Gwendolyn Brooks from the Library of Congress

On The Writing Life for Women's History Month HoCoPoLitSo debuts a newly re-mastered "Conversation with Gwendolyn Brooks," taped from the Library of Congress in 1986, during her year as poetry consultant. This rediscovered jewel gives a rare and winning glimpse of the late and now legendary figure in American literature. Ms. Brooks' talk with librarian and the young D.C. writer Ethelbert Miller is a rich one. Best of all, she recites her poem "We Are Cool."

This edition originally aired in 1986.

Allan Starkey hosts Hilary Tham

On HoCoPoLitSo’s The Writing Life Allan Starkey talks to poet Hilary Tham, born to Chinese parents in Malaysia, educated in English by Irish nuns, and later at the University of Malaysia married to a Jewish American Peace Corps volunteer. All have influenced her poetry. Ms. Tham reads “Village Afternoon,” “Letter from Malaysia” and several poems about a recurring character, Mrs. Wei, loosely based on her own mother: “Mrs. Wei and the Apple Man,” “Mrs. Wei Wants to Believe the First Amendment,” “There are no Kung-Fu Fighters in My Family Tree,” and “Ancestor Worship.”

This edition originally aired in 1993.

Gregory Orr hosts Stanley Kunitz

Here on this edition of The Writing Life is a moving conversation between Stanley Kunitz (named National Poet Laureate in 2000 at age 95!) and his onetime student, poet and author of the best critical study of Kunitz poetry, Gregory Orr.

At age 88, the much-honored Kunitz reflects: "Poetry is most deeply concerned with telling us what it feels like to be alive." "Before there were poets we had no evidence of what it was like to be human on this earth." Through the most ordinary images and details, Kunitz aims to make experience emblematic, "to convert life into legend." He reads "Open the Gates", "Father and Son", "The Portrait", and "An Old Cracked Tune". Orr sees the latter two as companion pieces, revealing the grim and the celebratory in Kunitz's work, while his passion for the natural world is heard in "The Snakes of September" and finally, "The Long Boat".

Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction to the Poetry, Columbia University Press 1985.

"Celebrating Sterling Brown"

Poet Roland Flint welcomes poet Michael S. Harper (editor of The Collected Poems of Sterling Brown) for reminiscences about the late (1901-1989) great, and greatly loved Howard University professor.

A poet of wide learning, rich humor and deeply moral vision, he was also a profoundly knowledgeable fan of jazz and the blues. In 40 years of teaching, Brown's notable students included writers Amiri Baraka, Lucille Clifton, and Toni Morrison.

Critic Harper reads and comments on five Brown poems: "Odyssey of Big Boy," "Long Gone," "Slim in Hell," "Puttin' on Dog," and "Conjured." The final poem, "After Winter," heard in Brown's own voice (courtesy Smithsonian/Folkways), recalls his father at the Howard County farm on Whiskey Bottom Road where the poet spent summers as a boy.

This edition originally recorded in 1994.

Mark Strand hosts W.S. Merwin

Poet W. S. Merwin talks with friend and Former National Poet Laureate Mark Strand about his prize-winning literary translations. Merwin, highly regarded for his work from the Spanish, French, Portuguese and Latin - languages he knows well - has also worked on texts from languages with which he is less familiar, such as ancient Greek, Chinese, and Russian, by collaborating with scholars. Merwin reads a favorite passage from Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis, Catullus poem #11 and Mandelstram's "Leningrad."

This edition originally aired in 1995.

Roland Flint hosts Lucille Clifton

In memory of the late Maryland Poet Laureate Roland Flint (1934-2001) the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society dedicates this edition of The Writing Life: Lucille Clifton hosting Roland Flint (1991).

Roland Flint was named Poet Laureate of Maryland in 1995 by Governor Parris Glendening and served in that position until October, 2000. He also served as HoCoPoLitSo's poet in residence (1989-1990) and appeared numerous times to local audiences, most recently in June 2000 at "A Day Devoted to Poetry" as part of the Columbia Festival of the Arts.

