short videos

[Guest guest]

Dear List,

This site has as much to do with hearing people share who they are, as

it does why the poem speaks to them. Whether you care much for poetry

in general is almost irrelevant, some of these people say they don't

either. Yet "this poem" they may carry always in their pocket...

You can "hear" that emotional connection and perhaps the poem too

comes alive in a surprising way. Anyway, I keep going back to hear a

few more, and have selected some particularly moving ones. ~Gloria

-----------

from the website:

Robert Pinsky, the 39th Poet Laureate of the United States, believes

that poetry is a vocal art, an art meant to be read aloud. "If a poem

is written well," he says, "it was written with the poet's voice and

for a voice. Reading a poem silently instead of saying a poem is like

the difference between staring at sheet music and actually humming or

playing the music on an instrument."

In his over thirty years of teaching, Robert Pinsky has emphasized the

bodily, vocal experience of the art of poetry. Pinsky, a professor of

English and creative writing at Boston University, long ago found

that when he asks students to read aloud and talk about a poem they

love something remarkable happens—something in their faces and voices

that demonstrates a profound personal connection to the poem. The

Favorite Poem Project has grown out of that discovery.

http://www.favoritepoem.org/archive/ entire list of 50 short videos

http://www.favoritepoem.org/archive/scherr.html - Alexander Scherr,

Professor of Law - At the Fishhouses by Elizabeth Bishop

http://www.favoritepoem.org/archive/doherty.html - John Doherty,

construction worker - from Song of Myself by Whitman

http://www.favoritepoem.org/archive/vanfields.html - William Van

Fields, retired - My Papa's Waltz by Theodore Roethke

http://www.favoritepoem.org/archive/liang.html - Yina Liang, teenage

student - I'm Nobody by Emily Dickinson