Season 4
8 episodes
0 min. per episode
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Elisa connects diverse voices through poetry, unraveling personal stories that reveal America’s heart and soul, one verse at a time.
Episodes
In 1770s Boston, Phillis Wheatley was at the same time enslaved and an international celebrity: a writer who mastered the most persuasive rhetoric of the day to publish enduring arguments about freedom. Inaugural poets Amanda Gorman and Richard Blanco, writer Clint Smith, and scholars Glenda Carpio and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. join host Elisa New to read two of Wheatley's poems for public occasions.
Russian-born poet Joseph Brodsky wrote about the centaur as a Cold War self-portrait: a divided global refugee, created by a geopolitics of shifting borders and cultures. Theater of War artistic director Bryan Doerries, writer Yelena Akhtiorskaya, and scholars Sven Birkerts, Zakhar Ishtov, Jonathan Brent, and Joseph Ellis read two poems by Brodsky: one about love; the other, exile.
Poems by Sylvia Plath and Kay Ryan consider the cultural significance of mushrooms. Chef Gabrielle Hamilton, Dr. Andrew Weil, writer Maria Popova, and journalist Frank Bruni join host Elisa New.
Against the backdrop of 1964 Washington D.C., Robert Lowell wrote this timeless reflection on the contradictions between American idealism and American policy. Journalists Andrea Mitchell and Justin Worland, political commentators David Axelrod and Bill Kristol, scholar Sir Jonathan Bate, and psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison join host Elisa New.
God drives down from the mountains behind the wheel of a Jeep, in this poem by Tracy K. Smith, former U.S. poet laureate. Smith illuminates the ambrosial bounty of Texas Hill Country, where she's joined by country music singer-songwriter Jimmie Dale Gilmore, members of both Christian and Jewish communities, and host Elisa New.
Scholar and host Elisa New travels the country, joining up with distinguished poets, celebrities, and everyday Americans to create a fully immersive experience in hearing, reading, and interpreting American poems.