A nationally recognized poet, Dr. Flint was an extremely popular English Literature professor at Georgetown University. His latest works of poetry include Stubborn (1990); Hearing Voices (1991); Pigeon (1991); Pigeon in the Night (1994); and Easy: Poems (1999).

In this edition of The Writing Life Roland Flint, hosted by Lucille Clifton, reads a number of poems from his 1990 National Poetry Series Winner, Stubborn, published by the University of Illinois Press. Mr. Flint reads "Love & Breath", "Gift of Honey", "Follow", "Last Words", "Park River 1939", "Juggle", "Late September, Early Morning", "Pamela, on February 8, 1982" and "2/26/91" - a poem about his birthday.

Lucille Clifton, the author of ten books of poetry and former Maryland Poet Laureate (1976-1985), recently won the National Book Award for Poetry for Blessing the Boats (2000) published by BOA Editions.

Roland Flint hosts Ann Darr

On The Writing Life poet Roland Flint talks with poet Ann Darr about her years as a WASP (Women's Airforce Service Pilot) and their affect on her work. She says "Flight, is in all its meaning," the central metaphor of her work.

Ms. Darr reads nine poems from her 1994 book, Flying the Zuni Mountains. The conversation is enriched with historic photos and slides prepared for a poetry reading that took place at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

This edition originally aired in 1995.

Roland Flint talks with Josephine Jacobsen

Roland Flint talks with Baltimore poet Josephine Jacobsen, whose "best work, done in her seventies and eighties, has won her almost every major poetry award." She reads eight poems, including her passionate affirmation of the power of poetry, "Gentle Reader."

The American Academy of Arts and Letters says, "Jacobsen's quietly articulated observations have the dark resonance of great art."

Roland Flint hosts Michael Collier

Maryland Poet Laureate Michael Collier is asked about his teaching at the University of Maryland College Park and innovations as director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Soon his host and predecessor as Maryland Poet Laureate, Roland Flint, turns to Collier's poetry. From his 1989 book The Folded Heart, the new laureate reads "V-8" and "The Problem"; from The Neighbor (1995), "The Barber" and "2212 West Flower Street"; closing with "Brave Sparrow", published since in The Ledge (2000).

This show originally aired in 1997.

Henry Taylor hosts Mark Strand

Poet Henry Taylor engages HoCoPoLitSo guest Mark Strand, then in his Washington year as National Poet Laureate (1991), in wide ranging literary talk. Traditional form, rhyme, slant rhymes and alliteration are typical of both Strand's early and most recent work.

Taylor observes that Strand's poems often have a rather "spooky" quality. At his request, Mr. Strand reads five poems that illustrate this feature: "Sleeping with One Eye Open;" Keeping Things Whole;" and "Shooting Whales" from his Selected Poems (1980); "A.M." and "Always" from The Continuous Life (1990), both published by Knopf.

Henry Taylor hosts Maxine Kumin

Much-honored poet Maxine Kumin - Pulitzer Prize-winner, former national Poet Laureate - whose poems The New York Times has called "increasingly unforgettable, indispensable" reads and discusses a sampling of her work during this conversation with an old friend, her host Henry Taylor. She began writing at age 8, stopped in college, wrote light verse in the 1950's, and belonged to a poetry workshop through the suburban housewife years during which her work matured.

Punctuated by Taylor's appreciations of her craft, of a line, a rhyme, a metaphor, of her ability to convey feelings without sentimentality, Kumin reads "Casablanca", "Morning Swim", "The Vealers", "Hello, Hello Henry", "How It Is" (after the death of her close friend, poet Anne Sexton), "We Stood There Singing", and "The Rendezvous".

This edition originally aired in 1997.

