Kay Ryan was appointed the Library of Congress's 16th Poet Laureate in 2008. She has published several collections of poetry, including The Niagara River, Say Uncle, and Flamingo Watching. A re-issue of her 2002 collection, Believe It or Not!, poems inspired by stories from the newspaper cartoon Ripley's Believe It or Not!, has recently been re-released and re-titled as The Jam Jar Lifeboat & Other Novelties Exposed.

In this episode she is joined in conversation with Atsuro Riley. The companion Reading episode may be found here.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also listen to audio recordings of this event there.

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Length: 36:29; Size: 445 MB

Kay Ryan was appointed the Library of Congress's 16th Poet Laureate in 2008. She has published several collections of poetry, including The Niagara River, Say Uncle, and Flamingo Watching. A re-issue of her 2002 collection, Believe It or Not!, poems inspired by stories from the newspaper cartoon Ripley's Believe It or Not!, has recently been re-released and re-titled as The Jam Jar Lifeboat & Other Novelties Exposed.

In this episode she is introduced by Atsuro Riley and then reads from her work. The companion Conversation episode may be found here.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also listen to audio recordings of this event there.

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Length: 52:33; Size: 638 MB

Kay Ryan was appointed the Library of Congress's 16th Poet Laureate in 2008. She has published several collections of poetry, including The Niagara River, Say Uncle, and Flamingo Watching. A re-issue of her 2002 collection, Believe It or Not!, poems inspired by stories from the newspaper cartoon Ripley's Believe It or Not!, has recently been re-released and re-titled as The Jam Jar Lifeboat & Other Novelties Exposed. Her most recent publication is The Best of It: New and Selected Poems. A longtime resident of Marin County, she was born in California in 1945 and grew up in the small towns of the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. About her work, J.D. McClatchy has said: "Her poems are compact, exhilarating, strange affairs, like Erik Satie miniatures or Joseph Cornell boxes. She is an anomaly in today's literary culture: as intense and elliptical as Dickinson, as buoyant and rueful as Frost." Ryan's poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, The Yale Review, The Paris Review, and The Threepenny Review, among other journals and anthologies. She was named to the "It List" by Entertainment Weekly and one of her poems has been permanently installed at New York's Central Park Zoo. Ryan was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2006. In October 2009, Kay Ryan launched her project "Poetry for the Mind's Joy," an initiative through which she hopes to draw national attention to community colleges, as well as drawing the colleges' attention to poetry.

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Length: 1:29:14; Size: 81.8 MB

Peter Reading is one of Britain’s most original and controversial poets: angry, uncompromising, gruesomely ironic, hilarious, and heartbreaking. In Spring 2001, the Lannan Foundation traveled to England and recorded Peter Reading reading his entire body of poetry to that time, i.e. through the collection Faunal. In 2010 the Lannan Foundation commissioned British filmmaker Pamela Robertson-Pearce to record Mr. Reading reading from his subsequent collections at his home in Ludlow, Shropshire, England. The Lannan Foundation is delighted to bring the voice and work of Peter Reading to a world-wide audience.

Vendange Tardive is a late harvest of vintage Reading in disaster mode. Here is a rueful crop of valedictory poems in which man reaps what he sows: shipwreck, ruin, death, war, ignomony and extinction. But somehow, amid all that, there is still the fruit of the vine and the bittersweet spirit of life. - Bloodaxe Books

A vendange tardive is a late-harvest wine, and the title poem records the gift of a bottle on the poet's 62nd birthday. Another poem, "All Is Safely Gathered In", in which he offers thanks for a birthday bottle of champagne, bluntly begins: "Morituri te salutant" (we who are about to die salute you). While this book marks Reading's return to a collection of individual pieces, it still coheres as he weaves multiple threads in which deaths of family members and friends mix with the deleterious effects of oil-dependent economies, compounded by a day-to-day awareness that not only is the self at the age of "late harvest", but in the face of climate change, so is the whole human race. - Carrie Etter, The Guardian.

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Length: 29:21; Size: 337 MB

Peter Reading is one of Britain’s most original and controversial poets: angry, uncompromising, gruesomely ironic, hilarious, and heartbreaking. In Spring 2001, the Lannan Foundation traveled to England and recorded Peter Reading reading his entire body of poetry to that time, i.e. through the collection Faunal. In 2010 the Lannan Foundation commissioned British videographer Pamela Robertson-Pearce to record Mr. Reading reading from his subsequent collections at his home in Ludlow, Shropshire, England. The Lannan Foundation is delighted to bring the voice and work of Peter Reading to a world-wide audience.

