselves.

JEFFREY BROWN: Just another assumption confounded in this rare look behind the veil.

And, for the record, Poetry magazine, which is featuring the landays this month, is produced by the Poetry Foundation, which helps support our coverage.

And there's more on all of this online, where photographer Seamus Murphy narrates a slide show of his images for the project.

Short, Potent Poetry Offers Bite of Afghan Life

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:17:01 EDT

Watch Video Journalist and poet Eliza Griswold set out to document Afghan life through the prism of oral folk poems shared mostly among Pashtun women. Seamus Murphy, the London-based photographer and filmmaker who worked with Griswold on the landay project, has been covering events in Afghanistan for 20 years. He narrates a slideshow of some of his favorite images.

For 10 years, journalist Eliza Griswold reported from Afghanistan and Pakistan for publications like The New York Times and The New Yorker. But she was frustrated that in pursuit of the headlines, some of her most interesting stories were left on the cutting room floor. Too often, she felt, she wasn't able to convey the humanity and humor of the Afghan people who were living with the daily realities of war. Last year, she embarked on a project to tell those stories by collecting oral folk poems shared mostly among Pashtun women. I dream I am the president. When I awake, I am the beggar of the world. The poems are called landays. Just two lines long with 22 syllables, they carry a bite. (One meaning of the word landay is short, poisonous snake.)

"This is rural folk poetry. This is poetry that's meant to be oral. It's passed mouth to mouth. Ear to ear. And the women have recited these poems for centuries," said Griswold. A poet herself, Griswold collaborated with photographer Seamus Murphy to document Afghan life through the prism of these landays. Poetry Magazine is devoting its entire June issue to their work.

As with poetry everywhere, many of the themes deal with love and lust. Slide your hand inside my bra Stroke a red and ripening pomegranate of Kandahar "Pull the burka back and she will talk to you about the size of her husband's manhood. She will go right for it: sex, raunch, kissing, rage. She will talk about the rage of what it is to be cast in this role of subservient, in a way that is really startling," says Griswold.

The landays are a way to subvert the social code in which women are prohibited from speaking freely. Since the poems are collective and anonymous "women can claim they just overhead the poems in the marketplace," says Griswold, "not that they authored them." You sold me to an old man, father. May God destroy your home, I was your daughter. Over the past decade, many of the landays have also expressed anger about the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan: May God destroy the White House and kill the man who sent U.S. cruise missiles to burn my homeland. Others are filled with sorrow: In battle, there should be two brothers: One to be martyred, one to wind the shroud of the other. Collecting the poems wasn't easy. Griswold had to essentially go "under cover," wearing a burka and meeting women in secret locations. And photographer Murphy was never able to accompany her. "It was impossible for him as a man to witness women or singing the landay. The women would be killed if they were found out," says Griswold. Mother, come to the jailhouse windows. Talk to me before I go to the gallows. Although the tradition of landay poetry goes back centuries, they are kept very up-to-date with modern references. While the river was typically the place where men could interact with women who were gathering water, this landay mentions the way men and women now meet (at least in other countries). Daughter, in America the river isn't wet. Young girls learn to fill their jugs on the internet. Griswold had worried that these modern terms would mean the death of the landay, but was assured by one of Afghanistan's leading novelists that just the opposite was happening.

"They are being traded and changed and remixed like rap music. People love them," said Griswold. "The landay is supposed to communicate, in the most natural language, the truth of Afghan life. So I found my assumptions about the death of the landay being absolutely confounded by what Afghans said themselves." How much simpler can love be? Let's get engaged now. Text me.

Weekly Poem: Charles Hood Reads 'Skype'

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 12:25:00 EDT

By Charles Hood

We are arguing about if there are pets in Heaven and my partner in the miracle that is marriage assures me that more people at any moment on earth are dreaming than are talking, cooking, making love, or riding bikes. Than are beating dogs, doing an ollie off a railing, skutching flax, tightening a wing nut, fixing the photocopier with a paperclip, or sailing to Byzantium with SparkNotes and a highlighter. Than are blowing on tinder to start a fire. More are dreaming than tying their shoes after gym. More people right now are dreaming than are flying, than are driving their cars, than are pulling all of the triggers on all the guns in all of the world. Pulses of joy and pomegranates fill more dreams than all the water in all of the Niles rushing over all the glossy lips to purl into white mist. There are more dreams than snowflakes, more dreams than wind, more dreams than the planets waiting above us for their turn to come to bed and ravish the night by kissing the mad circus horse riders and the drunken pilots and the dead polar explorers on the tops of their heads, on their hands, kissing them right on their wide mummified sepia mouths.

Charles Hood is the author of "South x South" (Ohio University Press), winner of the 2012 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. His previous books include "Bombing Ploesti" and "Rio de Dios" (Red Hen Press). He has been the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship, an Artist in Residency with the Center for Land Use Interpretation and an Artists and Writers grant from the National Science Foundation. He teaches photography and writing at Antelope Valley College, Calif.

Charles Henry Rowell

Tue, 14 May 2013 10:49:01 EDT

Jeffrey Brown talks with longtime literary editor Charles Henry Rowell about his passion for promoting undiscovered and under-appreciated African-American poets and artists. His latest effort is a new anthology called "Angles of Ascent."

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Transcript: New Anthology Celebrates 'Ascent' of African-American Poets Watch some of the poets included in "Angles of Ascent" read their work here.

New Anthology Celebrates 'Ascent' of African-American Poets

Mon, 13 May 2013 18:43:00 EDT

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JEFFREY BROWN: And finally tonight, bringing contemporary African-American poetry into the public eye.

CHARLES HENRY ROWELL, Callaloo: I think we're going to have to omit Colson Whitehead.

JEFFREY BROWN: Meeting to plan the summer issue of the literacy journal Callaloo and editor Charles Henry Rowell finds he has an embarrassment of riches.

CHARLES HENRY ROWELL: We are going to have so much stuff. And I'm trying to hold back, so that we won't overrun.

JEFFREY BROWN: Rowell, who was raised on a farm his parents owned in Alabama, started the journal in 1975 as a home for Southern black writers who he says were mostly ignored by journals of the day in both the South and North.

CHARLES HENRY ROWELL: The purpose was to identify, nurture, and promote and publish new black writers.

We will just keep going and keep going and keep going.

JEFFREY BROWN: At age 74 and for the last 12 years based at Texas A&M University, Rowell can look back on remarkable success. His journal has helped introduce several generations of now high-profile writers, some of whom we have featured on the NewsHour.

Former poet laureate Rita Dove:

RITA DOVE, Former Poet Laureate: "Singsong."

"When I was young, the moon spoke in riddles and the stars rhymed. I was a new toy waiting for my owner to pick me up."

JEFFREY BROWN: National Book Award Winner Terrance Hayes:

TERRANCE HAYES, National Book Award Winner: "Root."

"My parents would have had me believe there was no such thing as race there in the wild backyard, our knees black with store-bought grass and dirt."

JEFFREY BROWN: And the current laureate, Natasha Trethewey.

NATASHA TRETHEWEY, U.S. Poet Laureate: "Elegy for My Father."

"I think by now the river must be thick with salmon. Late August, I imagine it as it was that morning, drizzled, needling the surface, mist at the banks like a net settling around us."

JEFFREY BROWN: These and 82 other poets are now part of Charles Rowell's latest ambitious project: "Angles of Ascent," a new "Norton Anthology."

CHARLES HENRY ROWELL: I wanted to demonstrate the infinite variety of voices and content and style and ideas in African -- contemporary African-American poetry.

JEFFREY BROWN: The anthology begins with poems from two literacy giants, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, followed by poets including Amiri Baraka and Nikki Giovanni writing at the height of the black power movement.

But the majority of the book focuses on poets writing after the turbulent civil rights era.

CHARLES HENRY ROWELL: What fascinated me about the contemporary writer is that turn from the external world into the interior world, not the obsession with -- quote -- "the struggle," not that that is not a valid subject, but that has been written about over and over. And these writers were not committing themselves to the struggle. They were committing their poetry to itself, to its craft, to its beauty.

JEFFREY BROWN: That's a good thing, right?

CHARLES HENRY ROWELL: Yes. Oh, yes, that's very positive to me, because ...

JEFFREY BROWN: Yes. Yes.

CHARLES HENRY ROWELL: And I think it's terribly revolutionary. These poets use being black to write about larger subjects.

JEFFREY BROWN: He says the change has not only broadened the poetry, but the audience as well.

CHARLES HENRY ROWELL: If I'm able to get you to feel what I'm thinking about in a poem, and you start identifying with it and you proceed to quote my poem, that's revolutionary, you know, because earlier, non-African-Americans didn't go around quoting African-American poets.

This is another cover art.

JEFFREY BROWN: In addition to discovering new poets, Rowell is also always on the lookout for new black artists from around the world.

CHARLES HENRY ROWELL: Collecting art is an addiction for me. And I don't know. And I just feel that I have to have things around me that are beautiful.

JEFFREY BROWN: Many of the paintings end up on the covers of the Callaloo journals. And this fall, he will publish a special edition devoted just to art.

In both art and poetry, he says, the idea is to promote the undiscovered or ignored.

CHARLES HENRY ROWELL: I'm prepared to do battle. And that has been my whole life, to do battle with whatever I confront that is anti-me or anti-community, not with loud, screaming voices, mind you, or sounding revolutionary, but doing the work that is necessary to do.

JEFFREY BROWN: Many, many years later, you still -- still on the mission.

CHARLES HENRY ROWELL: I'm still on the battlefield.

JEFFREY BROWN: Doing the battle.

CHARLES HENRY ROWELL: That is my nature now. It's in the DNA, practically.

JEFFREY BROWN: The new anthology is "Angles of Ascent."

Charles Henry Rowell, thanks for talking with us.

CHARLES HENRY ROWELL: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I enjoyed it.

JEFFREY BROWN: Online, you can watch some of the poets included in the new anthology read from their works, including Natasha Trethewey, Elizabeth Alexander, Rita Dove, and Kevin Young. That's on our Art Beat page.

Poet Gerald Stern Looks Back on a Career Spent Reading and Writing

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 18:48:00 EDT

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Finally tonight, we talk with one of the country's most acclaimed poets, Gerald Stern, as he looks back at more than 70 years of writing verse.

Jeffrey Brown has our conversation, part of our occasional series on poets and poetry.

JEFFREY BROWN: At 87, Gerald Stern has been writing poetry a long time and has been one of the nation's most honored poets. Now he's received a new honor for a collection of some of his earliest works.

The prestigious Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress is given for the most distinguished book of verse published in the last two years. Stern won for his "Early Collected Poems." His newest book is called "In Beauty Bright."

And welcome to you.

GERALD STERN, Author, "Early Collected Poems": Hi, Jeff.

JEFFREY BROWN: What happened when you look -- I want to talk about these early -- this early collection. What happened when you looked back at the early poems? What did you see?

GERALD STERN: Well, you know, I paid a lot of attention to it in the last couple of days, because I felt there it was my duty in terms of this prize to read from that book, rather than recent poems.

And what struck me was two things, the overwhelming similarity of what I'm doing now and the overwhelming difference.

JEFFREY BROWN: On the one hand, on the other hand.

GERALD STERN: In a certain year, '64/'66, I suddenly developed a voice that I have been happy with ever since. And I have never been left alone. I have never had a time when I didn't have five or six poems from that day to this where I'm ready to work at ...

JEFFREY BROWN: I see. So, in that sense, you feel sort of the same poet.

GERALD STERN: Right, albeit, you know, you write differently when you're 70 than when you're 30 or when you're 80 than when you're 50.

JEFFREY BROWN: What does that mean? How do you write differently?

GERALD STERN: Well, because you're closer to death. You're farther from birth.

Your children, if you have them, are older. You have some money.

JEFFREY BROWN: You grew up in Pittsburgh.

GERALD STERN: Yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: You describe walking, walking the streets. You came from a working-class background.

GERALD STERN: And that's what I did. I walked all the time across the bridges.

JEFFREY BROWN: And ...

GERALD STERN: Through the tunnels.

JEFFREY BROWN: And the background wasn't one of literature and poetry. Right?

GERALD STERN: We didn't have one book in my house, not one book. And we used to get Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, which was a Hearst paper. And we subscribed to Look magazine. And that was the extent of reading material there, plus a Bible in Hebrew, you know?

JEFFREY BROWN: So, when it came to there you were now teaching American literature, and you had to teach yourself in some ways?

GERALD STERN: I was a prisoner of the library.

And I just -- just spent hours sitting on the -- in the stacks on a lighted floor which gave off some heat in the main branch of the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh just reading, reading, and reading. And I just -- after I graduated from college, and I did with highest honors -- I was really a bright student -- I wasn't a major in English. I majored in political science. I was going to be a lawyer.

And I -- my dad, my poor dad said, well, what are you going to do? Because I was offered all kinds of scholarships. And I said I'm going to take off a year and read. And that became 10 years. I lived in Paris, New York, and all that stuff.

JEFFREY BROWN: And then a life of reading and a life of writing.

GERALD STERN: Yes. Yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: So, just bring us up -- in our last minute here, like, bring us up to date. I mean, where are you now as a writer, as a poet?

GERALD STERN: In 2012, I had two books published, this book called "In Beauty Bright," which is a book of poetry, and a book of prose called "Stealing History," which is published by Trinity University Press. It's about 300-some pages, 85 short sections.

They're not essays, but they're essay-like and they're almost like prose poems, some of them. And since I have published this book -- I counted the other day -- I have 63 new poems.

JEFFREY BROWN: So, you're certainly not slowing down?

GERALD STERN: I'm speeding up.

JEFFREY BROWN: In a sense of urgency, or it just happened?

GERALD STERN: Just joy.

JEFFREY BROWN: Just joy?

GERALD STERN: And there's no -- joy and sorrow, of course. They go together, and -- don't they?

JEFFREY BROWN: I guess so.

GERALD STERN: And it's just what I do.

I have another poem again that's a recent poem. I don't have it with me. I don't think it's in here. It's called "The Mule." And I think of myself as a mule with blinders or blinded. Some of them, they actually blind. And they went in a circle pushing against a stone grinding corn, grinding wheat, and, only, I make poems, so I'm a mule.

And that was the metaphor I used in that poem.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right.

Well, the honored book is for the "Early Collected Poems: 1965-1992." The new book is "In Beauty Bright."

GERALD STERN: "In Beauty Bright."

JEFFREY BROWN: Gerald Stern, nice to talk to you. Thanks.

GERALD STERN: It's a pleasure to talk to you, Jeff. It really is.

JUDY WOODRUFF: What an inspiration. And you can go to Art Beat to listen to Stern read his poem "The One Thing in Life."

Gretel Ehrlich

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 09:44:00 EDT

Poet and writer Gretel Ehrlich shares her reflections on the devastating earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan in 2011, where she traveled to document the physical and emotional aftermath. Best known for her nature and travel writing, Ehrlich has authored 13 books, including three of poetry.

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Transcript: A Writer Reflects on the Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami, Two Years Later In this web exclusive clip, Ehrlich reads from "Facing the Wave":

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A Writer Reflects on the Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami, Two Years Later

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 18:48:00 EDT

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JEFFREY BROWN: Finally tonight: Monday marks two years since a devastating tsunami hit Japan. We take a look back through the words of a writer.

Gretel Ehrlich is best known for her nature and travel writing. She's authored 13 books, including three of poetry.

It was the most powerful earthquake ever to hit Japan, triggering a tsunami that reached over 130 feet, taking close to 16,000 lives and causing the meltdown of three nuclear reactors, a disaster of epic proportions.

Beginning in the 1960s, Gretel Ehrlich began visiting Japan regularly to study and write about its culture, its religion -- she's a practicing Buddhist -- and its literature. Soon after the tsunami, she returned for the first of three trips to document the physical and emotional aftermath.

GRETEL EHRLICH, Author: I felt a need to go. And it's been a lifelong thing about Japan that has called me. I wanted to hear the stories. I wanted to help people tell what had happened to them.

JEFFREY BROWN: The result was the new book, part reportage, part personal reflection, titled "Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami."

She talked to us about it recently on Kent Island, Md., where she spends the winter.

GRETEL EHRLICH: We came to cove after cove of villages that just didn't exist anymore.

You would see parts of boats up in the trees and clothing and -- from rocks and -- but it was when we got to the larger towns, three of them right in a row, where you drive down a street, and the rubble on either side would maybe be two or three stories high. It became this illegible collage of a society that had been completely taken apart and left there.

JEFFREY BROWN: For Ehrlich, one response was in poetry, writing verse based on what she was seeing.

GRETEL EHRLICH: My old friend William Stafford, a poet now gone, said, a poem is an emergency of the spirit.

And I think that's -- were the moments that I wrote a poem, when I couldn't sort of tell the news anymore.

"Here, the earth altar breaks. We have always been on the move. Past and future, those are places I have never reached. Where the tsunami wave came and went, that's where I am."

Everything in Japanese culture is about beauty framed by impermanence. And a poem can be very brief and, in a way, explode out like an open door. It draws the mind and the heart in, and then it lets go. It sort of steps aside. Everything is transient. Everything is in flux.

JEFFREY BROWN: But many things in Japan, she says, also have historical resonance. One of her poems, referring to the 17th century poet Matsuo Basho, makes a comparison between the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

GRETEL EHRLICH: "At Ishinomaki, where Matsuo Basho once wrote a poem, finally, the twisted roadbed drains and the daily flood tides at Ishinomaki dry out. The sky unmists itself and loss upon loss begins to feel like company. Nothing touches. Nights are brittle and soft, ink scraped smooth. To the South, Fukushima Daiichi blazes, flames we can't see. Sixty-six years ago, two other seacoast towns vanished. I stick my forearm out in moonlight looking seaward. My skin burns."