Henry Taylor hosts Maxine Kumin "Horsing Around"

Pulitzer Prize-winning poets Maxine Kumin and Henry Taylor each have long and deep involvements with the world of horses. Kumin and her husband raise horses on a farm in central New Hampshire.

Henry Taylor grew up riding and training show horses in northern Virginia. Birthing a filly, gaining the trust of a skittish animal, the ins and outs of riding lessons, taking on the toughest and most unpleasant chores, describing a “flying change”, evoking the grace and magic of the bonds between man, animal and nature-these are among the themes of this televised conversation which includes readings of ten poems-by turns informative, thoughtful, humorous, in every way a pleasure to see and hear.

This edition originally aired in 1997.

Henry Taylor hosts Daniel Mark Epstein

As a poet Daniel Mark Epstein admires formal meter, rhyme, and clarity. He is also a biographer drawn to charismatic figures. So the chance to pore over the newly released personal papers of Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) was irresistible. It led to What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, his recent, riveting life of this bold, seductive, and enormously popular American poet, whose life and work personified The Jazz Age.

At Taylor's request, Epstein closes by reading four poems from his own seventh collection, The Traveler's Calendar.

E. Ethelbert Miller hosts Amiri Baraka

Poet E. Ethelbert Miller introduces poet and activist Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), one of the most productive writers of the century. Baraka, drawn to alternative literature during his college years, believes he was influenced by Charlie Olson, the Black Mountain group, Frank O'Hara, and Allen Ginsberg. His 1960 trip to Cuba and the Civil Rights movement also play significant roles in the quality and style of his poems as well as his taste in music. One thing, Miller says that stands out in Baraka's poetry, is his interest in humor and popular culture.

Baraka reads the first poem he ever published, "Preface to a 20 Volume Suicide Note" and a section of "In the Tradition."

E. Ethelbert Miller hosts Sekou Sundiata

Sekou Sundiata is known as one of the leading recording performance poets. With host E. Ethelbert Miller he discusses his "vibrant and diverse" hometown of East Harlem and the influence of Victor Hernandez Cruz's poem "Snaps" on his own poetry. Sundiata also explains his passion for political issues such as democracy, freedom, and social justice and how these themes are reflected in his writing.

Among his recordings are The Blue Oneness of Dreams (1997), longstoryshort (2000) and Dance & Be Still (2000). He frequently tours with musicians Craig Harris and the Black Coalition Orchestra.

This edition of The Writing Life was recognized with a 2001 National Hometown Video Festival Award.

Michael Collier hosts Li-Young Lee

Prize-winning Chicago poet Li-Young Lee who speaks Chinese at home, considers English his literary language.

Collier asks to hear "Epistle" from Lee's first book Rose, "A Final Thing" from The City in Which I Love You; and an excerpt from his memoir, The Winged Seed.

This edition originally aired in 1996.

Michael Collier hosts Anne Caston

Host Michael Collier's links to guest Anne Caston go back to Warren Wilson College, where Caston learned her craft as a poet and earned an MFA. Caston reads "Anatomy" and the title poem from her first collection, Flying Out With the Wounded, awarded the NYU Press Prize for poetry in 1997.

These poems were inspired by Caston's experience as a nurse; she and Collier agree that they have more "muscle" in language and style than her apprentice efforts, too often constrained by forced rhyme and meter. Poetry, Caston says, provides an outlet to articulate her life experiences and to tell the "great, tragic" stories alluded to in "When I am Not Telling It" and "Gardens."

This edition originally aired in 1997.

Michael Collier hosts Rita Dove

Michael Collier's half-hour conversation with Pulitzer Prize winning poet Rita Dove centers on her recent book, On the Bus With Rosa Parks, and her years as a National Poet Laureate.

Dove talks about the genesis of her poems about Parks, the quiet ladylike person who, by remaining seated when told to move to the back of the bus, set off the Montgomery Bus Boycott that led to the end of Jim Crow. Collier likens the power and symbolism of Park's inaction to the historic ride of Paul Revere.