-273.15 [absolute zero] is a lament, a tirade, a disaster warning, and an anthropologist's catalogue of our final expedition addressed to an earlier survivor of global catastrophe, Noah of the Flood.

"Despair, both environmental and political, is never absent; but this is an appreciative, defiantly humane volume."
– Robert Potts, The Guardian

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Length: 37:05; Size: 442 MB

Update: We previously had an incorrect video file and have replaced it with the correct version. We apologize for any confusion. 913 September 2011)

Peter Reading is one of Britain’s most original and controversial poets: angry, uncompromising, gruesomely ironic, hilarious, and heartbreaking. In Spring 2001, the Lannan Foundation traveled to England and recorded Peter Reading reading his entire body of poetry to that time, i.e. through the collection Faunal. In 2010 the Lannan Foundation commissioned British videographer Pamela Robertson-Pearce to record Mr. Reading reading from his subsequent collections at his home in Ludlow, Shropshire, England. The Lannan Foundation is delighted to bring the voice and work of Peter Reading to a world-wide audience.

Reading's death statement features his 'death mask on the cover. His own consolations of 'verse, viticulture and love' are mirrored in the extended swansong of Chinoiserie, a sequence of versions of the 8th-century Chinese poet Li Po, while the blunter associations of his title are encrypted in the book's progressively shorter lyrics: obsolete, obscene and obit (he died). Now out of print, this book is included in Collected Poems Volume III: Poems 1997-2003 (2003, Bloodaxe).

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Length: 26:32; Size: 304 MB

Peter Reading is one of Britain’s most original and controversial poets: angry, uncompromising, gruesomely ironic, hilarious, and heartbreaking. In Spring 2001, the Lannan Foundation traveled to England and recorded Peter Reading reading his entire body of poetry to that time, i.e. through the collection Faunal. In 2010 the Lannan Foundation commissioned British videographer Pamela Robertson-Pearce to record Mr. Reading reading from his subsequent collections at his home in Ludlow, Shropshire, England. The Lannan Foundation is delighted to bring the voice and work of Peter Reading to a world-wide audience.

Civil, now out of print, is included in Collected Poems Volume III: Poems 1997-2003 (2003, Bloodaxe).

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Length: 8:21; Size: 95 MB

John D'Agata published his first book, Halls of Fame, a collection of lyric essays, in 2001 and Annie Dillard called it "A daring, utterly original book by a young writer of rare intelligence and artistry... With wit and finesse, and writing that's as much poetry as it is prose, D'Agata is redefining the modern American essay." He has since edited two essay collections, The Next American Essay (2002) and The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009) and his creative nonfiction book, About a Mountain, was published in 2010. His next book, due in February 2011, is titled The Lifespan of a Fact, which is a collaboration with a fact-checker. D'Agata holds MFAs in both nonfiction and poetry and teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, where he lives.

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Length: 28:51; Size: 350 MB

John D'Agata published his first book, Halls of Fame, a collection of lyric essays, in 2001 and Annie Dillard called it "A daring, utterly original book by a young writer of rare intelligence and artistry... With wit and finesse, and writing that's as much poetry as it is prose, D'Agata is redefining the modern American essay." He has since edited two essay collections, The Next American Essay (2002) and The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009) and his creative nonfiction book, About a Mountain, was published in 2010. His next book, due in February 2011, is titled The Lifespan of a Fact, which is a collaboration with a fact-checker. D'Agata holds MFAs in both nonfiction and poetry and teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, where he lives.

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Length: 1:03:14; Size: 768 MB

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, considered Germany's most important living poet, is also a highly regarded essayist, journalist, dramatist, editor, publisher, and translator. Born in 1929 in Bavaria, he was educated in German universities and also the Sorbonne in Paris. His many awards include the Nuremberg Cultural Prize and the Pasolini Prize. The most recent volume of his poems to be translated (by Michael Hamburger) into English is Kiosk, published in 1997.

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Length: 33:34; Size: 387 MB

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, considered Germany's most important living poet, is also a highly regarded essayist, journalist, dramatist, editor, publisher, and translator. Born in 1929 in Bavaria, he was educated in German universities and also the Sorbonne in Paris. His many awards include the Nuremberg Cultural Prize and the Pasolini Prize. The most recent volume of his poems to be translated (by Michael Hamburger) into English is Kiosk, published in 1997.