There was a sense of survival euphoria that came up, because it was so -- in such a field of loss, the possibility that you were still alive was kind of overwhelming.

JEFFREY BROWN: Amid the devastation, Ehrlich says, she found a remarkable resilience. This is a country and a people with long experience of natural disasters, including tsunamis.

GRETEL EHRLICH: "Oceans. Even underwater, I try to see, is the abyss dark or fed by fire? I hold a cracked tea bowl in my mind. It is lopsided, beautiful, spilling. The chilled depths into which I slide break open like doors. Abyss-san says, you have to be alive to die."

JEFFREY BROWN: Ehrlich says she hopes to return to Japan soon to help with efforts to move people from temporary government housing into permanent homes.

And there's more online, where you can watch Gretel Ehrlich read from her poetry. That's on our Art Beat page.

Poet Profile: David Ferry

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 00:36:40 EDT

Jeffrey Brown profiles David Ferry, a poet concerned with making connections to classical literature. Ferry was recently honored with the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize as well as the National Book Award for poetry. At age 88, he is currently tackling a translation of Virgil's "Aeneid."

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Transcript: Poet David Ferry on Writing Verse, Reading Poems, Winning Awards at 88

In this web exclusive clip, David Ferry reads from his collection, "Bewilderment."

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Read four of Ferry's poems after the jump.

Virgil, Aeneid VI Lines 297-329 From here there is a road which leads to where The waters of Tartarean Acheron are, Where a bottomless whirlpool thick with muck Heaves and seethes and vomits mire into The river Cocytos. Here is the dreadful boatman Who keeps these waters, frightful in his squalor, Charon, the gray hairs of his unkempt beard Depending from his chin, his glaring eyes On fire, his filthy mangle hanging by A loose knot from his shoulders. All by himself He manages the sails and with his pole Conveys the dead across in his dark boat-- He's old, but, being a god, old age is young. A vast crowd, so many, rushed to the riverbank, Women and men, famous great-hearted heroes, The life in their hero bodies now defunct, Unmarried boys and girls, sons whom their fathers Had had to watch being placed on the funeral pyre: As many as the leaves of the forest that, When autumn's first chill comes, fall from the branches; As many as the birds that flock in to the land From the great deep when, the season, turning cold, Has driven them over the seas to seek the sun, They stood beseeching on the riverbank, Yearning to be the first to be carried across, Stretching their hands out toward the farther shore. But the stern ferryman, taking only this one Or this other one, pushes the rest away. Aeneas cries out, excited by the tumult, "O virgin, why are they crowding at the river? What is it that the spirits want? What is it That decides why some of them are pushed away And others sweep across the livid waters?" The aged priestess thus: "Anchise's son, True scion of the gods, these are the pools Of the river Cocytos and this the Stygian marsh, Whose power it is to make the gods afraid Not to keep their word. All in this crowd are helpless Because their bodies have not been covered over. The boatman that you see is Charon. Those Who are being carried across with him are they Who have been buried. It is forbidden To take any with him across the echoing waters That flow between these terrible riverbanks Who have not found a resting-place for their bones. Restlessly to and fro along these shores They wander waiting for a hundred years. Not until after that, the longed-for crossing."

That Now Are Wild and Do Not Remember Where did you go to, when you went away? It is as if you step by step were going Someplace elsewhere into some other range Of speaking, that I had no gift for speaking, Knowing nothing of the language of that place To which you went with naked foot at night Into the wilderness there elsewhere in the bed, Elsewhere somewhere in the house beyond my seeking. I have been so dislanguaged by what happened I cannot speak the words that somewhere you Maybe were speaking to others where you went. Maybe they talk together where they are, Restlessly wandering, along the shore, Waiting for the way to cross the river.

Soul What am I doing inside this old man's body? I feel like I'm the insides of a lobster, All thought, and all digestion, and pornographic Inquiry, and getting about, and bewilderment, And fear, avoidance of trouble, belief in what, God knows, vague memories of friends, and what They said last night, and seeing, outside of myself, From here inside myself, my waving claws Inconsequential, wavering, and my feelers Preternatural, trembling, with their amazing Troubling sensitivity to threat; And I'm aware of and embarrassed by my ways Of getting around, and my protective shell. Where is it that she I loved has gone to, as This cold sea water's washing over my back? Ancestral Lines It's as when following the others' lines, Which are the tracks of somebody gone before, Leaving me mischievous clues, telling me who They were and who it was they weren't, And who it is I am because of them, Or, just for the moment, reading them, I am: Although the next moment I'm back in myself and lost. My father at the piano saying to me, "Listen to this, he called the piece Warum?" And the nearest my father could come to saying what He made of that was lamely to say he didn't, Schumann didn't, my father didn't, know why. "What's in a dog's heart"? I once asked in a poem, And Christopher Ricks when he read it said "Search me." He wasn't just being funny, of course; he was right. You can't tell anything much about who you are By exercising on the Romantic bars. What are the wild waves saying? I don't know. And Shelley didn't know, and knew he didn't. In his great poem, "Ode to the West Wind." he Said that the leaves of his pages were blowing away, Dead leaves, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.

Poet David Ferry on Writing Verse, Reading Poems, Winning Awards at 88

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 18:48:00 EDT

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GWEN IFILL: Finally tonight: a poet still exploring his own deep connections to the past.

Jeffrey Brown has our story.

DAVID FERRY, Poet: In February, "It will be my snowman's anniversary, with cake for him and soup for me."

JEFFREY BROWN: The weekly poetry reading for 88-year-old David Ferry with his daughter and two grandsons, who live next door to his home in Brookline, Mass., today's entry, Maurice Sendak's "Chicken Soup With Rice."

WOMAN: "Blowing once, blowing twice, blowing chicken soup with rice."

JEFFREY BROWN: More often, Ferry is found here at his desk, filling in more lines and verses in a lifetime of writing. And, late in life, the honors keep coming. Recently, he was given the Ruth Lilly Lifetime Achievement Award. And his newest collection, titled "Bewilderment," won the National Book Award for Poetry.

What does it turn you are bewildered by?

DAVID FERRY: Everything.

Everything.

But -- every poem, as I -- just as everything we say to one another, is an attempt to try to get something clear to the other person or to ourselves and so on. And that's always a partial success and a partial failure. And the title acknowledges that.

JEFFREY BROWN: Ferry grew up in New Jersey the son of a businessman, and spent most of his adult life teaching English at Wellesley College, chairing the department, raising a family, busy with all that entails.

And he has a simple answer for what some have seen as a hugely productive flowering late in life.

DAVID FERRY: One answer is retirement.

JEFFREY BROWN: Your retirement gave you more time?

DAVID FERRY: It gave me more time. It doesn't feel like, you know, suddenly I have got a lot of energy I didn't have in a sense. I don't know whether I had it or not, just because I was doing other things.

JEFFREY BROWN: In addition to his own volumes of poetry, Ferry is renowned as a translator. He's done acclaimed English versions of the Babylonian epic "Gilgamesh" and of Latin texts by Horace and Virgil.

And lines from works of the past will, in turn, show up in and become part of his own verse. In the "Bewilderment" collection, for example, a translation of a poem by Virgil is followed by a similarly themed poem by Ferry himself. This is a man clearly obsessed with connections and links.

I saw a review where someone referred to you with great admiration as a special kind of thief. So that's all artists, you know, use, right?

DAVID FERRY: Yes. And I do, do that. One reason for doing that is what it says in my own poem, its usefulness for that poem. It also, I think, does mean that there's a kind of motive to connect what you're saying to the past of writing, that you want your own poem to be part of that kind of enterprise.

JEFFREY BROWN: There is a poem of yours called "Ancestral Lines" which goes to this question of connections to the past, right?

DAVID FERRY: Yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: Can you read the beginning for us?

DAVID FERRY: It says: "When following the others' lines, which are the tracks of somebody gone before, leaving me mischievous clues, telling me who they were and who it was they weren't, and who it is I am because of them, or, just for the moment, reading them, I am, although the next moment, I'm back in myself and lost."

JEFFREY BROWN: You have these lines of others telling me who they were, who they weren't, and who I am.

DAVID FERRY: Yes. Yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: That's the kind of connective tissue you see.

DAVID FERRY: Yes.

When you read something, and especially when you're reading compellingly great, that becomes part of your identity, at least while you're reading it. You become changed by reading it. And then you're finished with it. Then you're lost again. Then you're back to just who you are.

JEFFREY BROWN: After the death of his wife seven years ago, Ferry moved to be nearer his daughter and grandsons.

And in his new neighborhood, he now finds himself the unofficial poet laureate of Matt Murphy's, a local Irish pub that has immortalized him with a photo on the wall and a passage from one of his poems painted around the bar.

He's also working his way through a new translation of one of the famous poems in world literature, Virgil's epic "The Aeneid," hoping to finish in another two years.

The recognition is pleasing, he told me, though he had his own humorous take on the National Book Award victory.

DAVID FERRY: When I told I was a finalist, I told my daughter, and she said -- she said, what do you think your chances are?

And I said, "One in five," because there were five finalists. And I said, but my hope is maybe they'd give it -- give it to me as a preposterous pre-posthumous award.

JEFFREY BROWN: Preposterous pre-posthumous award?

DAVID FERRY: Right, right.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, David Ferry, I'm glad they gave you the award. Congratulations.

Nice to talk to you.

DAVID FERRY: Thank you. Very nice to talk to you.

GWEN IFILL: You can watch David Ferry reading his poem "Soul" on Art Beat.

Gerald Stern

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 16:09:28 EDT

At 87, Gerald Stern has been writing poetry for a long time and is one of the nation's most honored poets. He recently received a new honor for a collection called "Early Collected Poems: 1965-1992": the prestigious Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress, given to the most distinguished book of verse published in the last two years.

Stern, whose newest book is "In Beauty Bright," joined me in the studio last week for a conversation:

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Stern reads his poem "The One Thing in Life":

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Richard Blanco

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 08:27:31 EDT

Jeffrey Brown talks with Richard Blanco, the poet chosen to read at President Obama's second swearing-in, about what it means to be a part of the festivities. Blanco, a Spanish born Cuban-American, is the first Latino, openly gay, as well as the youngest poet to ever at a presidential inauguration.

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Transcript: Inauguration Poet Richard Blanco Hopes to Offer Words of Unity, Belonging

Extended Interview and Reading with Richard Blanco:

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Richard Blacno reads "One Day" at President Obama's inauguration: Watch Video

Read the poem here.

Inauguration Poet Richard Blanco Hopes to Offer Words of Unity, Belonging

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 18:27:00 EDT

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JEFFREY BROWN: And now to the man who will be just the fifth inaugural poet in the nation's history.

Richard Blanco was, as he said, made in Cuba -- he was conceived there -- assembled in Spain -- his mother gave birth to him there -- and quickly imported to the United States. He grew up in Miami. He trained and worked as a civil engineer before turning to poetry. He's published three volumes, most recently one titled "Looking For the Gulf Motel."

Blanco now lives in the small town of Bethel, Maine. On Monday, he will become the first Latino, the first openly gay, and the youngest poet to read his work at a presidential inauguration.

Welcome.

RICHARD BLANCO, poet: Thank you.

JEFFREY BROWN: Congratulations.

RICHARD BLANCO: Pleasure to be here.

JEFFREY BROWN: Let me get to some of these firsts first.

This inauguration is a political event, and it is a rare meeting of, in your case, politics and poetry. What do you see yourself bringing to it?

RICHARD BLANCO: Well, I think, first and foremost, hopefully a great poem.

RICHARD BLANCO: It is obviously a question that had been floating around in the air.

But I would think and I would hope that I was selected, first and foremost, obviously for respect and admiration for my work. But it is also a tremendous honor. I mean, one can't help but think of all those firsts, as you just mentioned.

And I feel, I feel -- just in that context, it feels so much as part of the American dream, sort of a little taste of the American -- so much of what the American dream is made out of, to sort of -- when I think about my background and being a little Cuban kid from Miami and all of a sudden being asked to sort of speak before the nation, for the nation, to the nation. I mean, it's just amazing, and just besides myself.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, you know, I read your work. It often is narrative. It tells stories about you, family history, Cuban Americans.

I know you can't tell us about your poem, that you are going to give much away.

RICHARD BLANCO: Right. Right. Right.

JEFFREY BROWN: But what is the narrative that you want to convey in that poem?

RICHARD BLANCO: I will say -- I mean, I will say, in a word, unity.

I think that's something that's always been on my mind since trying to fit in since I was a kid, since I was a Cuban American kid and that sense of...

JEFFREY BROWN: Trying to fit into what?

RICHARD BLANCO: To what is the American ideal or what I thought was the American ideal.

I mean, I grew up between two imaginary worlds. One was the sort of 1950s of Cuba, of my parents from stories and photographs and pictures, and growing up in Miami in the 1970s.

The other imaginary world was America. There was this -- what I saw in the "Leave it to Beaver" and all the rest of the -- "Brady Bunch" -- and living inside Miami at the time in an exile community, I really thought that that kind of America really existed.

So, there's -- my stories are always about negotiation and how do we fit in. Of course, that's how I started writing. And that is what brought me to writing, that sort of question.

And as I wrote more and more about it, I realized it was a universal question. How do we belong, where do we belong, how do we belong together, what does that mean?

And so that is kind of sort of the same approach I'm taking to this poem. I'm asking a lot of questions of myself in the poem, even though it is in a different tone and a different voice. But it's like, what does it mean to be an American in today's -- especially in my generation? What does that mean?

JEFFREY BROWN: You know, when you mentioned coming to poetry, I was curious because you -- as I said, you trained as a civil engineer. You worked as a civil engineer. You came to poetry -- writing poetry, at least, as far as I know, a little late, it sounds as though.

RICHARD BLANCO: Yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: What is it that brought you to poetry?

RICHARD BLANCO: I should preface that by saying, I mean, I always had a creative bone. I was always the kind of kid that was coloring or paint-by-number sets or whatnot.

And -- but growing up in a working-class family, business is survival. Like, it would be a sort of typical sort of exile immigrant family. They wanted me to ensure that -- they wanted to ensure that I had a better life than them.

JEFFREY BROWN: Poetry wasn't one of the occupations in the plan. Right?

RICHARD BLANCO: No. No.

And then there was also sort of the cultural divide. So even though the arts, were they to be discussed around the dinner table, it wasn't going to be Frost. So there was also that cultural divide. And so my parents are sort of -- I wouldn't say pushed me, but they sort of encouraged me towards these direction that I choose, civil engineer, because I was a whiz at math.

So, I just sort of went with that and really was outside the realm of my -- of possibility at that moment. It's one of the reasons that I try to speak at schools as much as I can. Had I met a Sandra Cisneros or something when I was younger, maybe that would have been more of a possibility.

Nevertheless, after I graduated from engineering, I started, as I say, doodling around with poetry, fooling around with poetry, then went to a creative writing course at a community college, at Miami-Dade Community College. And then the one thing led to another. And as they say, the rest is history.

But I was doing it for me. And it was interesting, because I think that it was fun. I was doing it -- that degree was for me. That was just -- I didn't do it with any sort of end goal. And it was just, well, here we are.

JEFFREY BROWN: Here we are indeed, in quite a place.

Let me just ask you finally, briefly, I gather it's family lore that your name, Richard, you are named after another president, Nixon.

RICHARD BLANCO: Right. Right. Right.

JEFFREY BROWN: Now, here you are with President Obama. You were asked to write three poems. Somebody picks one poem, right...

RICHARD BLANCO: Right.

JEFFREY BROWN: ... that you will read.

RICHARD BLANCO: Right.

JEFFREY BROWN: Do you know if the president himself reads the poems?

RICHARD BLANCO: I'm not certain.

I mean, I get -- I keep on having these images of -- in my head about the president sitting around the Oval Office actually reading them and checking off. But I am not sure.

JEFFREY BROWN: Among all the things he has to do.

RICHARD BLANCO: Among all the other things.

RICHARD BLANCO: So I'm not sure exactly how the process worked, but that committee, I know, has worked so hard. And, so you know, we just -- we're trying to sort of be as cooperative as possible, and not get to that level of questioning or whatnot.

But they do -- they picked one. I know the White House has looked at it. I don't know exactly what that means. But, yes, they picked one, so -- and overwhelmingly chose one, so...

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, we will all hear on Monday.

And you and I are going to continue this talk online.

RICHARD BLANCO: That's right.

JEFFREY BROWN: For now, Richard Blanco, thanks so much.

RICHARD BLANCO: Thank you.

JEFFREY BROWN: Also online, our website features extensive inauguration coverage, from a look back at presidential speeches to a rundown of the scheduled events. NewsHour politics editor Christina Bellantoni takes you on an insiders video tour of Washington, D.C. And we will live stream the president's official swearing-in Sunday, plus all the festivities Monday. You can find our coverage on our home page.

Friday on the NewsHour: Inaugural Poet Richard Blanco

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 18:00:00 EDT

Richard Blanco was, as he says, "made in Cuba" (he was conceived there), "assembled in Spain" (his mother gave birth to him there) and quickly "imported to the United States" (he grew up in Miami). He trained and worked as a civil engineer before turning to poetry. He's published three volumes, most recently, "Looking for the Gulf Motel."

On Monday he will become the first Latino, the first openly gay, and the youngest poet to read his work at a presidential inauguration. I spoke to him earlier Friday. You can watch that conversation HERE.

Below, you can watch our extended interview and Blanco reading his poem "Betting on America":

Watch Video

Read Richard Blanco's Q&A with the Poetry Foundation here.