As Dove reads "In the Lobby of the Warner Theatre", "Washington, D.C.", "Rosa", "The Pond, Porch View: 6 p.m. Early Spring" and "Lady Freedom Among Us", Collier calls attention to the fine points of each poem.

This edition originally aired in 1999.

Michael Collier hosts Edgar Silex

Silex talks about growing up on a Pueblo reservation in the Southwest. The tri-cultural poet, who is of Native American, Hispanic and European descent, reflects on these influences, on his relationship with his parents and grandparents, and talks about falling in love with Spanish poetry heard on the Mexican radio at age 8. He also tells of leaving a lucrative career at Hughes Aircraft to study literature and pursue his interest in poetry. Silex reads four poems: "For Chris", written after meeting a young Navajo boy, "Departure", "Story" and "Distances".

This edition originally aired in 2000.

Michael Collier hosts Paula Meehan

Earlier this year, Maryland poet Michael Collier had the pleasure of hosting Irish poet Paula Meehan on The Writing Life. Their half-hour conversation includes her reading of several poems.

Paula Meehan lives in Dublin where she was born in 1955. The Northside working class neighborhood where she grew up provided local lore, the rhythms of children's playsongs and shouts, family talk and silences. Meehan's direct lighthearted, courageous treatment of such touchy subjects as the gender revolution has been groundbreaking, winning high praise from critics. Her poetry has been translated into ten languages, including Japanese.

Two of her four books of poems, Pillow Talk (1994) and The Man Who was Marked by Winter (1991), were shortlisted for the Times/Aer Lingus Award. Also a playwright, Ms. Meehan's work has been adapted for stage, radio, television and film, and several poems recorded as songs.

Paula Meehan was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and received a M.F.A. in Poetry from Eastern Washington University in 1983. Twice a grantee of the Irish Arts Council, she was a Fellow at the Robert Frost House in New Hampshire in 1988. She has been a Writer Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin and at University College, Dublin and a leader of poetry workshops and master classes in the U.S., Ireland and Britain, as well as for women prisoners. In 1995 Paula Meehan received the Martin Toonder Award, and in 1998 the Butler Award for Poetry from the Irish American Cultural Institute.

Michael Collier hosts Edward Hirsch

This The Writing Life is a particularly rich edition, worth several repeat viewings!

Edward Hirsch, author of five books of poetry and How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (Harcourt Brace 1999) writes for American Poetry Review and The New Yorker. In 1998 he was awarded a MacArthur "genius" fellowship. He has received many other honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Prix de Rome, and a National Book Critics Circle Award.

With host Michael Collier and guest Edward Hirsch talk about On Love (Knopf, 1998), Hirsch's most recent book of poems. He reads "The Poet at Seven", inspired by Rimbaud. Since his own apprenticeship, Hirsch says, he has needed and enjoyed "dialogue" other poets to "help deliver me to my own life and my own feelings". Not only Americans like Frost, Whitman and Dickinson, but a whole range read in translation - Vallejo, Lorca, Neruda - and the Eastern European poets with whom he shared a sense of history, of much older cultures, and of tenderness. Next Hirsch reads and discusses "Ocean of Grass", a villanelle powerfully evoking the loneliness of women who settled the American Midwest. He closes with a poem in the imagined voice of an expert in the erotic, the modern French novelist "Colette".

Michael Collier hosts Michael Glaser

This month's program focuses on Weavings 2000: The Maryland Millennial Anthology. Poet, editor and longtime St. Mary's professor Michael Glaser tells how his project came about. In historic St. Mary's City on the Chesapeake Bay for many years Glaser has held a summer literary festival attended by the area's leading writers. When the Maryland Commission for Celebration 2000 called for ideas, Glaser persuaded them to fund a one volume "archive of the spirit" in which poems and prose are interwoven with statements by the festival participants.

