Poetry

We remember the poet Kenneth Koch, who died Saturday.

Poet Donald Hall returns to the show to discuss his new collection of poetry, The Painted Bed, much of it written in mourning for his late wife, poet Jane Kenyon. Hall received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry for his collection, The One Day, and the 1990 Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America for Old and New Poems.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Poetry Speaks (Sourcebooks) a collection of poems by 42 English speaking poets, along with biographical and critical essays, as well as three CDs featuring the poets reading their own work.

Paul Muldoon reads: Ode ii-10 (to Licinius) (23 B.C.) by Horace; A Normal Day by Dorothy Muldoon; September 1, 1939 (1940) by W.H. Auden

Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz reflects on what music he has and hasn't been listening to.

Our new U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins. His new collection of poems is Sailing Alone Around the Room (Random House). His other collections include Picnic, Lightning (Univ of Pittsburgh), The Art of Drowning (Univ of Pittsburgh Press), and Questions about Angels (William Morrow & Co). John Updike says of Collins' poetry, "Billy Collins writes lovely poems...

Former poet laureate Robert Pinsky reads a poem that he has turned to at this time.

Former poet laureate Robert Hass also reads a poem.

Poet Billy Collins has just been appointed the next Poet Laureate. His books include Picnic, Lightning (University of Pittsburgh Press), The Art of Drowning, (University of Pittsburgh Press), and Questions about Angels (William Morrow & Co.), which was selected as a winner of the National Poetry Series Competition in 1990. John Updike says of Collins' poetry, "Billy Collins writes lovely poems...

Poet Billy Collins reads his poem This Much I Do Remember.

Our classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz joins us to talk about his new book of poems, “Cairo Traffic.” (University of Chicago Press) Lloyd is professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston and writes about classical music for the Boston Phoenix. In 1994, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai (ya-HOO-da AH-muh-kye, rhymes with pie) died Friday at the age of 76, and we feature a 1991 interview from the archives. Amichai was a celebrated poet whose subjects were love and loss, and more recently, aging and mortality. The New York Times wrote that he had a “gift for poeticizing the particular: the localized object or image in everyday life.” (originally aired 2/27/91)

Our classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz turns off the turntable and reads us a poem from his new book, Cairo Traffic.

Associate curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Russell Ferguson He curated the exhibit “In Memory of My Feelings: Frank O’Hara and American Art,” (there’s also a companion book). Frank O’Hara was part of a small group of poets in New York City in the 1950s and 60s, influenced by the Abstract Expressionist painters of that time, including Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. O’Hara died in 1966 after being struck by a jeep. Also, poet David Lehman (“LEE-man”), author of “the Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets” (Anchor Books)

Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz is also a poet. He reviews “The Voice of the Poet” (Random House) a collection of poets reading their own work on audio tape.

Poets Sonia Sanchez and Michael Harper. The two are featured on a new CD anthology, "Our Souls Have Grown Deep Like the Rivers" (Rhino) a collection of African American poetry from 1919 to 1999. It Includes the work of Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Maya Angelou, Gil Scott-heron, Amiri Baraka and others.

Poet David Lehman is the editor of “The Best American Poetry” and on the faculty of Bennington College and The New School. His new book of poems chronicles his attempt to write a poem a day. It’s called “The Daily Mirror: a journal in poetry.” (Scribner)

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic. He is part Serbian, and was born in Belgrade. He emigrated to the U.S. as a teenager over 40 years ago. His new collection of poems is "Jackstraws" (Harcourt Brace). SIMIC also edited and translated an anthology of Serbian poetry, "The Horse Has Six Legs" (Graywolf Press, 1992)

Poet Seamus Heaney has released a new collection of his poems called "Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. He resides in Dublin, Ireland and in Boston where he teaches at Harvard University.