Poet Richard Blanco Chosen to Read at Obama's Inauguration

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 12:15:00 EDT

The Presidential Inaugural Committee announced Wednesday that Richard Blanco has been chosen to read a poem at President Obama's inauguration swearing-in ceremony on Jan. 21. Blanco will become the first Hispanic and first gay poet to read at a presidential inauguration. At 44, he is also the youngest poet ever given that task.

"Even though it's been a few weeks since I found out, just thinking about my parents and my grandparents and all the struggles they've been through, and how, you know, here I am, first-generation Cuban-American, and this great honor that has just come to me, and just feeling that sense of just incredible gratitude and love," Blanco told NPR.

Here's Blanco reading "Betting on America" in 2012:

"I'm honored that Richard Blanco will join me and Vice President Biden at our second inaugural," President Obama said in a written statement. "His contributions to the fields of poetry and the arts have already paved a path forward for future generations of writers. Richard's writing will be wonderfully fitting for an Inaugural that will celebrate the strength of the American people and our nation's great diversity."

According to his biography at PoetryFoundation.org, "Blanco was made in Cuba, assembled in Spain, and imported to the United States -- meaning his mother, seven months pregnant, and the rest of the family arrived as exiles from Cuba to Madrid where he was born. Only forty-five days later, the family emigrated once more and eventually settled in Miami where he was raised and educated." He now lives in Bethel, Maine.

Blanco told the New York Times: "Since the beginning of the campaign, I totally related to [President Obama's] life story and the way he speaks of his family, and of course his multicultural background. There has always been a spiritual connection in that sense. I feel in some ways that when I'm writing about my family, I'm writing about him."

Blanco is the author of "City of a Hundred Fires" (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998) and "Directions to The Beach of the Dead" (University of Arizona Press, 2005).

Listen to Blanco read his poem "America":

Text of the poem is here.

Blanco will be the fifth poet to read at a swearing-in ceremony for the nation's highest office: Robert Frost recited "The Gift Outright" at John F. Kennedy's in 1961; Maya Angelou read "On the Pulse of Morning" at Bill Clinton's in 1993; Miller Williams' "Of History and Hope" was also read for Clinton in 1997; and Elizabeth Alexander read "Praise Song for the Day" at Mr. Obama's 2009 inauguration.

Weekly Poem: 'Distracted by an Ergonomic Bicycle'

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 13:32:00 EDT

By James Arthur

On a rainy morning in the worst year of my life, as icy eyelets shelled the street, I shared a tremor with a Doberman leashed to a post. We two were all the world until a bicyclist shot by, riding like a backward birth, feet-first, in level, gentle ease, with the season's hard breath between his teeth. The rain was almost ice, the sky mild and pale. I saw a milk carton bobbing by on a stream of melting sleet. A bicyclist. A bicyclist. He rode away— to his home, I guess. I went home, where I undressed, left my jacket where it fell, went straight to bed, and slept for two days straight. But those clicking wheels kept clicking in my head, and though I can't say why, I felt not only not myself, but that I'd never been ... that I was that man I hardly saw, hurling myself into the blast, and that everything I passed—dog, rain, cold, the other guy— I left in my wake, like afterbirth. James Arthur is the author of "Charms Against Lightning," a debut poetry collection published by Copper Canyon Press in October. He has received the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry, a residency at the Amy Clampitt House and a Discovery/The Nation Prize.

Photo by Sean Hill.

Greek Poets Muse Austerity Measures: 'We'll Hawk the Parthenon to Buy Our Bread'

Tue, 25 Dec 2012 18:45:00 EDT

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GWEN IFILL: Another way of looking at the ongoing economic crisis in Greece.

Jeffrey Brown was in Athens recently and talked to two poets about hard times now and in the nation's past.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, so, sometimes, you're out with the kids and a demonstration starts?

ALICIA STALLINGS, Poet: Well, we have got a friend who lives in the center, and we have had play dates where we have had to sort of figure out when we think the riot is going to start.

JEFFREY BROWN: An American poet in Athens, Alicia Stallings moved here 13 years ago with her Greek husband.

ALICIA STALLINGS: I think you have your sock inside out.

JEFFREY BROWN: They now have two young children, and have watched the nation go from the euphoria of the entry into the euro and the hosting of the Olympic Games to the despair of an ongoing financial crisis that's having severe economic and social consequences.

ALICIA STALLINGS: You see -- every time you walk down the street, there will be shops newly closed or having a sellout sale, or you see more homeless people on the streets. You see more people begging, and a different class of people begging, not professional beggars, people who had recently been sort of somewhere at the bottom of the middle class.

JEFFREY BROWN: Stallings is trained as a classicist reading ancient Greek and Latin.

She did an acclaimed translation of the Roman philosopher Lucretius' "The Nature of Things," and her own poetry has garnered several prizes. In 2011, she was the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, the so-called genius award. Her latest collection, titled "Olives," explores, among other things, ancient and modern lives in her adopted home.

ALICIA STALLINGS: There's weirdly a lot of energy in Athens. And whether that's good or bad, there's a feeling.

JEFFREY BROWN: What kind of energy?

ALICIA STALLINGS: Maybe there's a -- that there's nothing left to lose is a kind of freedom as well. People are going out to plays. They're still going out and doing things, but, you know, with less money. And -- but there's an urgency. There are -- poetry readings are very well attended. Literary events are packed. So I think...

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, what do you think that -- why do you think that is?

ALICIA STALLINGS: Well, A., I think it's inexpensive.

(LAUGHTER)

ALICIA STALLINGS: Inexpensive entertainment.

But, B., I think people want to be together. They want to be talking to people.

JEFFREY BROWN: The crisis around her, she says, rarely makes it into her poetry in an explicit way. But she did have one direct hit for us, a playful work in progress called "Austerity Measures."

ALICIA STALLINGS: I love the term “austerity measures.”

(LAUGHTER)

ALICIA STALLINGS: It sounds so poetic.

JEFFREY BROWN: Even though it's so real, nitty-gritty in what's happening here?

ALICIA STALLINGS: Yes, but I love the idea of measures as -- you know, as verse.

It was prompted by a headline that I read somewhere, which was, "Greece Downgraded Deeper Into Junk," the Greek bonds. And it scanned nicely, and I just wanted to play with it. So this is just playing with it.

"Austerity Measures."

If you believe the headlines, then we're sunk. The dateline oracle, giddy with dread, Greece downgraded deeper into junk. Stash cash beneath the mattress, pack the trunk. Will drachmas creep where euros fear to dread? If you believe the headlines, then we're sunk. A crisis that lasts for years. Call it a funk. Austerity starves the more its maw is fed, and downgrades all our deepest bonds to junk.

"Every politician is a punk, the right, the left, the blue, the green, the red, ministers in cahoots with the odd monk. We have lost our marbles. Elgin took a chunk. Caryatid's gone on strike. Sit down instead. Tear gas lingers like a whiff of skunk. Weep, Pericles, or maybe just get drunk. We will hawk the Parthenon to buy our bread. If you believe the headlines, then we're sunk, Greece downgraded deeper into junk."

JEFFREY BROWN: If these are interesting times in Greece, where you can see a man crawling into a recycling bin to cart away newspapers he will sell for a pittance, and, of course, the weekly, sometimes daily, protests by various government workers, well, Titos Patrikios is a man who knows interesting times.

TITOS PATRIKIOS, Poet: Interesting and difficult, but perhaps every interesting time is also a very difficult time. Easy times are not interesting, perhaps.

(LAUGHTER)

JEFFREY BROWN: Easy times are not interesting.

(LAUGHTER)

JEFFREY BROWN: A poet and elder statesman of Greek letters, he's seen many of the hardships and horrors of Greek history in the 20th century, including the German occupation in World War II.

TITOS PATRIKIOS: Here is Athens during the occupation, a street in the center quarter of Athens, against the occupation.

JEFFREY BROWN: So this was part of your life at that time?

TITOS PATRIKIOS: Yes, somewhere, I was there.

JEFFREY BROWN: Somewhere, you're back in the crowd?

TITOS PATRIKIOS: Yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: Even more devastating, he says, was the Greek civil war that followed, one that led to his own captivity and torture on an island prison.

So you have seen much worse?

TITOS PATRIKIOS: I give always this example, that during the winter of 1940-'41, every day, I was going to my high school. In order to get in the courtyard, I had to go over one, two, sometimes three dead people that died during the night there.

And this is high matters.

JEFFREY BROWN: Today, he sees his country in a different kind of crisis, one especially difficult for the young, that goes beyond just the economic.

TITOS PATRIKIOS: An economic crisis always creates also other crisis.

JEFFREY BROWN: What kind of crisis?

TITOS PATRIKIOS: Social crisis, personal crisis, psychological crisis, existential crisis. Every latent crisis finds the possibility to come out.

(LAUGHTER)

JEFFREY BROWN: You see that happening now?

TITOS PATRIKIOS: Yes, yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: A selection from seven decades of Patrikios' poetry has been translated into English in a volume titled "The Lions' Gate." The title poem ends likes this.

TITOS PATRIKIOS: Our past is forever full, terrible, just as the story of what happened is terrible, carved as it is now, written on the lintel of the gate we pass through every day.

JEFFREY BROWN: Have you decided what the role of a poet is then?

TITOS PATRIKIOS: The role of a poet is to observe, not only to feel, to describe through his observations a small aspect that wasn't seen up to his -- to the moment that he writes down.

JEFFREY BROWN: Titos Patrikios still writes every day. A new volume, in Greek, came out just this year. And above all, it seems, he maintains his sense of humor, as when I asked his age.

TITOS PATRIKIOS: Eighty-four.

JEFFREY BROWN: Eighty-four.

TITOS PATRIKIOS: Eighty-four, yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: Yes.

TITOS PATRIKIOS: Sometimes, I -- I laugh with that.

JEFFREY BROWN: Why?

TITOS PATRIKIOS: I laugh because I think, incredible. How did I manage to arrive to that age?

(LAUGHTER)

JEFFREY BROWN: These days, Greece can use some of that laughter. And with its own rich and often troubled history, from ancient times to today, the poet's sense of purpose and survival.

GWEN IFILL: We have more poems from Stallings and Patrikios on our Poetry page, as well as a conversation with Greek novelist Ersi Sotiropoulos. Find that on Art Beat.

A.E. Stallings and Titos Patrikios

Tue, 25 Dec 2012 13:41:22 EDT

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A.E. Stallings is a poet and translator who has lived in Athens, Greece, for the last 13 years. Trained as a classicist, studying ancient Greek and Latin, she garnered much acclaim for her translation of the Roman philosopher Lecretius' "The Nature of Things."

Stallings' own poetry has garnered several prizes, and in 2011 she was a recipient of a MacArthur "genius" award. Most recently she published a collection titled "Olives," which includes poems about life -- both ancient and modern -- in her adopted home.

Stallings, who studied at the University of Georgia and at Oxford, is married to journalist John Psaropoulos. They have two young children and live in the heart of Athens.

In the web extra below, she reads "On a Greek Proverb, " which she wrote in response to the frequent question she gets from friends: "How long are you staying in Greece?"

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Titos Patrikios is one of the leading poets of Greece. Born in 1928 to parents who were actors, he spent his first years in the United States as they toured with a Greek theater company. He returned to Greece, where he eventually studied law at the University of Athens and then philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Patrikios bore witness to much of Greece's turbulence of the last century. He was active in the resistance movement against the German occupation during World War II and was tortured and jailed during the Greek civil war that followed.

According to Patrikios, poetry should have three main qualities: to bring people together, to help readers discover something new about themselves and to address and provide answers to problems that have gone unnoticed.

A comprehensive collection of Patriokios' poetry was published in English in a volume titled "Lionsgate." In these web extras, he reads two poems: "Lionsgate" and "Molyvos," which is a village on the island of Lesbos where Patrikios owns a summer home. He's written a series of poems about that area, which is rich in classical history.

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100 Years, 100 Poems: Celebrating the Centennial for Poetry Magazine

Mon, 24 Dec 2012 18:45:00 EDT

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JEFFREY BROWN: Finally tonight: the gift of poetry over 100 years in a conversation we recorded recently with poet and editor Christian Wiman.

"Print the best poetry written today in whatever style, genre or approach," the ambitious words written a hundred years ago by Harriet Monroe, when she founded Poetry, now the oldest monthly journal devoted to verse in the English-speaking language.

Along the way, it has introduced such seminal figures as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot and has championed poets from Wallace Stevens to Gwendolyn Brooks to former poet laureate Kay Ryan.

In 2003, Poetry received a large grant from philanthropist Ruth Lilly that led to the creation of the Poetry Foundation, which funds projects to support the art, including the NewsHour's coverage.

And to mark the anniversary now comes a new book, "The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of Poetry Magazine."

With me now is Christian Wiman, the magazine's editor and himself a highly regarded poet.

And, welcome, Chris.

CHRISTIAN WIMAN, "The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of 'Poetry' Magazine": Thanks for having me.

JEFFREY BROWN: This is not a greatest hits of Poetry magazine. What were you and co-editor Don Share after?

CHRISTIAN WIMAN: We wanted to make a book that did a couple of things.

It represented the magazine's history, so that it had some of these high water moments like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" or "The Shield of Achilles" by W. H. Auden.

But it also represented sort of the living history of the magazine, where we're reading 140,000 submissions a year and choosing from among the best of them.

JEFFREY BROWN: One hundred and forty-thousand a year?

CHRISTIAN WIMAN: One hundred and forty-thousand.

JEFFREY BROWN: I saw you wrote that in the introduction, and I went, oh, my, goodness.

CHRISTIAN WIMAN: Right. And so we're looking for unexpected pieces by the recognizably great poets, but also and even more so stand-out pieces by young poets. We wanted the anthology to really represent that.

JEFFREY BROWN: In the introduction, you have a line -- I will quote it -- "One of the qualities essential to being good at reading poetry is also one of the qualities essential to being good at life, a capacity for surprise."

Here you are as the editor getting all of these -- and you're reading poetry. What does surprise mean to you when you're reading a poem?

CHRISTIAN WIMAN: I think it's usually first a quality of language, something -- it's some sort of signature language that you notice.

But it's easy to get sort of sidetracked with that. You need that in a poem, but even more than that, you have got to have some sort of emotional engine running the thing. It's those two things. You're surprised on the level of technique and yet you're surprised on the level of your heart. And you respond to it.

JEFFREY BROWN: Is there an example you can think from when you were going, culling through all of these 100 years?

CHRISTIAN WIMAN: Oh, every poem in the book.

(LAUGHTER)

JEFFREY BROWN: I guess by definition, right.

CHRISTIAN WIMAN: Yes. What pops into mind -- two poems immediately pop into mind.

There one by Thomas Disch, who died a few years ago. And he wrote a poem -- I forget the title -- but it's about -- he uses words like terror and civilization and words that we hear in the news all the time now, but he wrote this poem in the '70s.

And that poem was a real surprise for the way it seemed to anticipate things that we're talking about now. There was another by a young poet, one that -- we wanted to include several young poets, and this is a young poet out in California named Maria Hummel. And she wrote a very beautiful, spare poem about having a sick child, a seriously ill child, and taking care that child.

And it showed the way you could just use very plain language to bring across this very complicated, tragic situation.

JEFFREY BROWN: When you're talking about the writing of poetry, and again I'm referring to your introduction -- you do emphasize language, you emphasize craft.

You also emphasize a kind of moral quality, I think, to writing poetry. What did you learn about writing of poetry again from going back and looking at all of this work?

CHRISTIAN WIMAN: Well, there's a famous quote from Ezra Pound, who was the foreign correspondent for Poetry magazine for years.

And Ezra Pound said technique is the test of a man's sincerity. And I think that surprises some people, because they think if you are spending too much time concentrating on the technique of an art, then you're losing sort of the feeling that's behind it. A lot of students think that. You're squelching my voice if you make me learn to write in these other ways.

But I think any time you spend a long time with poetry what you learn is that anyone who doesn't make those technical decisions part of their emotional life, where you can't feel their emotional life in those technical decisions, is not really writing poetry that is going to last.

And I think that's what we saw throughout a hundred years, is the poems that lasted had some real concentration with the formal elements of the arts, an obsession with it, almost.

JEFFREY BROWN: You also said, I think -- I forget the quote here -- but something about, if you can paraphrase a poem, it's not a poem, if you just can tell me what it is in a sentence or a phrase.

CHRISTIAN WIMAN: There's a similarity to dreams in that regard.

We make a lot about interpreting our own dreams. But there's always something a little reductive about that. You have a dream and it seems to tell you something and then you figure it out. And you think, well, I have figured it out. The same is true of poems.

You have got a great poem. And we ask kids to tell us what it means. And there's always an element of disappointment, I find, because a poem is -- W.H. Auden said a poem is the clear expression of mixed feelings. I think you want -- we need some way in our lives to inhabit these parts of our lives that are not clear, that aren't black or white, one way or the other. And poetry can give us that.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, this long-running question which you -- and sometimes tired question of the role of poetry in our culture, your answer seems to be something like that. Who knows in what ways poetry seeps into all of our lives.

CHRISTIAN WIMAN: Yes.

I think there are actually a couple of answers to that question. If you look at just -- at the metrics, poetry is actually -- poetry's presence in American culture is increasing. You see it on the "NewsHour," for instance, you hear it on the radio, you come across it on the Internet, which I think is actually a great boon to poetry.

JEFFREY BROWN: And I remember talking to Philip Levine, a recent poet laureate. And he was talking about the number of poetry readings. He said you can't take a walk without tripping over one, as opposed to when he was a young man.

CHRISTIAN WIMAN: Right. Right. It's enormous.

JEFFREY BROWN: Yes.

CHRISTIAN WIMAN: On the other hand, it's a country of, what, 350 million people or whatever, and it is a small percentage of that population that actually reads poetry.