From more than 120 selections, host Michael Collier and editor Glaser read seven favorites: "The Cheer" by William Meredith, "We are Running" by Lucille Clifton, "Freedom Ride" by E. Ethelbert Miller, "Minnow" by sixth grader Tracy Slaughter, "The Thrower of Stones" by Hilary Tham, Michael Collier's "The Waves", and finally "Blessing the Boats", title poem of Lucille Clifton's most recent book, which has since received the National Book Award for Poetry.

Weavings 2000 is available at $14.95 plus tax and shipping from HoCoPoLitSo and from the Maryland Commission for Celebration 2000 by calling 1-877-MD2-0001. It can also be borrowed from any Maryland Public Library or public school.

Michael Collier hosts Elizabeth Spires

HoCoPoLitSo presents Elizabeth Spires, author of a powerful new book of poems, Now the Green Blade Rises, in conversation with poet Michael Collier. A Whiting Award and Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, she contributes to "The New Yorker" and the "American Poetry Review".

Spires has also published several books for children: among them Riddle Road, I Am Arachne, and The Mouse of Amherst, about a tiny apprentice poet who lives in the house of Emily Dickinson.

Michael Collier hosts Madison Smartt Bell

HoCoPoLitSo presents Madison Smartt Bell, author of thirteen novels, talking with friend and colleague Michael Collier. Bell is best known for his historical novels. All Souls' Rising, about the Haitian Revolution, was a finalist for both the PEN/Faulkner and National Book Awards.

Master of the Crossroads was then second in Bell's projected Haitian trilogy. Anything Goes, the versatile Mr. Bell's most recent novel is very different, centering as it does on rock musicians in today's American South.

Terance Winch hosts Nuala O'Faolain

Nuala O'Faolain, author of the groundbreaking international bestseller Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman and more recently a novel, My Dream of You, talks about her work with writer Terence Winch.

Their conversation touches on O'Faolain's background, narrative strategies, and her experience as a middle-aged Irish woman writing candidly about sex and the body in a "very conservative" Irish society.

Terence Winch hosts Ciaran Carson

HoCoPoLitSo's The Writing Life presents Irish poet Ciaran Carson, who is also a traditional musician, flutist, tinwhistler, and singer, in conversation with poet and musician Terence Winch. He is the author of nine books of poetry and five of prose.

Among the Belfast writer's many honors is the Butler Award for Poetry from the Irish American Cultural Institute. Mr. Carson was featured at the 25th Annual Evening of Irish Music and Poetry in Columbia in 2003.

Colum McCann hosts Colm Tóibín

Born in 1955, Colm Tóibín of Dublin has been called "the best Irish writer of his generation." Much admired for such non-fiction books as The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe, he is also the author of prize-winning novels.

Best known is The Heather Blazing. In this wide-ranging talk with younger Irish writer Colum McCann, Tóibín chooses to read passages from his first novel The South, as well as his third, The Story of the Night, in which politics and sex become metaphors for each other.

Colm Tóibín hosts Paul Durcan

This edition of The Writing Life opens with Paul Durcan reciting "The Hay Carrier" directly into the camera. Host Colm Tóibín follows with a more conventional introduction to this internationally popular Irish poet, born in 1944, who has published 16 collections since 1967.

Of all Irish poets, notes Tóibín, Durcan has produced both the most public and the most private poems. His work often reflects his country's current events. At other times deeply personal, his poems trace the break-up of a marriage. For the intense but soft-spoken Durcan "poetry and spirituality are closely linked, cannot be separated". Taking on the personas he has created in each piece, Durcan also recites "The Kilfenora Teaboy" and "Raymond of the Rooftops", which like "The Hay Carrier", were written earlier but can be found in A Snail in My Prime: Selected Poems (Harvill, London, 1993).

Brian Bedford & Friends read Wilbur's Molière

The Tony Award winning actor and friends Helen Carey and Michele Farr read three scenes from Richard Wilbur's delightful and much-honored translations of 17th-century Frenchman's comedies. Mr. Wilbur introduces them. Followed by Bedford and Wilbur in Q & A with the audience.