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Length: 38:00; Size: 438 MB

Jimmy Santiago Baca is a poet, memoirist, activist, and native New Mexican. His books include a memoir, A Place to Stand: The Making of a Poet, and the story collection, The Importance of a Piece of Paper. "Language placed my life experiences in a new context, freeing me for the moment to become with air as air, with clouds as clouds, from which new associations arose to engage me in present life in a more purposeful way." His recent novel, A Glass of Water, tells the story of Casimiro and Nopal who carry with them the promise of a new beginning as young immigrants having made the nearly deadly journey across the border from Mexico. The Dallas Morning News says, "An insistent theme of redemption blends with an unexpected lyrical tenderness, confirming that even in the harsh landscape of his stories, Mr. Baca sees a horizon of hope."

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Length: 27:33; Size: 319 MB

Jimmy Santiago Baca is a poet, memoirist, activist, and native New Mexican. His books include a memoir, A Place to Stand: The Making of a Poet, and the story collection, The Importance of a Piece of Paper. "Language placed my life experiences in a new context, freeing me for the moment to become with air as air, with clouds as clouds, from which new associations arose to engage me in present life in a more purposeful way." His recent novel, A Glass of Water, tells the story of Casimiro and Nopal who carry with them the promise of a new beginning as young immigrants having made the nearly deadly journey across the border from Mexico. The Dallas Morning News says, "An insistent theme of redemption blends with an unexpected lyrical tenderness, confirming that even in the harsh landscape of his stories, Mr. Baca sees a horizon of hope."

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Length: 54:00; Size: 624 MB

Michael Cunningham was raised in Los Angeles and educated at Stanford University and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. His novels include A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, and The Hours, which won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award and was chosen as a Best Book of 1998 by the New York Times and the Los Angles Times. He currently lives in New York City.

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Length: 27:23; Size: 316 MB

Michael Cunningham was raised in Los Angeles and educated at Stanford University and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. His novels include A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, and The Hours, which won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award and was chosen as a Best Book of 1998 by the New York Times and the Los Angles Times. He currently lives in New York City.

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Length: 29:41; Size: 342 MB

Billy Collins' poetry books are Picnic, Lightning; The Art of Drowning; Questions about Angels, which was a National Poetry Series winner; and The Apple that Astonished Paris. He has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Mr. Collins, who lives in New York and teaches at Lehman College, has been the United States Poet Laureate.

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Length: 27:38; Size: 318 MB

Billy Collins' poetry books are Picnic, Lightning; The Art of Drowning; Questions about Angels, which was a National Poetry Series winner; and The Apple that Astonished Paris. He has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Mr. Collins, who lives in New York and teaches at Lehman College, has been the United States Poet Laureate.

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Length: 47:07; Size: 543 MB

Mark Doty’s five books of poetry include My Alexandria, which won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award; Atlantis; and Sweet Machine. Mr. Doty said he wrote Heaven’s Coast, a memoir about his life with his partner who died of AIDS, when he realized "it would have felt in some way dishonest to the gravity and intensity of this time of grief to attempt to order it, to shape it in that very controlled way that poems are shaped. Potentially, it was an infinite book." Mr. Doty read from Atlantis, Heaven’s Coast, and Sweet Machine and talked with Eloise Klein Healy, whose poetry books include Artemis in Echo Park and Ordinary Wisdom.

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Length: 22:18; Size: 255 MB

Mark Doty’s five books of poetry include My Alexandria, which won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award; Atlantis; and Sweet Machine. Mr. Doty said he wrote Heaven’s Coast, a memoir about his life with his partner who died of AIDS, when he realized "it would have felt in some way dishonest to the gravity and intensity of this time of grief to attempt to order it, to shape it in that very controlled way that poems are shaped. Potentially, it was an infinite book." Mr. Doty read from Atlantis, Heaven’s Coast, and Sweet Machine and talked with Eloise Klein Healy, whose poetry books include Artemis in Echo Park and Ordinary Wisdom.

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Length: 37:24; Size: 429 MB

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on September 29, 2010.

Kwame Dawes is a writer of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and plays. Born in Ghana in 1962, Dawes spent most of his childhood and early adult life in Jamaica. As a poet, he is profoundly influenced by the rhythms and textures of that lush place, citing in a recent interview his "spiritual, intellectual, and emotional engagement with reggae music." His book Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius remains the most authoritative study of the lyrics of Bob Marley. Dawes has also published 15 collections of poetry. His most recent titles include Back of Mount Peace and Hope's Hospice. His book, Requiem is a suite of poems inspired by the illustrations of African American artist Tom Feelings in his landmark book The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo. He has also published two novels: Bivouac and She's Gone, winner of the 2008 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction. In 2007 he released a memoir, A Far Cry From Plymouth Rock: A Personal Narrative, called "a poet's eloquent meditation on the complexities of history, race and the oft-broken promise of America," by Geoff Dyer.

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Length: 36:24; Size: 444 MB