I think, however, that poetry is influencing the culture in ways that we don't see, in a way that other arts are as well, in that it tends to enter our lives and the lives of people -- even people who don't pay attention to it in ways that we're not always aware of. I talk about that some in the introduction.

JEFFREY BROWN: And that more than 100,000 submissions suggests that certainly a lot of people are writing poetry.

CHRISTIAN WIMAN: Yes. Yes. That's right.

JEFFREY BROWN: And a lot of poetry.

CHRISTIAN WIMAN: Well, I think it's actually -- you may not get people to admit that they're writing poetry, but the number of people who write poetry secretly and don't show it to anybody is enormous.

I meet people all the time who have -- they don't even want to show it to me. They just want to talk about the act of having written something. And I think it's embedded in our genes. We don't know of a culture that doesn't have poetry. And it just has such roots that they're not going to be torn out.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, we are going to continue this conversation online. And I hope our viewers will join us there.

But, for now, Christian Wiman, thanks for talking to us about "The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of 'Poetry' Magazine."

CHRISTIAN WIMAN: Thanks for having me.

JEFFREY BROWN: And there's indeed more of our conversation about Christian Wiman’s own poetry and his latest book, "Every Riven Thing." That's on our Poetry page.

Poetry Magazine Celebrating 100 Years

Mon, 24 Dec 2012 15:45:01 EDT

"Print the best poetry written today, in whatever style, genre or approach." Those were the ambitious words written 100 years ago by Harriet Monroe when she founded Poetry," now the oldest monthly journal devoted to verse in the English-speaking language.

Along the way, Poetry introduced such seminal figures as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, and has championed poets from Wallace Stevens to Gwendolyn Brooks to former Poet Laureate Kay Ryan.

In 2003, Poetry received a large grant from philanthropist Ruth Lilly that led to the creation of the Poetry Foundation, which funds projects to support the arts, including the NewsHour's coverage.

To mark the 100-year anniversary now comes a new book, "The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine."

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Here's more of Jeffrey Brown's with conversation with Christian Wiman, who is a poet in his own right. In this web extra, they talk about Wiman's poetry and his recent book, "Every Riven Thing."

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Weekly Poem: 'Messiah: Christmas Portions'

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 12:54:00 EDT

With Christmas next week, we thought it would be a good time to re-post this segment from last year. Poet Mark Doty reflects on one of the great traditions of the holiday season: Handel's "Messiah":

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Read the transcript here.

Weekly Poem: 'Providence'

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 11:29:33 EDT

By Sally Keith

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The restaurant owner opened the doors to let in the smell from the sea which stuck on the breeze. On the table, a white linen, a low candle, a tiger lily bouquet. The specials chalked in cursive we read from a slate, while the waiter, starched shirt and folded apron, explained them and we ordered, at first, a carafe of a thinner than usual pale colored wine. My mother sat across from me. She did not lean into her elbow on the table, did not slide her weight up her arm to make a leading shoulder. The light in her eyes was first a pool, then a line. Outside the skiffs in exit sailed toward us. On the corner a crushed Diet Coke can. What she then told me, I remember. Salt was exploding all over the sea. Sally Keith is the author of three collections of poetry: "The Fact of the Matter" (2012, Milkweed Editions); "Design," winner of the 2000 Colorado Prize for Poetry; and "Dwelling Song," winner of the University of Georgia's Contemporary Poetry Series competition. She teaches at George Mason University and lives in Washington, D.C.

Weekly Poem: 'Swimming Pool'

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 09:52:45 EDT

By James Arthur

A teapot, a pea coat, a butter boat. Can you prepare for love? The stars hole up in their blue night sleeve and will be your dear companions if you tell them what they are. Afraid of dying, he went for a swim: him to swim, no one else, but never mind— aqua-beetles made merry, and the pine stand stood. Weed clouds wandered. Float ... he did. And the sprung floss of clouds spun darker. The air shot wet. Unfelt touches set the swimming pool a-tilt. Rain. Lip to lip, it's inert, but what a lot a lot can do. The pool cried, Are they done, your days of glass? A sky, a frown, a sky-blue surface pelted down with leaping tin. Let fall! Let spring! He wasn't struck by lightning— James Arthur is the author of "Charms Against Lightning," a debut poetry collection published by Copper Canyon Press in October. He has received the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry, a residency at the Amy Clampitt House and a Discovery/The Nation Prize.

Photo by Sean Hill.

Weekly Poem: 'Rage Sonnet'

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 15:35:00 EDT

By Hoa Nguyen

Rage on the grinding spot Independence Day Rag laundry day My boy wears shark pajamas Mother ran large food trays sore shoulders Lobster surf & turf It's Independence Day 2011 We may have been poisoned by Operation Ranch Hand I am not dead yet Ezra Pound in my D.C. Charles Olson dream "It is so much harder to be a poet now." they say to me Lack of rain and the #30 bus may run now all the way to downtown

Born in the Mekong Delta and raised in the Washington, D.C., area, Hoa Nguyen studied poetics at New College of California in San Francisco. With the poet Dale Smith, Nguyen founded Skanky Possum, a poetry journal and book imprint in Austin, Texas, where they lived for 14 years. The author of eight books and chapbooks, she currently lives in Toronto, where she teaches poetics in a private workshop and at Ryerson University. Wave Books published her third full-length collection of poems, "As Long As Trees Last," in September 2012.

After Sandy, Poet Describes 'What It Means to Stand in the Rubble of Your Life'

Fri, 23 Nov 2012 18:50:00 EDT

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JEFFREY BROWN: And finally tonight: As residents in New Jersey and New York continue to recover from superstorm Sandy, we look at the physical and emotional damage through the voice of fifth-generation Staten Islander and poet Jennifer Fitzgerald.

JENNIFER FITZGERALD, poet: I had been out on the streets helping the people, dropping off donations directly to sites, because our evacuation centers were full, but people still needed supplies.

So my friends and I dropped donations directly off into the neighborhoods. And I had started compiling images, and the images resonated with me.

About three days after the storm, a woman went on television, and she was crying, and she said, "Somebody, please come here and help us. We need help."

That was the first time that I had heard a clear and honest voice come from Staten Island.

I cannot show you the streets under the rubble. The sun teased through the clouds. I watched it land on the debris, illuminating soaked Sheetrock, support beams, a child's stuffed panda. You can't discern what came from the ocean, what the ocean tore out. Say it, storm surge. Alliteration masks the weight of 20-foot waves pulling themselves down on top of you.

Dear reader, I cannot bring you to the quaint towns dotting the shoreline, standing their ground against development. Instead, I will show you what it means to stand in the rubble of your life and wait, wait for FEMA, wait for city, wait for anyone to unblink their eyes and glance your way.

I mean, the fact that a marathon was still going to be held on this borough when we were still finding bodies in the marshes surrounding the area where the marathon would begin? It solidified everything that Staten Island felt about being part of the city.

The Red Cross wasn't there. Salvation Army wasn't there. I mean, not even sanitation had gotten to the streets yet. It was nothing.

Maybe they could see us, not mistake our drowning for greeting. Until then, street-side tables proffer wares manned by residents of devastation, a familiar face to assure it's OK to take what you need. I cannot show you the piers we fished from and the paths we used to navigate the coast. I can show you the barefoot woman to whom I offered shoes. She stared stoically ahead, bundled in a fraying coat: "No, give them to someone who needs them."

Could you tell a proud soul that, this time around, she's the one, the homeless woman with a mortgage? How many lives had she lived since the full moon dragged her tide over land? The barefoot woman asked me if they had found all the bodies yet, all the missing, as though we were working toward a number.

She heard our death toll click over as a clock, adding two at a time. Digits are easier to swallow than images of bodies drowned in their own homes, shoved into the backyard by waves. We seek erasure, not closure, a time when memory will be kind.

These neighborhoods are going to be brought closer together, whatever is left of them, when people leave, because some people are going to leave. But the ones that stay are going to understand community a lot more than they did before. It will absolutely take time.

I don't know if the landscape of this area will every look the same. Maybe it will look better. Maybe things will -- you know, the homes will be repaired and the beaches will be restored and we will get the seawalls and the berms that we need to protect this part of the island from the next storm that comes.

Until then, we clear a space for ourselves, line it with diapers, bottles of water, garbage bags to be filled and emptied. With each bag they take away, we decide what it means to salvage, what parts of ourselves we can save, and what pieces will forever belong to the past.

RAY SUAREZ: Find two more of Jennifer Fitzgerald's poems about the storm on our Art Beat page.

Friday on the NewsHour: The Poetry of Sandy

Fri, 23 Nov 2012 16:12:00 EDT

Jennifer Fitzgerald's family and friends have been greatly impacted by superstorm Sandy. During NewsHour's visit to Staten Island, N.Y., last week, she said she immediately got involved in relief efforts in her community. But she feels her poetry was another way to reach a much larger audience and explain what happened.

"A lot of what people believe about this island we have allowed them to deduce," Fitzgerald said. "We are the forgotten borough. People don't come here, and when they arrive at the Staten Island ferry, it's to see the Statue of Liberty and then they get right back on.

"My family's been on this island for about 200 years, and I don't want our narrative to start now because this is not where Staten Island started. I believe poetry is truth and that poetry has a way of showing the world through a different lens."

Fitzgerald is working toward her MFA in poetry from Lesley University and oversees "The Count," a project for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts that tracks the rates of publication between women and men in the literary world. Her work has appeared in the online journal Underwater New York.

We'll post the segment from Friday's program here later this evening. In the video below, she reads "I Was Raised on an Island" and "What It Means to Rise."

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Video edited by Victoria Fleischer.

Poet Joy Harjo Shares Words of Celebration and Memory for Thanksgiving

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 18:51:00 EDT

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Finally tonight: some words to celebrate what millions will be doing tomorrow, gathering around the table to eat, talk, give thanks, and be together.

They come from poet Joy Harjo, a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation Oklahoma, and longtime teacher at the University of New Mexico.

She's the author of seven books of verse and a new memoir titled "Crazy Brave."

Her poem is titled "Perhaps the World Ends Here."

JOY HARJO, poet: The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us, put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the kitchen table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror, a place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table, we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

JEFFREY BROWN: That was Joy Harjo reading "Perhaps the World Ends Here.”

And if you're hungry for more verse about eating, her poem is included in a new anthology called "The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food and Drink." It's edited by Kevin Young, another poet we featured in our regular coverage of poets and poetry.

Weekly Poem: 'Highlights and Interstices'

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 10:26:00 EDT

By Jack Gilbert

We think of lifetimes as mostly the exceptional and sorrows. Marriage we remember as the children, vacations, and emergencies. The uncommon parts. But the best is often when nothing is happening. The way a mother picks up the child almost without noticing and carries her across Waller Street while talking with the other woman. What if she could keep all of that? Our lives happen between the memorable. I have lost two thousand habitual breakfasts with Michiko. What I miss most about her is that commonplace I can no longer remember. Prize-winning Jack Gilbert died last week at the age of 87 after suffering from Alzheimer's disease for several years. Though he won several major awards and was a well-known figure in American poetry, Gilbert "was something of a self-imposed exile: flunking out of high school; congregating with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Spicer in San Francisco but never really writing like a Beat poet; living in Europe and writing American poetry inspired by Pound and Eliot," according to the Poetry Foundation.

His many honors include the Yale Younger Poets prize for his 1962 debut "Views of Jeopardy" and a National Book Critics Circle award for "Refusing Heaven" (2005). His verse was known for its spareness and lucidity, and many of his poems deal with personal relationships, love and loss, including the death of his wife, Michiko, of 11 years.

For more on Gilbert and to read several other of his poems, visit the Poetry Foundation.

Weekly Poem: 'The Role of Elegy'

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 15:59:00 EDT

By Mary Jo Bang

The role of elegy is To put a death mask on tragedy, A drape on the mirror. To bow to the cultural Debate over the anesthetization of sorrow, Of loss, of the unbearable Afterimage of the once material. To look for an imagined Consolidation of grief So we can all be finished Once and for all and genuinely shut up The cabinet of genuine particulars. Instead there's the endless refrain One hears replayed repeatedly Through the just ajar door: Some terrible mistake has been made. What is elegy but the attempt To rebreathe life Into what the gone one once was Before he grew to enormity. Come on stage and be yourself, The elegist says to the dead. Show them Now -- after the fact -- What you were meant to be: The performer of a live song. A shoe. Now bow. What is left but this: The compulsion to tell. The transient distraction of ink on cloth One scrubbed and scrubbed But couldn't make less. Not then, not soon. Each day, a new caption on the cartoon Ending that simply cannot be. One hears repeatedly, the role of elegy is. Mary Jo Bang is the author of several books of poetry, including most recently a translation of Dante's "Inferno" (2012), "The Bride of E" (2009) and "Elegy" (2007), which won the National Book Critics Circle award.

Weekly Poem: 'Never Seen'

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 09:56:00 EDT

By Hoa Nguyen

Never seen a corncrake an ochre cry to screen makes the evening chill a chord to sandhill string and feel wind of wing beats in your face Face the never-stumble for throwing yourself so sprightly What can't stay late in the month: dolphin fetuses not birds washing up in numbers Born in the Mekong Delta and raised in the Washington, D.C., area, Hoa Nguyen studied poetics at New College of California in San Francisco. With the poet Dale Smith, Nguyen founded Skanky Possum, a poetry journal and book imprint in Austin, Texas, where they lived for 14 years. The author of eight books and chapbooks, she currently lives in Toronto, where she teaches poetics in a private workshop and at Ryerson University. Wave Books published her third full-length collection of poems, "As Long As Trees Last," in September 2012.

Weekly Poem: 'A.M.'

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 10:08:00 EDT

By Nick Norwood

My father's shaving with the radio on. He's in the bathroom, the Trutone's in the kitchen. All of us crammed in this crackerbox on Spicer Street, Wichita Falls. The one tiny speaker strains and crackles. The air fattens on Patsy Cline. Ernest Tubb comes on and it starts to wobble. Daddy's dark face, mirrored back a foot away, half-shrouded in a cloud of Barbasol, cuts through a cirrus of steam. In T-shirt and boxers he's like a linebacker in a phone booth. But his voice when he arcs out a Bob Wills holler starts near the ceiling and doesn't level off till it hits Oklahoma. In six months he'll be dead, his oilfield Cessna accordioned into the flats near Olney. But right now he's happy, almost completely himself, a half-assed country singer, playing to a packed house. i.m. Richard Gaylon Norwood

Nick Norwood's third full volume of poems, "Gravel and Hawk," won the Hollis Summers Prize in Poetry and was published by Ohio University Press in April 2012. His other books are "A Palace for the Heart" (2004), "The Soft Blare" (2003) and "Wrestle" (2007). His poems have appeared in many journals, including The Paris Review, Southwest Review, Western Humanities Review, The Wallace Stevens Journal and Poetry Daily. He teaches creative writing at Columbus State University in Georgia.

Weekly Poem: 'Redemption Song'

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 09:45:16 EDT

By Kevin Young

Finally fall. At last the mist, heat's haze, we woke these past weeks with has lifted. We find ourselves chill, a briskness we hug ourselves in. Frost greying the ground. Grief might be easy if there wasn't still such beauty -- would be far simpler if the silver maple didn't thrust its leaves into flame, trusting that spring will find it again. All this might be easier if there wasn't a song still lifting us above it, if wind didn't trouble my mind like water. I half expect to see you fill the autumn air like breath-- At night I sleep on clenched fists. Days I'm like the child who on the playground falls, crying not so much from pain as surprise. I'm tired of tide taking you away, then back again-- what's worse, the forgetting or the thing you can't forget. Neither yet-- last summer's choir of crickets grown quiet.

Kevin Young is Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English and Curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University. He is the author of s the author of seven books of poetry, including "Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels" (Knopf, 2011) and "Jelly Roll: A Blues" (Knopf, 2003), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won the Paterson Poetry Prize.

Weekly Poem: 'Diagnosis'

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 12:53:00 EDT

By Sharon Olds

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By the time I was six months old, she knew something was wrong with me. I got looks on my face she had not seen on any child in the family, or the extended family, or the neighborhood. My mother took me in to the pediatrician with the kind hands, a doctor with a name like a suit size for a wheel: Hub Long. My mom did not tell him what she thought in truth, that I was Possessed. It was just these strange looks on my face-- he held me, and conversed with me, chatting as one does with a baby, and my mother said, She's doing it now! Look! She's doing it now! and the doctor said, What your daughter has is called a sense of humor. Ohhh, she said, and took me back to the house where that sense would be tested and found to be incurable. Sharon Olds is the author of several books of poetry, including "The Dead and the Living," winner of the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award; "The Unswept Room," a finalist for the 2002 National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and "Stag's Leap," which was published this year. She teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University.

Watch our profile of Olds here.

Dodge Poetry Festival Gets Underway

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 13:01:00 EDT

The 2012 Dodge Poetry Festival is underway, billed as the largest poetry gathering in North America. This will be the third time it's being held in Newark, after many years in the woods in a much more rural New Jersey setting.

This year's program is as rich and diverse as ever, with Philip Levine, Eavan Boland, Patricia Smith and Natasha Trethewey among the many participants. All of the events are accessible by train or public transportation, so if you're in the area, you have no excuse!

Martin Farawell is the director of the festival, and I spoke to him yesterday by phone about this year's program.

A transcript is after the jump.

JEFFREY BROWN: Welcome again to Art Beat. I'm Jeffrey Brown. The 14th Dodge Poetry Festival is underway. It's billed as the largest poetry gathering in North America. This is just the second time it's being held in Newark after many years in the woods in a much more bucolic rural New Jersey setting. Martin Farawell is the director of the festival and he joins us now. Welcome to you.

