Marilyn Nelson is a storytelling poet who has taught poetry and contemplative practice to college students and West Point cadets. She brings a contemplative eye to ordinary goodness in the present and to complicated ancestries we’re all reckoning with now. And she imparts a spacious perspective on what “communal pondering” might mean.
Mar 12
Arab Aramin, Robi Damelin, Liora Eilon, Mohamed Abu Jafar — Turning Unbearable Loss Into Ground of Shared Life
From Krista: A few months ago, I was invited to sit with four people sharing a very different Israeli-Palestinian story than that which comes to us in headlines. They are members of the Parents Circle - Bereaved Families Forum, a very special community. It's composed of hundreds ... Show More
1h 6m
May 2022
Marilyn Nelson — The Truceless Wars
What do we achieve in our fighting? How can we turn to hope and our deepest nature? Marilyn Nelson was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the daughter of a school teacher and a U. S. serviceman, a member of the last graduating class of Tuskegee Airmen. She is the author or translator of mo ... Show More
14m 22s
Jul 2020
Radical Imagination: Tracy K. Smith, Marilyn Nelson, and Terrance Hayes on Poetry in Our Times
<p>In a special episode of the Poetry Podcast, Tracy K. Smith, Marilyn Nelson, and Terrance Hayes join<span> </span><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/kevin-young">Kevin Young</a><span> </span>to read their work, and to discuss its relationship to protest and liberat ... Show More
45m 41s
Nov 2021
Donika Kelly — In the Chapel of St. Mary’s
Why do empty places sometimes lend themselves to reflection or contemplation? In this poem, a poet — describing herself as a nonbeliever — goes into a chapel to sit. In the corner there are some girls talking, there are stained glass windows, and the poet is at once at home in he ... Show More
14m 57s
Nov 2023
Clint Smith with Krista Tippett — What We Know in the "Marrow of Our Bones"
Friends, Pádraig here — we are awakening your Poetry Unbound feed to share this brilliant episode from the newest season of On Being, which is well underway. Conversations on love and loss, comedy and ecology, social creativity, poetry, and more all await you in the On Being feed ... Show More
1h 5m
Aug 2019
'Pick up the book and read': Canadian poets on the legacy of Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison's literary and academic career was honoured with a Pulitzer Prize, Nobel Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her writing explored, celebrated, questioned and critiqued the space of black lives in America, up until her death on Monday at the age of 88.
Today ... Show More
19m 24s
Jul 2023
Maya C. Popa — They Are Building a Hospital
So much of what was once deemed impossible was found — during Covid — to be possible. Here, a poet watches a tent, a huge temporary hospital, be raised up on the green of Central Park, a place she’d previously walked her dog.Maya C. Popa is the author of Wound Is the Origin of Wo ... Show More
15m 52s
Nov 2019
74 | Stephen Greenblatt on Stories, History, and Cultural Poetics
An infinite number of things happen; we bring structure and meaning to the world by making art and telling stories about it. Every work of literature created by human beings comes out of an historical and cultural context, and drawing connections between art and its context can b ... Show More
1h 6m