MARTIN FARAWELL: Thank you, Jeffrey.

JEFFREY BROWN: Let's start with that switch. How has the move changed the character of the festival? What do you think?

MARTIN FARAWELL: Well, one of the big changes is just the nature of the venues. We used to put up a bunch of temporary tents, including a circus tent that seats 2,000, and in downtown Newark the main venue is Prudential Hall at the New Jersey Performing Art Center, which is just a stunning concert hall, and some of the other venues -- the Victoria Theater and the Chase Room, which are all just beautiful, state-of-the-art performance spaces. But there are also historical churches in the neighborhood like First Peddie Baptist Memorial Church, Trinity & St. Philip's Cathedral, and these are just those kind of architectural wonders you find in old American cities.

JEFFREY BROWN: That must change the whole flavor of the festival. Must have changed the audiences that come as well, right?

MARTIN FARAWELL: We actually noticed in 2010 that the audience was younger over the weekend and more diverse, because for the first time we are in a major mass-transit hub. The old setting, if you didn't have a car you couldn't get there. We are literally a 20-minute ride on the PATH train from downtown New York City. There is a long, urban corridor along the Hudson River connected by a rail system, The trains here go to Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Boston. It's the first time, I think, that the audience has began to reflect the diversity of the lineup. The poetry lineup has always been very diverse, and now it's really quite exciting to see that same diversity in the audience that can come here.

JEFFREY BROWN: Tell us, and especially for those who don't get there, besides being big what is this festival supposed to be doing? How do you envision it when you are putting it together?

MARTIN FARAWELL: The goal is to give people a sense of the American poetries that are out there. That's a phrase from the late Adrienne Rich, who said there was no one American poetry, there's American poetries so many. We've all heard about slam poetry, spoken word poetry, language poetry, academic poetry -- people put poetry into silos. The whole goal of the festival has always been to celebrate all different voices, all different styles and to get us all listening to each other, to celebrate the fact that poetry is one of our oldest arts. It began as soon as we cuold speak. There is a great joy and a great pleasure in being read to, in hearing stories and songs and poems aloud. It becomes this kind of ancient sitting-around-the-campfire human experience that we sometimes forget, just the sheer pleasure of having someone read to us. And in so many different voices, so many different traditions, there is something for everyone. Whether they are experts or scholars or people who think they don't like poetry, they come and they hear something that they are often delightfully surprised at how moved or amused they are.

JEFFREY BROWN: How about yourself this year? I don't how much you want to single out any one or two or three things, but is there something you are especially excited about this year?

MARTIN FARAWELL: I am really excited about the diversity of the lineup. We have everyone from Ada Limon, who is just emerging -- she's quite young, her third book just came out -- to Philip Levine, who was poet laureate -- he's 83, one of the great American poets -- Eavan Boland, who's considered Ireland's greatest living woman poet, Natasha Trethewey, who was just named poet laureate, and Patricia Smith, someone who comes out of the slam tradition and yet has developed amazing publishing credentials. She's doing an event with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra String Quartet. She is going to be reading selections from a book-length sequence called "Blood Dazzler" about Hurricane Katrina, and the quartet's going to be playing at "At the Octoroon Balls," which is Wynton Marsalis' first string quarter, which is a musical history of New Orleans. The two pieces go together with almost astonishing beauty. That's one of the things I'm very excited about. I just came from a rehearsal with the Newark Boys Chorus, Jane Hirshfield and Kurtis Lamkin. Lamkin play the kora, which is the 21-string West African instrument, and they're going to be doing an event on Saturday morning called "In Praise," which is going to be songs and poems of praise in anyway you can define them. There are conversations and poets-on-poetry sessions and reading all day and all night, but one of the things that makes the Dodge Festival unique is the conversations we have. They are not academic lectures, they are not seminars on how to get published or get an editor. They are conversations between living poets and the audience about, really, the life behind the making of poems and the life of the poet and the dilemmas and challenges you face. They tend to be very human, direct, intimate sometimes, conversations, quite different from what you get in a more academic setting.

JEFFREY BROWN: The Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark, N.J. Martin Farawell is the director. Thanks so much for talking to us.

MARTIN FARAWELL: Can you give people the web address?

JEFFREY BROWN: Go ahead give it.

MARTIN FARAWELL: www.dodgepoetry.org. And we're here through Sunday.

JEFFREY BROWN: Thanks so much for talking to us.

MARTIN FARAWELL: Thank you so much for talking to us.

JEFFREY BROWN: And thanks for joining us again on Art Beat. I'm Jeffrey Brown.

Poet Sharon Olds' New Collection Mourns and Heals the End of a Marriage

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 18:50:00 EDT

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Finally tonight: Sharon Olds is one of the country's best-known and best-selling poets. She recently talked with us at her New Hampshire home about her newest book.

SHARON OLDS, Poet: This latest book, "Stag's Leap," is a story of loss and mourning and healing after the end of a 32-year marriage.

"The Healers"

"When they say, if there are any doctors aboard, would they make themselves known? I remember when my then-husband would rise and I would get to be the one he rose from beside. They say now that it doesn't work unless you are equal. And after those first 30 years, I wasn't the one he wanted to rise from or return to, not I, but she who would also rise when such were needed.

"Now I see them lifting side by side on wide medical waiting bird wings like storks with the doctor bags of like, loves, like dangling from their beaks. Oh, well. It was the way it was. He didn't feel happy when words were called for and I stood."

We are at Graylag, which is a nature retreat belonging to my partner Carl Wallman. People come here for weekends in the cabins.

Carl and I met six years ago. I would get up, and Carl makes coffee and I bring up a cup into my table, and I look.

My first book was published when I was 37. So it took me a long time to -- for the poems that I was writing to feel like me, rather than feel too much like the people I admired and was learning from, not in school, but while reading their books.

We also want to make something that will be pleasing to someone else, that will have some kind of beauty, each one with a different kind of beauty, and not too beautiful, not pretty, but strong and companionly, something that -- this is my favorite word for what I would want my poems to be: useful. Useful.

Well, also, if you're late at night and you're lonesome and there's no one around, you can pick up a book of poems, and then poetry being the place where it's like one person talking to one person.

"Bathing the Newborn"

"I love with an almost fearful love to remember the first baths I gave him, our second child, so I knew what to do. I laid the little torso along my left forearm, nape of the neck in the crook of my elbow, hips nearly as small as a least tern's tail against my wrist, thigh held loosely in the loop of thumb and forefinger, the sign that means exactly right.

"I love that time when you croon and croon to them. You can see the calm slowly entering them. You can sense it in your clasping hand, the little spine relaxing against the muscle of your forearm. You feel the fear leaving their bodies. He lay in the blue oval plastic baby tub and looked at me in wonder and began to move his silky limbs at will in the water."

Poet Sharon Olds Reads From Her New Book

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 16:35:11 EDT

Sharon Olds is one of the country's best-selling poets. Her books include "The Dead and the Living," winner of the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award; "The Unswept Room," a finalist for the 2002 National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and "Stag's Leap," which was published this year. She teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University.

We recently visited her in New Hampshire, where she talked about how she approaches writing and about her most recent collection. We'll post Thursday's segment here later this evening. In the meantime, in the video below, you can watch her read several of her poems.

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Dissident Vietnamese Poet Nguyen Chi Thien Dies at Age 73

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 12:01:00 EDT

Nguyen Chi Thien, a Vietnamese dissident poet who spent 27 years in communist prisons and was the acclaimed author of "Flowers of Hell," died last week in California after a long bout of illness.

Earlier today I spoke to Dan Duffy, editor and publisher of the Viet Nam Literature Project, about Nguyen's life, work and influence.

Duffy also read Nguyen's poem "My Verses," which is from "Flowers of Hell," the manuscript which brought Nguyen fame around the world. The poem was translated by Nguyen Ngoc Bich.

My Verses My verses are in fact no verses They are simply Life's sobbings Dark prison cells opening and shutting The dry cough of two caving in lungs The sound of earth coming down to bury dreams The exhumation sound of hoes bringing up memories The chattering of teeth in cold and misery The aimless contractions of an empty stomach The hopeless beat of a dying heart Impotence's voice in the midst of collapsing earth All the sounds of a life not deserving half its name Or even the name of death: No verses are they! You can read more of Nguyen's work at the Viet Nam Literature Project.

Weekly Poem: 'The Worst Thing'

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 13:22:00 EDT

By Sharon Olds

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One side of the highway, the waterless hills. The other, in the distance, the tidal wastes, estuaries, bay, throat of the ocean. I had not put it into words, yet—the worst thing, but I thought that I could say it, if I said it word by word. My friend was driving, sea-level, coastal hills, valley, foothills, mountains—the slope, for both, of our earliest years. I had been saying that it hardly mattered to me now, the pain, what I minded was—say there was a god—of love—and I'd given—I had meant to give—my life—to it—and I had failed, well I could just suffer for that— but what, if I, had harmed, love? I howled this out, and on my glasses the salt water pooled, almost sweet to me, then, because it was named, the worst thing—and once it was named, I knew there was no god of love, there were only people. And my friend reached over, to where my fists clutched each other, and the back of his hand rubbed them, a second, with clumsiness, with the courtesy of no eros, the homemade kindness. Sharon Olds is the author of several books of poetry, including "The Dead and the Living," winner of the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award; "The Unswept Room," a finalist for the 2002 National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and "Stag's Leap," which was published this year. She teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University.

We'll have a profile of Olds on the NewsHour soon.

Weekly Poem: 'Intravenous'

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 18:27:00 EDT

By Hugh Martin

--Jalula, Iraq

A rope of black smoke above the city. Police sirens. The feet of the crowd over pavement. We don't know who she is: barely a year alive, her blue leggings wet, stuck to the skin with her own blood. Doc Johnson holds her head like an orange in his open hand. He kneels beside the white Opel while Kenson aims the mounted light from his M4 through the shattered window to her face, the glass spread around her like rock salt on the brown seat cushions. Doc scissors her cotton sleeve, pushes his thumb to her arm for a vein--nothing... He finds one, eye to hairline, pulsing with her screams; he wipes the skin with antiseptic, and with one hand, steadies her head as an Imam's voice blankets the night in waves; cars filled with wounded weave around us with the dust. Doc lowers the needle to this girl's blue vein, and it touches her skin like pricking the Tigris on a smooth map of the earth. Hugh Martin recently won the Jeff Sharlet Memorial Award from The Iowa Review for his poetry. His upcoming book, "The Stick Soldiers," received the A. Poulin Jr. First Book Prize from BOA Editions. Hugh served in the U.S. Army in Iraq for 11 months. After returning, he obtained an MFA from Arizona State. Currently, he is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. "The Stick Soldiers" will be published in March 2013.

U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey Talks About Her New Job and Fourth Book

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 10:42:00 EDT

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Natasha Trethewey is a familiar face to NewsHour viewers and Art Beat visitors. She first talked to us in 2006 as she returned to her hometown in Mississippi to witness the effects of Hurricane Katrina. Then we caught up with her in 2007 after her book "Native Guard" went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. In 2010, we talked to her about her book "Beyond Katrina."

Recently, Trethewey took on the job of poet laureate of the United States, appointed by the Librarian of Congress, and published her fourth book, "Thrall." She is also a professor of English at Emory University and serves as laureate for the state of Mississippi. She visited us in our studio last week.

A transcript is after the jump.

JEFFREY BROWN: The new official face of American poetry is one familiar to NewsHour viewers. Natasha Trethewey has just taken on the job of poet laureate of the United States, appointed by the Librarian of Congress. She's the author of four books of verse, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Native Guard" and her latest, "Thrall." Trethewey is 46, she's a professor of English at Emory University and also currently serves as laureate for the state of Mississippi, where she was born. Welcome back, and congratulations.

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: Thank you.

JEFFREY BROWN: The laureate post sometimes is given to an older, well-established sort of star of the poetry world. You are younger, mid career, still out and about, growing.

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: That's right.

JEFFREY BROWN: Is it a different energy? Is it a difference sense that you bring to this?

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: Well, I'm hoping that my youth, relatively speaking, means I'm also energetic and can bring a lot of service to the role, rather than simply ceremonial or honorific as it certainly is.

JEFFREY BROWN: How do you see the role? I guess, it's an interesting question, right?

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: Well, you are the cheerleader for poetry, a promoter.

JEFFREY BROWN: A cheerleader?

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: That's right, but the role really is to try to bring poetry to as wide an audience as possible, and so it's my job to think of as many ways possible to do that.

JEFFREY BROWN: And how have you thought about that? I saw that one thing you are planning to do is actually be in residence here in Washington and at the Library of Congress.

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: That is the first thing. I'll be the first one to have done that in a very long time, so I'm hoping that in that capacity I'll be able to have regular office hours, invite people to the poetry center to talk with me about poetry and what's important about it in our lives in that office.

JEFFREY BROWN: There is the proverbial, 'What is the role of poetry in our culture anyway?' It's always interesting that here we are in the middle of a political campaign you hear a lot of one kind of rhetoric. Poetry is a different kind of language, right?

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: That's right, that's right. Poetry is -- I said this the other day, I think -- it's way more diplomatic than we ever are in our everyday lives

JEFFREY BROWN: More diplomatic?

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: That's right.

JEFFREY BROWN: What does that mean?

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: Because it can speak to all of us. It helps us not only to grieve our losses but to celebrate our joys and triumphs. It is open to all of us. It's the best thing we've got. It's the most humane repository for our feelings and our thoughts, our most humane and dignified thoughts.

JEFFREY BROWN:Your new book, you have it there. It picks up on some themes that we've talked about before here, I know, your interest in history, in family, your own families experience race. Tell me about the new book.

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: The new book started with an investigation of Mexican casta paintings. I was very interested in these because they represented the mixed-blood unions that were taking place in the colony across the 18th century. I was, of course, drawn to them because they had the picture of the parents as well as the offspring and the taxonomy, the names created for those mixed-blood children. So it was like looking at portraits of my own family.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well explain that to people. That is, your own history. As I recall, an illegal marriage at the time.

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: That's right. My parents had to go to Ohio to get married in 1965 because it was still illegal in Mississippi. My white father and black mother.

JEFFREY BROWN: What is it that you want to look at through the poems, when you want to explore that history?

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: I'm trying to make sense of my own contemporary experience across time and space. To make sense of myself through the lens of history. These things are not new to us; they've been going on for a long time, and people have been thinking about them for a long time, and my experience now is reflected through that larger public history.

JEFFREY BROWN: Is there a poem you could read for us?

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: Yes. I'd like to read a poem that's a slightly different take on the elegy, because my father is still alive.

Elegy

-- For my father

I think by now the river must be thick with salmon. Late August, I imagine it as it was that morning: drizzle needling the surface, mist at the banks like a net settling around us -- everything damp and shining. That morning, awkward and heavy in our hip waders, we stalked into the current and found our places-- you upstream a few yards, and out far deeper. You must remember how the river seeped in over your boots, and you grew heavy with that defeat. All day I kept turning to watch you, how first you mimed our guide's casting, then cast your invisible line, slicing the sky between us; and later, rod in hand, how you tried -- again and again -- to find that perfect arc, flight of an insect skimming the river's surface. Perhaps you recall I cast my line and reeled in two small trout we could not keep. Because I had to release them, I confess, I thought about the past -- working the hooks loose, the fish writhing in my hands, each one slipping away before I could let go. I can tell you now that I tried to take it all in, record it for an elegy I'd write -- one day -- when the time came. Your daughter, I was that ruthless. What does it matter if I tell you I learned to be? You kept casting your line, and when it did not come back empty, it was tangled with mine. Some nights, dreaming, I step again into the small boat that carried us out and watch the bank receding -- my back to where I know we are headed. JEFFREY BROWN: An elegy for your father even though he's still alive. What made you want to do that?

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: The poem actually elegizes something else, not the loss of the person but a loss of a certain kind of relationship with the person. So he's still here, but some part of our relationship as father and daughter has changed. It's different now the older I get, the older he gets.

JEFFREY BROWN: For those who you know, don't get poetry or feel disconnected from it, do you think of them when you are writing and, of course, now that you are taking on a very public role as the laureate?

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: I do think of them when I'm writing, because even though I'm the daughter of a poet I think I felt like that myself at some point.

JEFFREY BROWN: You felt disconnected or ...

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: Yes, I think I felt at some point that I couldn't understand poetry or that it was beyond me or it didn't speak to my experience. I think that was because I hadn't yet found the right poems to invite me in. I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it.

JEFFREY BROWN: What was it for you that will help people? Who did you read or who do you read give the models?

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: I was going to say, when my mother died the poem that made sense to me and invited me into poetry was Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts." That begins, 'About suffering they were never wrong, the old masters.' You know, it's a poem that goes on to describe how this tiny little image of Icarus falling into the sea while everything else is going on around the world, that's what grief sometimes feels like, that you are the only person experiencing it and the whole world is going on about its business without you. That actually comforted me in my loss.

JEFFREY BROWN: That's a very personal take on things. Are you excited now about the public role that you are taking on?

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: I think so. I'm very --

JEFFREY BROWN: You think so?

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: I think I am. I'm a little, well, you know, it's a big responsibility, and I want to do it well and so that means that I'm a little anxious about it and so it means that I'm also going to try very hard to find the best ways to do it.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, Natasha Trethewey is the new poet laureate of the United States. Your new book is "Thrall." Nice to talk to you.

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: Nice talking with you, Jeff.

Weekly Poem: 'Elegy'

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 14:20:00 EDT

By Natasha Trethewey

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Elegy

For my father

I think by now the river must be thick with salmon. Late August, I imagine it as it was that morning: drizzle needling the surface, mist at the banks like a net settling around us -- everything damp and shining. That morning, awkward and heavy in our hip waders, we stalked into the current and found our places-- you upstream a few yards, and out far deeper. You must remember how the river seeped in over your boots, and you grew heavy with that defeat. All day I kept turning to watch you, how first you mimed our guide's casting, then cast your invisible line, slicing the sky between us; and later, rod in hand, how you tried -- again and again -- to find that perfect arc, flight of an insect skimming the river's surface. Perhaps you recall I cast my line and reeled in two small trout we could not keep. Because I had to release them, I confess, I thought about the past -- working the hooks loose, the fish writhing in my hands, each one slipping away before I could let go. I can tell you now that I tried to take it all in, record it for an elegy I'd write -- one day -- when the time came. Your daughter, I was that ruthless. What does it matter if I tell you I learned to be? You kept casting your line, and when it did not come back empty, it was tangled with mine. Some nights, dreaming, I step again into the small boat that carried us out and watch the bank receding -- my back to where I know we are headed. Natasha Trethewey was named U.S. Poet Laureate earlier this year. She has written four collections of poetry: "Thrall," "Domestic Work," "Bellocq's Ophelia" and "Native Guard," which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize. Art Beat will have a conversation with Trethewey later this week.

Poet Billy Collins Reflects on 9/11 Victims in 'The Names'

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 18:45:00 EDT

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JUDY WOODRUFF: And thank you, Jeff. And finally we go back to New York where it is now nighttime and cloudy there. The now-famous Tribute in Light marks yet another year of absence and observance at ground zero. I'm Judy Woodruff.

GWEN IFILL: And I'm Gwen Ifill. For all of my NewsHour colleagues, thank you for watching. We give the last word to poet Billy Collins. He was the nation's poet laureate at the time of the attacks. One year later, he wrote this poem, "The Names." He read it before a special joint session of Congress held in New York in 2002. He reads it again now, for us.

BILLY COLLINS, poet: "The Names," for the victims of September 11th and their survivors.

Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night.

A soft rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze,

And when I saw the silver glaze on the windows,

I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened,

Then Baxter and Calabro,

Davis and Eberling, names falling into place

As droplets fell through the dark.

Names printed on the ceiling of the night.

Names slipping around a watery bend.

Twenty-six willows on the banks of a stream.

In the morning, I walked out barefoot

Among thousands of flowers

Heavy with dew like the eyes of tears,

And each had a name --

Fiori inscribed on a yellow petal

Then Gonzalez and Han, Ishikawa and Jenkins.

Names written in the air

And stitched into the cloth of the day.

A name under a photograph taped to a mailbox.

Monogram on a torn shirt,

I see you spelled out on storefront windows

And on the bright unfurled awnings of this city.

I say the syllables as I turn a corner --

Kelly and Lee,

Medina, Nardella, and O'Connor.

When I peer into the woods,

I see a thick tangle where letters are hidden

As in a puzzle concocted for children.

Parker and Quigley in the twigs of an ash,

Rizzo, Schubert, Torres, and Upton,

Secrets in the boughs of an ancient maple.

Names written in the pale sky.

Names rising in the updraft amid buildings.

Names silent in stone

Or cried out behind a door.

Names blown over the earth and out to sea.

In the evening -- weakening light, the last swallows.

A boy on a lake lifts his oars.

A woman by a window puts a match to a candle,

And the names are outlined on the rose clouds --

Vanacore and Wallace,

(let X stand, if it can, for the ones unfound)

Then Young and Ziminsky, the final jolt of Z.

Names etched on the head of a pin.

One name spanning a bridge, another undergoing a tunnel.

A blue name needled into the skin.

Names of citizens, workers, mothers and fathers,

The bright-eyed daughter, the quick son.

Alphabet of names in a green field.

Names in the small tracks of birds.

Names lifted from a hat

Or balanced on the tip of the tongue.

Names wheeled into the dim warehouse of memory.

So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.

Iraq War Veteran Wins Inaugural Prize From Iowa Review

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 11:15:00 EDT

Iraq War veteran Hugh Martin has won the first-ever Jeff Sharlet Memorial Award from The Iowa Review, the literary journal announced Tuesday.

The Iowa Review received 265 entries for the prize, which is only open to active duty military personnel and veterans and includes an $1,000 award and publication in the journal. Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Olen Butler was this year's judge.

Martin, a poet and author who served in the Ohio Army National Guard from 2001 to 2007 and spent 11 months in Iraq, submitted a collection of poems about his war experience and his return to civilian life. He has an MFA from Arizona State and is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Martin's first book, "The Stick Soldiers," recently won the A. Poulin Jr. First Book Prize from BOA Editions and will be published in March.

Here's a poem by Martin:

Intravenous

--Jalula, Iraq

A rope of black smoke above the city. Police sirens. The feet of the crowd over pavement. We don't know who she is: barely a year alive, her blue leggings wet, stuck to the skin with her own blood. Doc Johnson holds her head like an orange in his open hand. He kneels beside the white Opel while Kenson aims the mounted light from his M4 through the shattered window to her face, the glass spread around her like rock salt on the brown seat cushions. Doc scissors her cotton sleeve, pushes his thumb to her arm for a vein--nothing... He finds one, eye to hairline, pulsing with her screams; he wipes the skin with antiseptic, and with one hand, steadies her head as an Imam's voice blankets the night in waves; cars filled with wounded weave around us with the dust. Doc lowers the needle to this girl's blue vein, and it touches her skin like pricking the Tigris on a smooth map of the earth. According to Russell Valentino, editor-in-chief of The Iowa Review, the somber and profound themes in Martin's poems were frequently present in the other submissions. "Some of the stories were...very raw," Valentino said. "You could really tell [a] person was writing from a first-person perspective."

"The quality was very high because of that sort of authentic voice," Valentino said. Yet writing about war represented only a portion of the topics covered by entrants. "It's not for writing about war. It's for writing by veterans," Valentino said of the prize.

The award is named in honor of Jeff Sharlet, a Vietnam veteran and antiwar writer and activist who died in 1969, and is funded through a gift from his family.

"Most writers who are veterans don't have access to the same kind of literary ladders," said Sharlet's nephew, Jeff Sharlet, who carries his uncle's name. "Here was a guy who, it's become such a terrible cliche, but really did write truth to power," Sharlet said of his namesake.

An award like the one his family has endowed might be a step toward changing "knee jerk assumptions about what veterans believe or don't believe, write about or don't write about," said Sharlet, an assistant professor of English at Dartmouth College, a contributing editor to Harper's Magazine and the author of several books.

Martin kept track of his experiences in a journal but never wrote poems while in Iraq. "I knew when I came back from Iraq, I'd write about it in some way," Martin said. He also threw himself into reading, citing authors like Don DeLillo, Robert Penn Warren and John Updike as influences, in addition to other veteran writers like Bruce Weigl.

"It's very strange and you don't really know how to talk about it and it's hard to find people to discuss the experience with," Martin said. "So you can write about your experiences and get it off your chest that way."

Writing isn't just therapeutic for Martin, however. As a student of literature, he said he always keeps literary context in mind, looking back to veteran writers who came before him like Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves. "[S]hedding away the layers and the rhetoric" of warfare is one of his goals in writing about the military.

"All I can really do is write about it," Martin said, "because I want to and because I want to show people who weren't there what it really was like."

Weekly Poem: 'Second Helping'

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 13:03:00 EDT

By Michael Robbins

I dare not speak my name, it is so long and unpronounceable. I enforce the thaw here among the timbered few. We despise you and whatever you rode in on—is that a swan? I'm not really like this. I'm over the moon. Still, we jar marmalade. We plow. We don't need Neil Young around anyhow. Your tribe's Doritos are infested with a stegosaur. That Forever 21 used to be a Virgin Megastore. Scott Baio in full feathered glory was everything I'm not. I am everything I am and then some. I'm coming along nicely. Don't stick your fork in me till I'm done. Michael Robbins is the author of the collection of poems "Alien vs. Predator" (Penguin, 2012). His poems have appeared in several publications, including the New Yorker, Poetry, Harper's and Boston Review. He reviews books for the London Review of Books and other publications, and music for The Daily and the Village Voice. He lives in Chicago.

Weekly Poem: 'Wolf'

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 10:28:40 EDT

By Joseph Campana

Little man, I said, keep the wolf from my door: one more night, one more wretched night and day. The wolf said wait and the season was packing its bags, but it would not leave and it would never leave. Little man, I said, there's a tooth at my throat, and the tooth said time and it was really a wolf and it was cloaked in a sheep's skin of satisfaction, and there was a fury raining down at night and it tapped at the windows. Little man, I said, close the door, there's a wolf in the air, and there is a fury that even fear can't touch and it is gnawing me, I feel it gnawing at me and the wolf said shelter and I knew it was a lie, I felt it as a lie, I could already feel its teeth tearing my skin. Joseph Campana is a poet, critic and scholar of Renaissance literature. He is the author of two collections of poetry, "The Book of Faces" (Graywolf, 2005) and "Natural Selections," which won the 2011 Iowa Poetry Prize. He teaches Renaissance literature and creative writing at Rice University.

Finding Poetry in the Athleticism and Lingo of the Olympics

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 18:46:00 EDT

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JEFFREY BROWN: And finally tonight, an Olympics story that for once requires no spoiler alert. This one focuses on the games and the words, the Olympics and, yes, poetry.

Priscila Uppal is a Toronto-based writer and professor at York University whose work includes eight collections of verse. She's in London these two weeks serving as poet in residence on behalf of Canadian Athletes Now, a nonprofit group supporting that country's athletes.

I spoke with her earlier today.

Priscila Uppal, thanks for joining us.

I can see I didn't need to say which country you're supporting. It looks like you're having a good time.

PRISCILA UPPAL, poet: I'm having a fabulous time here at the Olympics. I think I have the best job.

JEFFREY BROWN: So, what is the job? What does a poet-in-residence at the Olympics do?

PRISCILA UPPAL: I have wonderful days.

I get up and I get to attend events, some of the sporting, athletic events, and sometimes other celebratory events. And I try my best to find ways to write about the different sports, using some of the history of the sports, some of the wonderful vocabulary of the sport, in poetry.

And I get to celebrate the summer sports, the athletes, events at the Olympics, and the people that I meet from all over the world who are attending the Games and participating in them.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, talk to me a little bit about that language of sports. Each sport has its unique terms and words. All of us as viewers are learning them. All of that is good material for you, I guess?

PRISCILA UPPAL: Yes, it's wonderful material.

And it's material a lot of poets have not tapped into, because it's really like an entirely different language, as many people might feel when they're experiencing those sports on air.

And I just love it because it's really metaphorical. It's very playful. Many of the sport terms are basically invented by teenagers and young people, as they're inventing the actual moves of the sport. And so, there's a lot of metaphoric possibility. There's a lot of room for cleverness, for playfulness, but also sometimes for seriousness, for thinking about the sports and what they teach us and how I can put that into a poem.

JEFFREY BROWN: Can you give me an example of something playful, something you have had fun with?

PRISCILA UPPAL: Oh, I love the terms in beach volleyball, for instance.

They have a lot of terms that have to do with food, for some reason. So, ‘tuna' is when someone gets caught in the volleyball net. But, also, they have this wonderful term for when a serve is sent over the net, and the two players, none of them goes after it, and so the ball just drops between them. And they call this ‘husband-and-wife-ing.'

JEFFREY BROWN: Husband-and-wife-ing, that is terrible and perfect, right?

PRISCILA UPPAL: It's absolutely perfect.

And then we have seen a lot of crashes, unfortunately, in cycling. And when there's a crash and gear flies off and water bottles end up on the street, they call this a ‘yard sale.'

JEFFREY BROWN: That's great, too.

Well, poetry, of course, has a long, long history and tradition at the Olympics, ancient and modern, right?

PRISCILA UPPAL: It actually does.

There was an ancient poet named Pindar who wrote a number of odes to Olympic athletes. And even in the modern era, from 1912 to 1948, there were actually medals awarded for sport art in five different categories, and poetry was one of the five categories.

So you could potentially have won a medal in athletics, as well as art. And, in fact, two people did, an American and a Hungarian. And I think that's a tradition that ought to be brought back. We should have gold medals for poetry.

JEFFREY BROWN: Not likely, I suppose. Is that getting much traction there?

PRISCILA UPPAL: I'm not sure exactly, but there are a number of people who think it would be a good idea.

The reason it was actually discontinued was because the artists were considered to be professionals, while the athletes were considered to be amateurs. And now that's really quite reversed. So, I might be able to get more traction with that argument.

JEFFREY BROWN: I'll say. Those worlds have really turned, haven't they?

PRISCILA UPPAL: Yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: OK. Could you read one of our poems for us?

PRISCILA UPPAL: This is called "Gymnastics Love Poem."

"I can honestly say I've bent over backwards for you, executed front flips and twists and somersaults in your name. I've tumbled my way into and out of corners. I've kicked up storms and spun my wheels. I've learned to balance my heart on my sleeve while remaining flexible to all your judgments and opinions."

"The art of loving is the art of vaulting through the air without a safety net and landing firmly on your feet. The art of loving is the art of iron crosses and crash mats and, when you've built up your strength, the seizing of rings."

JEFFREY BROWN: Priscila Uppal, a poet in residence at the London Olympics, thanks for joining us.

PRISCILA UPPAL: Thank you.

JEFFREY BROWN: And on our Art Beat page, you can watch Priscila Uppal read another of her poems. It's called "Obsessive Compulsive Cycling Disorder." That's at NewsHour.PBS.org.

Weekly Poem: 'How to Make Fatherhood Lyrical'

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 12:59:50 EDT

By Gibson Fay-LeBlanc

I could describe the arc of piss as sanctifying the changing table or argue that his wailing resembles a certain style of opera -- one develops a taste for its peaks as evidence of proper training, the cultivation of a gift. I might tell you that when the dog tugs the leash in one direction and the stroller rolls in the other it's similar to the push and pull of family and vocation, and each in turn alters its course. Surely I'd do some research and touch on why gerbils eat their young and moose will charge if you dare step between a mother and her calf. But none of this is the basic truth I tell myself or don't, depending on the morning: it's not a set of lyrics, it's prose -- as in pedestrian, a man on foot, not some freak stallion, not a Clydesdale, not even a draft -- and every day I have to choose whether to write myself in Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is a writer and teacher. His first collection of poems, "Death of a Ventriloquist," won the Vassar Miller Prize and was published by the University of North Texas Press in 2012. He lives in Portland, Maine, with his family and is working on a novel.

Weekly Poem: 'Tavern. Tavern. Church. Shuttered Tavern,'

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 14:10:58 EDT

By Patricia Smith

Tavern. Tavern. Church. Shuttered tavern, then Goldblatt's, with its finger-smeared display windows full of stifled plaid pinafore and hard-tailored serge, each unattainable thread cooing the delayed lusciousness of layaway, another church then, of course, Jesus pitchin' a blustery bitch on every other block, then the butcher shop with, inexplicably, the blanched, archaic head of a hog propped upright to lure waffling patrons into the steamy innards of yet another storefront, where they drag their feet through sawdust and revel in the come-hither bouquet of blood, then a vacant lot, then another vacant lot, right up against a shoe store specializing in unyielding leather, All-Stars and glittered stacked heels designed for the Christian woman daring the jukebox, then the what-not joint, with vanilla-iced long johns, wax lips crammed with sugar water, notebook paper, swollen sour pickles buoyant in a splintered barrel, school supplies, Pixy Stix, licorice whips and vaguely warped 45s by Fontella Bass or Johnny Taylor, now oooh, what's that blue pepper piercing the air with the nouns of backwood and cheap Delta cuts -- neck and gizzard, skin and claw -- it's the chicken shack, wobbling on a foundation of board, grease riding relentless on three of its walls, the slick cuisine served up in virgin white cardboard boxes with Tabasco nibbling the seams, scorched wings under soaked slices of Wonder, blind perch fried limp, spiced like a mistake Mississippi don' made, and speaking of, July moans around a perfect perfumed tangle of eight Baptist gals on the corner of Madison and Warren, fanning themselves with their own impending funerals, fluid-filled ankles like tree trunks sprouting from narrow slingbacks, choking in Sears' Best cinnamontinged hose, their legs so unlike their arms and faces, on the other side of the street is everything they are trying to be beyond, everything they are trying to ignore, the grayed promise of government, 25 floors of lying windows, of peeling grates called balconies, of yellow panties and shredded diapers fluttering from open windows, of them nasty girls with wide avenue hips stomping doubledutch in the concrete courtyard, spewing their woman verses, too fueled and irreversible to be not listened to and wiggled against, and the Madison St. bus revs its tired engine, backs up a little for traction and drives smoothly into the sweaty space between their legs, the only route out of the day we're riding through. Patricia Smith is the author of five volumes of poetry, including "Blood Dazzler," a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award, "Teahouse of the Almighty," a National Poetry Series selection, and most recently "Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah."

She is a professor for the City University of New York and a Cave Canem faculty member.

Weekly Poem: 'Quarantine'

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 12:51:00 EDT

By Eavan Boland

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In the worst hour of the worst season of the worst year of a whole people a man set out from the workhouse with his wife. He was walking -- they were both walking -- north. She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up. He lifted her and put her on his back. He walked like that west and north. Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived. In the morning they were both found dead. Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history. But her feet were held against his breastbone. The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her. Let no love poem ever come to this threshold. There is no place here for the inexact praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body. There is only time for this merciless inventory: Their death together in the winter of 1847. Also what they suffered. How they lived. And what there is between a man and a woman. And in which darkness it can best be proved. Eavan Boland is one of Ireland's most prominent poets. Her poems often examine the lives of women, looking at larger cultural issues through the lens of the details of everyday life. She's published more than 10 books of verse, most recently, "New Collected Poems." She is also professor of English and director of the creative writing program at Stanford University.

Watch Jeffrey Brown's conversation with Boland from earlier this year.

Weekly Poem: From 'The Speed of Belief'

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 10:14:00 EDT

By Tracy K. Smith

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What does the storm set free? Spirits stripped of flesh on their slow walk. The poor in cities learn: when there is no place to lie down, walk. At night, the streets are minefields. Only sirens drown out the cries. If you're being followed, hang on to yourself and run -- no -- walk. I wandered through evenings of lit windows, laughter inside walls. The sole steps amid streetlamps, errant stars. Nothing else below walked. When we believed in the underworld, we buried fortunes for our dead. Low country of dogs and servants, where ghosts in gold-stitched robes walk. Old loves turn up in dreams, still livid at every slight. Show them out. This bed is full. Our limbs tangle in sleep, but our shadows walk. Perhaps one day it will be enough to live a few seasons and return to ash. No children to carry our names. No grief. Life will be a brief, hollow walk. My father won't lie still, though his legs are buried in trousers and socks. But where does all he knew -- and all he must now know -- walk? Tracy K. Smith's poem is from her book "Life on Mars" (2011, Graywolf Press), which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry earlier this year. She is the author of two other collections of poetry: "Duende" (Graywolf, 2007), winner of the 2006 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets, and "The Body's Question" (Graywolf, 2003), winner of the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Smith teaches creative writing at Princeton University.

You can watch our profile of Smith here.

Weekly Poem: 'Immigrant Picnic'

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 11:37:00 EDT

From our archive, July 4, 2007.

By Gregory Djanikian Immigrant Picnic It's the Fourth of July, the flags are painting the town, the plastic forks and knives are laid out like a parade. And I'm grilling, I've got my apron, I've got potato salad, macaroni, relish, I've got a hat shaped like the state of Pennsylvania. I ask my father what's his pleasure and he says, "Hot dog, medium rare," and then, "Hamburger, sure, what's the big difference," as if he's really asking. I put on hamburgers and hot dogs, slice up the sour pickles and Bermudas, uncap the condiments. The paper napkins are fluttering away like lost messages. "You're running around," my mother says, "like a chicken with its head loose." "Ma," I say, "you mean cut off, loose and cut off being as far apart as, say, son and daughter." She gives me a quizzical look as though I've been caught in some impropriety. "I love you and your sister just the same," she says, "Sure," my grandfather pipes in, "you're both our children, so why worry?" That's not the point I begin telling them, and I'm comparing words to fish now, like the ones in the sea at Port Said, or like birds among the date palms by the Nile, unrepentantly elusive, wild. "Sonia," my father says to my mother, "what the hell is he talking about?" "He's on a ball," my mother says. "That's roll!" I say, throwing up my hands, "as in hot dog, hamburger, dinner roll...." "And what about roll out the barrels?" my mother asks, and my father claps his hands, "Why sure," he says, "let's have some fun," and launches into a polka, twirling my mother around and around like the happiest top, and my uncle is shaking his head, saying "You could grow nuts listening to us," and I'm thinking of pistachios in the Sinai burgeoning without end, pecans in the South, the jumbled flavor of them suddenly in my mouth, wordless, confusing, crowding out everything else.

Gregory Djanikian has written several books of poetry, including "So I Will Till the Ground" (2007), "Years Later" (2000), "Falling Deeply into America" (1989) and "The Man in the Middle" (1984). He directs the creative writing program at the University of Pennsylvania.

Weekly Poem: 'I'll Say It Again'

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 13:57:00 EDT

By Amanda Nadelberg

Shame gets out of bed for no one in particular and there's nothing wrong with that. We say things until we don't want to anymore. That is called broken, it's called desire. If the room were another half itself more, if the trees were quieter when they grouped together talking and if a city was in my house and you were in that city. Well anything just about ends when we fall down at night. Having moved toward victory, I was ready to lie on the floor until it was all over. Waiting the forest out, we spoke I think you kissed my arm. Darkness finds a meticulous hole and falls asleep inside. My mouth has little corners. See, return is just another word for shame--no, virtue, molecule? Blight. The ghosted things we used to do as beggars for the waves still make good stories but stories come with graph paper, graph paper with song. I could show you something but I don't want to, I have to keep my coat on, I have to take us home. The pin light at the end of my mind flashes off like it just had to. Color as your new best friend, I asked you what you're still doing here, you said you wanted fire. Amanda Nadelberg is the author of "Bright Brave Phenomena" (Coffee House Press, 2012) and "Isa the Truck Named Isadore" (Slope Editions, 2006). Originally from Boston, she is a graduate of Carleton College and the University of Iowa, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow and a Teaching-Writing Fellow. She lives in Oakland, Calif.

On a Mission for Preservation, Poet Natalie Diaz Returns to Her Roots

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 18:36:00 EDT

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JEFFREY BROWN: Next, a story of poetry, basketball and the preservation of a native language. It begins with a trip down the Colorado River.

HUBERT MCCORD, Mojave Tribe: (SPEAKING MOJAVE)

NATALIE DIAZ, author: What's that?

HUBERT MCCORD: (SPEAKING MOJAVE) is rattlesnake fangs.

NATALIE DIAZ: If you look at the peaks there, they almost look like rattlesnake fangs.

JEFFREY BROWN: For Mojaves, this part of the Colorado River, California on one side, Arizona on the other, is (SPEAKING MOJAVE) the place where the spirits live. And on our early-morning boat trip, before the heat of the desert reached 105, we saw bighorn sheep, wild donkeys, sharp cliffs and rock formations that all are part of the Mojave story.

NATALIE DIAZ: (SPEAKING MOJAVE) is the people who change into the mountain.

JEFFREY BROWN: So they're -- they're sitting up there forever?

MAN: It looks like they're standing and sitting?

JEFFREY BROWN: Yes.

MAN: Yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: But if the stones continue to stand, the stories and the Mojave language itself are in danger of being lost. And that's the reason for these trips, to bring young people together with elders like 85-year-old Hubert McCord, one of a handful of fluent speakers left in the Fort Mojave Indian tribe.

The language preservation effort is being organized by 33-year-old Natalie Diaz.

NATALIE DIAZ: They are constantly reminding us of the time crunch. You know, we have this many years and we're supposed to do this, this, this and this. How are we going to get there? But. . .

JEFFREY BROWN: It is a race against time, they're saying.

NATALIE DIAZ: It definitely is.

One of the most probably crushing moments for me was listening to Hubert. He said, what are we going to do? What are my people going to do? Meaning, when he's gone, he's not going to be able to help and to teach them anymore.

This is (SPEAKING MOJAVE). This is (SPEAKING MOJAVE).

JEFFREY BROWN: Diaz herself only heard bits of the language from her grandparents as a child and has no formal training in linguistics.

In fact, this calling to preserve her native language is a recent one; 16 years ago, she left the reservation here to pursue a completely different passion, basketball, first at Old Dominion University in Virginia, then professionally in women's leagues abroad.

NATALIE DIAZ: It was kind of my way to navigate between the different cultures. On the reservation, if you were good at basketball, you could do anything. You know, fit into any group, and then off the reservation as well.

JEFFREY BROWN: It was at Old Dominion that she also began to write poetry.

NATALIE DIAZ: I thought, hey, writing can offer me something, some sort of -- again, some sort of quiet that I have always kind of been looking for.

For me, writing -- it's kind of a way for me to explore why I want things and why I'm afraid of things and why I worry about things. And, for me, all of those things represent a kind of hunger that comes with being raised in a place like this.

JEFFREY BROWN: Diaz's first book, titled "When My Brother Was an Aztec," has just been published, with many poems that deal with the harsh realities of reservation life: poverty, teen pregnancy, and the methamphetamine drug addiction that plagues many young people, including one of her brothers.

NATALIE DIAZ: "Now he's fresh-released from Rancho Cucamonga, having traveled the Mojave trail in chains, living with your parents, and you have come to take him to dinner, because he is your brother, because you heard he was cleaning up. Holler upstairs to your brother to hurry. He won't come right away. Remember how long it took the Minotaur to escape the labyrinth."

JEFFREY BROWN: So that's a way of processing I guess a real experience, but through -- I hear Minotaur myth, all kinds of things.

NATALIE DIAZ: Yes. I think there's more truth in myth than there is in truth.

I mean, I can sit here and tell you, you know, Jeff, this is -- it's terrible having a brother like this. It's really bad. It's awful. But that's not going to register with you. But, for me, poetry allows me to kind of break down images and kind of see what they're made of. And so I'm able to reinvent images and colors and sounds, and, you know, and all of the senses kind of come together to give you a more truthful picture of what's happening.

JEFFREY BROWN: It was two years ago that Diaz decided to return home and work to revive a language that's been in decline since the late 1800s.

Even into the 20th century, Native children were put in a government-run school near here that was intended to take and even beat the language and culture out of them. Today, some of the elders can still recall those days.

HUBERT MCCORD: My mother could tell you that, because they came around with horses and tied them up like and then put them in wagons and then took them to school. And you're not supposed to even talk Mojave anymore up there. If you do, you get punished.

JEFFREY BROWN: Hubert McCord, who is one of the last of the tribe's bird singers, has watched as the language drained away over several generations, from men leaving the reservation for work, extended families no longer living together and handing down rituals, and, of course, the bombardment of media and culture from the larger Anglo society.

NATALIE DIAZ: Okay. So we will get you miked up then.

JEFFREY BROWN: He and several other elders are now working with Natalie Diaz to record words, stories and songs.

HUBERT MCCORD: It's a long time ago.

JEFFREY BROWN: Helping her create a talking dictionary for students to use on computers.

NATALIE DIAZ: Hubert, how do you say creation mountain?

HUBERT MCCORD: (SPEAKING MOJAVE)

NATALIE DIAZ: Yes. So that's one of the most important places that you guys have as Mojaves.

JEFFREY BROWN: Some of those students join the elders in a weekly workshop. It's a small program, still in its infancy, but one that's striking a chord.

Are you surprised that there's this interest now in coming to you to hear your stories and get you to translate?

HUBERT MCCORD: I'll tell you the truth. I am a little -- I am surprised. I am.

JEFFREY BROWN: Yes?

HUBERT MCCORD: And, in my heart, I feel good.

JEFFREY BROWN: Natalie Diaz says that, for her, this effort is really part of a much larger reconnection and sense of identity, especially for young people in the tribe.

NATALIE DIAZ: In Mojave, everything passes through your dreams. All your gifts come from dreams. And so, what they worry about, in one of our workshops, they discussed maybe the dreams are coming to the kids, but maybe they're coming in Mojave, and maybe they don't understand that. And so they're not going to know what their gifts are. They're not going to know what they should be doing. . .

JEFFREY BROWN: Wow.

NATALIE DIAZ: . . . because they don't speak the language.

JEFFREY BROWN: The next step is a larger summer workshop, where elders, including Hubert McCord, will continue to pass on Mojave words and songs of the river, the rocks and the birds.

And there's more online, where you can watch Natalie Diaz read several of her poems. That's on our Art Beat page.

Weekly Poem: 'Je m'appelle Ivan'

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 10:07:00 EDT

By Heather Christle

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I am alone I am a real bear with a head full ofhazard and light I live in nature live with nofriends and no equity who needs it I havemy face I have my hands which are as I speakmauling the air one time I took a trip I layhorizontal on a marvelous raft I did look upregard the blank stars and accept them as holes in the frame one time I ran so fast I left my ownself behind my own self wandered into an oldbirch and it fell over I have no escrow Obees thou sweet kingdom of noise I worshipfreely I pee on the leaves and the windimpulses right through me like a small clean rockall I want is the fish to glow at night wheneveryone on earth is trying to reach me helloyes hello this never happens yet other eventsgo on and on the dimming of the moon I amupright I am lumbering alone with no liquidityand I live on berries deliver me berries if lateron you glide into these wild and wilder woods

Heather Christle is the author of "What Is Amazing" (Wesleyan University Press), "The Difficult Farm" (Octopus Books, 2009) and "The Trees The Trees" (Octopus Books, 2011), which won the 2012 Believer Poetry Award. She has taught at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and at Emory University, where she was the 2009-2011 Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry. She is the web editor for jubilat and frequently a writer in residence at the Juniper Summer Writing Institute.

New Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey 'Explores the Human Struggles We All Face'

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 18:49:00 EDT

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Finally tonight, a new poet laureate has been named for the U.S., but she is not new to NewsHour viewers.

Natasha Trethewey will be the 19th laureate appointed by the Library of Congress.

We first profiled Trethewey in 2006 for her third book of poems, "Native Guard."

NATASHA TRETHEWEY, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet: This is my first trip back to Gulfport since Hurricane Katrina.

It's been over a year since I have seen the place. And it's odd to come back here after having written this book, seeing the places that I was trying to elegize years ago when I first started working on these poems in a very figurative sense, because I was distant from these places, not that these places were actually gone.

And now, as I walk around here today, I realize that those poems that I wrote have become quite literal, that Gulfport really is destroyed, and so many of those places that I connect to my childhood and growing up are no longer here.

When I was born here in Gulfport in 1966, my parents' interracial marriage was still illegal. And it was very hard to drive around town with my parents, to be out in public with my parents.

We're going to Ship Island, the home of Fort Massachusetts, which is just off the coast of Gulfport, Mississippi, my hometown. We're going out there to try to remember the Louisiana Native Guards, who were the first officially sanctioned regiment of African-American soldiers, Union soldiers in the Civil War, who were stationed at the island.

I used to come out here every Fourth of July as a child to picnic and to swim on the island, to tour the fort and wander through it. And all of that time, I never knew anything about the presence of black soldiers on the island. And so, for me, this was a way of trying to tell another history, a lost or a forgotten or a little-known history about these black soldiers who played an important part in American history.

"The Daughters of the Confederacy has placed a plaque here, at the fort's entrance, each Confederate soldier's name raised hard in bronze, no names carved for the Native Guards, 2nd Regiment, Union men, black phalanx.

What is monument to their legacy?

"All the grave markers, all the crude headstones, water lost. Now fish dart among their bones, and we listen for what the waves intone. Only the fort remains, near 40 feet high, round, unfinished, half-open to the sky, the elements, wind, rain, God's deliberate eye."

JEFFREY BROWN: In 2007, "Native Guard" was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Natasha Trethewey officially takes up her duties in the fall. You can watch much more of her, as well as readings, profiles and interviews with 11 other former U.S. poet laureates on our Art Beat page.

Natasha Trethewey Named U.S. Poet Laureate

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 08:41:00 EDT

Pulitzer Prize-winner Natasha Trethewey will be the 19th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, the Library of Congress announced on Thursday.

"Natasha Trethewey is an outstanding poet/historian in the mold of Robert Penn Warren, our first Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry," Librarian of Congress James Billington said in a statement. "Her poems dig beneath the surface of history--personal or communal, from childhood or from a century ago -- to explore the human struggles that we all face."

Born in Gulfport, Miss., in 1966, Trethewey's work has chronicled the complicated history of her own family and that of the South. As the daughter of a black mother and white father, an interracial union that was still illegal in Mississippi at the time, "it was very hard to drive around town with my parents, to be out in public with my parents," she told the NewsHour in 2006. Her hometown was later ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. The shotgun houses in the neighborhood where she was born and raised were destroyed.

With the NewsHour, she returned home for the first time following the storm to discuss her third collection of poems, "Native Guard," which went on to win the 2007 Pulitzer Prize.

"It's odd to come back here after having written this book, seeing the places that I was trying to elegize years ago when I first started working on these poems, in a very figurative sense, because I was distant from these places, not that these places were actually gone," Trethewey said.

The poems in "Native Guard" are set on Ship Island, just off Gulfport, and are inspired by the Louisiana Native Guards, the first sanctioned regiment of black Union soldiers in the Civil War stationed on the island.

"I used to come out here every Fourth of July as a child to picnic and to swim on the island, to tour the fort and wander through it. And all of that time, I never knew anything about the presence of black soldiers on the island. And so, for me, this was a way of trying to tell another history, a lost or a forgotten or a little-known history about these black soldiers who played an important part in American history." Trethewey said. Coincidentally, she was born "exactly 100 years to the day that Mississippi celebrated the first Confederate Memorial Day, April 26, 1866."

After she won the Pulitzer Prize, we caught up with Trethewey in our studio:

Trethewey's 2010 book, "Beyond Katrina," is a personal account of how the people of the Gulf Coast region, including her family, have lived with the threat and consequences of natural disasters for generations.

"Oddly, not until after Katrina did I come to see that the history of one storm, Camille -- and the ever-present possibility of others -- helped to define my relationship to the place from which I come," Trethewey writes.

"There are so many things that haven't come back," Trethewey told Art Beat in 2010. "There are these big gaps where my own history seems to have vanished. All these buildings that were landmarks of my own past [are] gone."

The storm hit her own family hard. Her grandmother, who had also been born and raised in North Gulfport, survived Hurricane Camille in 1969, but was forced to flee to Atlanta after Katrina. She died there, never able to return home. Trethewey's brother Joe, who before the hurricane had recently begun to make a living renting the family's shotgun houses in the area, found himself listless after the storm which destroyed their property.

"At first, there was nothing to do but watch," Trethewey writes in her poem "Watcher." "For days, before the trucks arrived, before the work / of cleanup, my brother sat on the stoop and watched."

Out of work, Joe got into trouble and was sent to jail for trafficking cocaine. Her family's story was the basis for "Beyond Katrina," and the collection even contains a poem by Joe, who began writing in prison.

Trethewey will be the first U.S. Poet Laureate to actually take up a residency at the Library of Congress, starting in spring 2013. She is also far younger than the last two to hold the honor. At 84, Philip Levine is the outgoing laureate. He followed W.S. Merwin, who was also in his 80s when he was named to the post.

"I am thrilled our next Poet Laureate will spend the second half of her term in the Library's 'Catbird Seat,'" said Robert Casper, head of the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress. "There she will impact the capital and the country even more powerfully, as one of our great poets of reclamation and reckoning."

In January, Trethewey was named Poet Laureate of Mississippi, a four-year position she will retain while serving as U.S. Poet Laureate. She is also a professor of creative writing at Emory University.

Trethewey's first poetry collection, "Domestic Work," won the inaugural 1999 Cave Canem poetry prize, a 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Her second collection, "Bellocq's Ophelia," received the 2003 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, was a finalist for both the Academy of American Poets' James Laughlin and Lenore Marshall prizes, and was named a 2003 Notable Book by the American Library Association.

Below, Trethewey reads from "Native Guard." You can also read the poems here on our Poetry Series page.

Here are links to conversations with past U.S. Poet Laureates:

Rita Dove, 1993-1995 Robert Hass, 1995-1997 Robert Pinksy, 1997-2000 Stanley Kunitz, 2000-2001 Billy Collins, 2001-2003 Ted Kooser, 2004-2006 Donald Hall, 2006-2007 Charles Simic, 2007-2008 Kay Ryan, 2008-2010 W.S. Merwin, 2010-2011 Philip Levine, 2011-2012

Conversation: Kristen Dupard, 2012 Poetry Out Loud National Champion

Fri, 18 May 2012 14:57:00 EDT

Kristen Dupard of Ridgeland, Miss., performs at the 2012 Poetry Out Loud National Recitation Contest in Washington, D.C., earlier this week. Photo by James Kegley.

Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of being one of the judges for the national finals of "Poetry Out Loud," a competition for high schools students from around the country who study, memorize and recite poems. It all begins in the schools and then on up to the state and, finally, the national levels.

According to the sponsors, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation -- both, by the way, funders of the NewsHour's arts and poetry coverage -- some 365,000 students took part.

The winner at the end of it all was 18-year-old high school senior Kristen Dupard from Ridgeland, Miss., who received a $20,000 award. I spoke to her earlier today by phone:

U.S., U.K. Poets Laureate on Being Public Face for 'Solitary Act'

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 18:45:00 EDT

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JEFFREY BROWN: And finally tonight, this being National Poetry Month, at least for a few more days, we talk to two poets who've taken on a very public role.

CAROL ANN DUFFY, U.K. Poet Laureate: Look, we all have wishes, granted. But who has wishes granted? Him.

JEFFREY BROWN: Carol Ann Duffy is poet laureate of the United Kingdom. At 56, she is the first woman and the first openly gay writer to hold a position that is still appointed by the monarch, but now for a 10-year term, rather than for life.

One of her best-known books is "The World's Wife," which reimagines myths and history through the voices of women, rather than the men who originally got all the attention, as here in "Mrs. Midas."

CAROL ANN DUFFY: I put a chair against my door, near petrified. He was below, turning the spare room into the tomb of Tutankhamen.

(LAUGHTER)

CAROL ANN DUFFY: You see, we were passionate then, in those halcyon days, unwrapping each other, rapidly, like presents, fast food. But now I feared his honeyed embrace, the kiss that would turn my lips to a work of art.

JEFFREY BROWN: Now 84, Philip Levine is poet laureate of the United States, appointed by the Librarian of Congress to a one-year term.

Levine is best known for poems about working-class life and people he grew up around in Detroit, as here in "Of Love and Other Disasters."

PHILIP LEVINE, U.S. Poet Laureate: How the grease ate so deeply into her skin, it became a part of her, and she put her hand palm up on the bar and pointed with her cigarette at the deep lines that work had carved.

JEFFREY BROWN: They were together for the first time recently, reading their work and speaking to a packed crowd at the annual gathering of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, held this year in Chicago.

The next day, I sat down with the two of them, and began by asking just why they'd wanted to take on this public role.

CAROL ANN DUFFY: Well, in my case, I think it was because in the U.K. there hadn't been a woman laureate for nearly 400 years.

JEFFREY BROWN: You felt that, so it was important to take on?

CAROL ANN DUFFY: I felt, yes, very much, that was the case. And I think it was felt in the country that a woman's voice should be the representative poet, not necessarily my voice, but certainly a woman poet.

It wasn't something I felt I could turn down, even if I had reservations.

JEFFREY BROWN: Did you have reservations?

CAROL ANN DUFFY: Yeah. I mean, I think poets should be private and invisible and listeners, really. So, it is a different way of being a poet, to be a laureate.

Do you think. . .

PHILIP LEVINE: Oh, yeah.

I think we witness things, but we are not witnessed.

CAROL ANN DUFFY: Yeah.

PHILIP LEVINE: You know, We have our private lives, and that is where -- the poetry comes out of that. And it is a very solitary act.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, what is it? A lot of people still wonder, I suppose, what is a poet laureate in the 21st century? You said this has had a 400-year history in Britain.

CAROL ANN DUFFY: The first laureates were spin doctors really that were employed by the monarch to write poems saying how great the king was.

That's evolved over the centuries. I think Tennyson, when he wrote "The Charge of the Light Brigade," that was a public poem which was critical of government policy of the Crimean War. So I think laureates have to feel the pulse of their country, and perhaps write poems that reflect that or are truthful.

You can meet a public event with a poetic event. And I think it is important that poetry is part of the dialogue of a country.

JEFFREY BROWN: Could you imagine in the old -- as you were saying, in the older style for the laureate in Britain, you would be asked to write the occasional poem, right?

PHILIP LEVINE: I can imagine being asked and I can imagine saying, no, stuff it. That's not the way. . .

(LAUGHTER)

PHILIP LEVINE: That is not the way it works.

JEFFREY BROWN: Because that's just not the way it works for you as a writer?

PHILIP LEVINE: That's not the way.

I remember years ago, when I was teaching at Fresno State in California, they hired a new president. And the vice president called me into his office and asked me to write a ceremonial poem for this occasion. And I said, no, no, that isn't the way poems come to be.

And he said, but we would appreciate it so much. And I said, I have never met the man. I do not know who he is. I don't have any feeling toward him. And as far as I'm concerned, he is just another bureaucrat.

That was the wrong thing to say. That kept me as assistant professor, rather than associate professor, for another five years.

CAROL ANN DUFFY: For years.

PHILIP LEVINE: Yes.

(LAUGHTER)

JEFFREY BROWN: Both Duffy and Levine came from a working-class background, she the daughter of an electrician born in a poor section of Glasgow, he born and raised in Detroit to immigrant parents. His father sold used auto parts. His mother was a bookseller. And both came to poetry early on.

PHILIP LEVINE: When I was very young, like in my teens and thereabouts, poetry reading was not a big thing in America.

For example, I went to a school, Wayne University in Detroit, a school of 20,000. And we had one poetry reading a year. And we would invite someone in. But then they invited Dylan Thomas, and he was a kind of rock star. And he traveled around the United States. He actually made a living doing this.

And I think the American poets, sort of for a couple of years, we suddenly started writing rural Welsh poetry.

(LAUGHTER)

PHILIP LEVINE: I mean, people who'd never left Chicago were writing about hayrick and the owls swooping down. And then they got over it.

CAROL ANN DUFFY: That's extraordinary. I mean, we didn't have any poetry readings in my school. It was a convent school.

And although I loved the poets that we had to study for our exams, Keats, for example, John Donne, Shakespeare, Chaucer, I did love those poets, but it was Dylan Thomas, given to me by my English teacher, her own copy, that made me begin to kind of copy. . .

JEFFREY BROWN: Going back to the background, and in your case being a woman, did you feel a kind of outsider to the poetry establishment?

CAROL ANN DUFFY: When I first published, I was still called a poetess.

JEFFREY BROWN: Really?

CAROL ANN DUFFY: And there was still that very kind of male dominance of publishing, of reviewing, of the people who were awarded prizes.

Anthologies -- you could open an anthology, and there would be three or four women out of 50 poets.

JEFFREY BROWN: Has taking on this public role affected your poetry?

PHILIP LEVINE: My life hasn't changed that -- hardly changed at all, in fact, but my writing has been weak -- weak.

And that's why I thank God I don't have to do this for 10 years, because, at my age, I want to -- I still think there are some poems in me.

JEFFREY BROWN: You started by saying that part of the reason you took the laureate position was because you are a woman. You felt a women should have that role. Is it a burden in any way, because of that?

CAROL ANN DUFFY: I thought it would be, but I've really loved it. It's a joy.

JEFFREY BROWN: You thought it would be because. . .

CAROL ANN DUFFY: Too much attention, and people looking more at me than the poetry.

Going back to childhood, to be asked to represent and celebrate the thing you've loved most since childhood is a real privilege and a joy. So, I've loved it much, much more than I had anticipated.

JEFFREY BROWN: Carol Ann Duffy and Philip Levine, thank you very much.

PHILIP LEVINE: Thank you for having me. Thank you.

CAROL ANN DUFFY: Thank you. Thank you.

Poet Naomi Shihab Nye: 'Telling a Story Helped Us Figure Out Who We Were'

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 18:50:00 EDT

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Finally tonight, another in our occasional series on poets and poetry.

Naomi Shihab Nye is author of more than 25 volumes and winner of numerous awards. She was recently elected to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets, and, as we will hear, regularly conducts writing workshops around the country for young people.

NAOMI SHIHAB NYE, poet: My name is Naomi Shihab Nye. I live in San Antonio, Texas.

I have been working with students of all ages for 38 years, encouraging them to write their own poems and stories and discover how much material they have.

I took the title for my recent book, "Transfer," from an actual airlines baggage tag, but I was thinking about all the different kinds of transfers we make in our lives from one stage of our lives to another. My mother, Miriam Shihab, exposed her children to art and culture as much as she could. And our father, Aziz Shihab, was an immigrant from Palestine, a refugee.

I was lucky to be told stories as a little child. Our father brought tales out of his Palestinian background to our bedsides. And the minute I could write, when I was 6 years old, I wanted to start writing little detailed stories, poems of my own.

It seemed that telling a story helped us focus, helped us figure out who we were anyway, where were we in the world.

"Storyteller."

"Where is the door to the story? Is the door left open? When he sat by our beds, the days rushed past like water, driftwood, bricks, heavy cargoes disappearing downstream, no matter, no matter. Even the trees outside our screens tipped their cooling leaves to listen."

My father was very disappointed by war and fighting. And he thought language could help us out of cycles of revenge and animosity. And so, as a journalist, he always found himself asking lots of questions and trying to gather information. He was always very clear to underscore the fact that Jewish people and Arab people were brother and sister. That was in every story that he told.

He would say, this conflict came about because of political decisions or decisions made by powers in different countries, and it's not the fault of Jewish people and Arab people. He was convinced all through his life that resolution was possible.

"Many asked me not to forget them. Where do you keep all these people, the shoemaker with his rumpled cough, the man who twisted straws into brooms? My teacher, oh, my teacher. I will always cry when I think of my teacher. The olive farmer who lost every inch of ground, every tree, who sat with head in his hands in his son's living room for years after."

In the poem "Many Asked Me Not to Forget Them," I found the line, that actual line in my father's notebooks after he died, and then the poem I wrote came out in his voice. And when he died, and I really couldn't imagine how I would continue to live without this voice, until I realized I would always have that voice in my days. It was in my DNA, it was in my memory.

"I tucked them into my drawer with cufflinks and bow ties, touched them each evening before I slept, wished them happiness and peace, peace in the heart. No wonder we all got heart trouble."

I do think that all of us think in poems. I think of a poem as being deeper than headline news. You know how they talk about breaking news all the time, that -- if too much breaking news, trying to absorb all the breaking news, you start feeling really broken. And you need something that takes you to a place that's a little more timeless, that kind of gives you a place to stand to look out at all these things. Otherwise, you just feel assaulted by all of the tragedy in the world.

"We swam so easily to the stone village, women in thick dresses, men with smoky breath. We sat around the fire pitching in our own twigs. The world curled around us, sizzled and popped. We dropped our troubles into the lap of the storyteller, and they turned into someone else's."

JUDY WOODRUFF: That was Naomi Shihab Nye reading from her book of poems called "Transfer."

You can watch her read more of her work on our Art Beat page at NewsHour.PBS.org.

Remembering 'Brilliant' Banjo Player Earl Scruggs, Poet Adrienne Rich

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 18:44:00 EDT

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Finally tonight, we remember two American artists, beginning with poet Adrienne Rich, in her own words.

Rich was one of the most widely-read and influential poets of her time, a leading feminist, known especially for her politically-engaged verse. Her best-known volume, "Diving into the Wreck," won the National Book Award in 1973. She died Tuesday at her home in Santa Cruz, Calif.

Here she is at the Dodge Poetry Festival in 1998 reading her poem, "What Kind of Times Are These."

ADRIENNE RICH, poet: There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted who disappeared into those shadows.

I have walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled. This isn't a Russian poem. This is not somewhere else but here, our country moving closer to its own truth and dread, its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods meeting the unmarked strip of light, ghost-ridden crossroads, leaf mold paradise. I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these, to have you listen at all, it's necessary to talk about trees.

(APPLAUSE)

JUDY WOODRUFF: That was poet Adrienne Rich reading "What Kind of Times Are These." She died Tuesday at age 82.

JEFFREY BROWN: And we close with another artist, bluegrass musician Earl Scruggs, who died yesterday in Nashville at 88.

Scruggs helped create a new sound for the banjo and bluegrass music, first with Bill Monroe and then with his longtime partner Lester Flatt and The Foggy Mountain Boys. Their son "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" used in the film "Bonnie and Clyde" won a Grammy in 1968. He also performed the theme music to the television show "The Beverly Hillbillies."

He later formed the Earl Scruggs Review, playing and recording with his sons.

Here's a clip from a Scruggs performance in North Carolina in 2002.

(MUSIC)

JEFFREY BROWN: And we're joined now by another Grammy-winning banjo player, Bela Fleck.

Thanks so much for joining us.

BELA FLECK, musician: My pleasure. Thanks for asking me.

JEFFREY BROWN: So tell us about the Earl Scruggs sound. What did he do with the banjo to create something new?

BELA FLECK: Well, he's the guy who really made that leap with using three fingers in a rotating fashion to create this fast rippling sound that had never been heard before. And I can show you.

JEFFREY BROWN: Please.

BELA FLECK: He wears -- he wears two finger picks and a thumb pick, and by alternating them, he can play about as fast as he wants.

(MUSIC)

BELA FLECK: So it's this action. You know, you couldn't move one finger that fast, but all three, it's pretty easy, and it's kind of an incredible leap.

JEFFREY BROWN: So give us -- tell us a little bit more about this -- the history of his playing and really changing the sound of bluegrass music.

BELA FLECK: Well, he really exploded on the scene in Bill Monroe's band in the early '40s. And when he joined the band, it was an incredible thing.

They played the Grand Ole Opry, and I think it was like a Beatles-type response, where nobody had heard anything like this before. And I think his playing propelled bluegrass and Bill Monroe's music to the level that -- where we're all still talking about it.

JEFFREY BROWN: How do you describe that sound? Because you're the one of the people that picked up on it. What did you first hear when you heard it?

BELA FLECK: Well, I first heard this.

(MUSIC)

JEFFREY BROWN: I think a lot of people will remember that, yes.

BELA FLECK: Yeah, they do.

And Earl Scruggs had this thing that it wasn't just the technique or even the instrument. It was him. There was this soulful quality that came through that made you -- if you're somebody like me who was, I guess, supposed to play the banjo, it made you stop in your tracks, and you couldn't do anything until you got done hearing him play, and then immediately you'd have to go try and find a banjo.

I've heard of people stopping their cars, having car wrecks, all kinds of things. But most of the banjo players I know had that moment when they heard Earl Scruggs. So, for me, it transcends the technique. It's the musician in him and his personality, his musical personality, such great taste, such great technique, very, very creative.

JEFFREY BROWN: And you see that influence today still?

BELA FLECK: The influence? Absolutely.

I mean if it wasn't for Earl Scruggs, guys like me wouldn't be doing what we're doing. I mean, he's changed so many people's lives, honestly. I was thinking about all the thousands of people that live in Nashville, like myself, that there's no reason a guy from New York would end up down there if it wasn't for the sound of Earl Scruggs' banjo coming over the airwaves and just changing my life.

And it's happened so many people that I know. It's made a lot of people richer from hearing him. And I just think we're all very lucky to have him in the world.

JEFFREY BROWN: And you got to play with him. What was that like? What was he like?

BELA FLECK: He was really cool because he was very quiet, and he wouldn't say much, but then he would come out with a quip that was like so perfect and so brilliant, very smart.

And over the last few years, I got to know him a lot better. He was home a lot more. And we live about a mile apart in Nashville, Tenn. In fact, he came -- I shouldn't be talking about me, but he came to see my concerto performance in Nashville with a symphony back in September. And I was just thrilled that he would do that.

But, also, on occasion, I could go to his place and we'd sit around and play or talk and hear old stories. And it was just very sweet. And I just feel very fortunate to have had that time with him.

JEFFREY BROWN: Can you take us out with about 30 seconds more of some Earl Scruggs music?

BELA FLECK: Sure.

Here -- about the time when he came up, there was a lot of swing and jazz going on in the world, too, and it affected him, too. So I will play a little of that, that you might not expect from Earl Scruggs.

(MUSIC)

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, Bela Fleck on the music and life of Earl Scruggs, thanks so much.

BELA FLECK: Thank you.