Celebrating Josephine Jacobson

Three Maryland poets - Lucille Clifton, Michael Collier and Elizabeth Spires - celebrate their distinguished colleague, the late Josephine Jacobsen (1908-2003). A closing segment includes never-before-seen videotape of Ms. Jacobsen, "a simply astonishing poet" (Baltimore Sun) reading three poems and talking about poetry during a 1982 Howard County visit.

Charles Guggenheim hosts Reynolds Price

When North Carolina novelist Reynolds Price was HoCoPoLitSo's guest at the Columbia Festival, Charles Guggenheim's documentary film about the now wheelchair-bound writer was shown several days in advance. The late four-time Oscar winner, who died in 2002, came to introduce his friend that Sunday and stayed to host this rich conversation with Mr. Price for The Writing Life.

Elizabeth Spires hosts Philip Levine

This half-hour edition of The Writing Life, orginally aired May 2, 1998, features Philip Levine’s (left) conversation with host Elizabeth Spires (below) (poet-in-residence at Goucher College). The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning poet talks about growing up during the 30s and 40s in the industrial city of Detroit, being the son of immigrants, his “coming to poetry” and his appreciation for particular teachers.

He discusses the greatest of these teachers, described in the essay Mine Own John Berryman. The show also includes Levine’s readings and discussion with Elizabeth Spires of three significant and moving poems: The Escape, Monsieur Degas Teaches Art and Science at Durfee Intermediate School, and The Poem of Chalk.

First Poetry Quartet

The Writing Life presents HoCoPoLitSo's "First Poetry Quartet." In this National Hometown Video honored show, four well-known area poets - Ann Darr, E. Ethelbert Miller, Hilary Tham and Henry Taylor - discuss the merits and limitations of small press versus commercial publishing, and share several well-chosen rounds of their short poems.

This edition originally aired in 1995.

George O'Brien hosts Michael Coady

On The Writing Life Georgetown University professor and writer George O'Brien hosts a conversation with award-winning poet Michael Coady from Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary, Ireland. Awarded the 2004 O'Shaughnessy poetry award "…for having made the intimacy of his world a shared intimacy; for having listened so attentively to humble voices, past and present; and for having given us a poetry of gratitude…," Coady reads a variety of poems that illuminate the Irish diaspora and family displacement in America through motifs of time and mutability, individual destiny, community, mortality and memory. His reflections on the story of "The Letter," from his Oven Lane collection, are particularly enlightening. Mr. Coady read at the 27th Irish Evening.

This edition originally aired in 2005.

Israeli Poems on War and Peace

Maryland Poet Laureate Michael Collier talks with Israeli poet Mosha Dor and translator Barbara Goldberg, who co-edited the anthology of that title. Readings in Hebrew and in English translations.

Jean Nordhaus hosts Mary O'Malley

Hennessey Award winning poet Mary O'Malley is from Connemara, on the Irish-speaking west coast of Ireland, where her father was a fisherman and Mary the oldest of his ten children. The university educated poet writes in English, but is deeply attached to her native language and the rich store of myth and legend that informs it. Her host, Washington poet Jean Nordhaus, asks to hear a sampling from the widely traveled O'Malley's five books. The guest obliges by reading from The Boning Hall (2003) new and selected earlier poems published in England by Carcanet Press.

Linda Pastan hosts Roland Flint

Maryland Poet Laureate Roland Flint is interviewed by his predecessor Linda Pastan in a conversation centering on Flint's seventh and newest book Easy: Poems (L.S.U. Press 1999). They discuss his "quirky" titles, changes in his style and voice, and his influences, which include poets William Stafford, James Wright, Charles Simic, and Robert Hayden.

Flint reads and comments on: his title poem "Easy"; "William Stafford's Last Day", a tribute to his old friend and mentor; "Austere", drawn from his North Dakota farm memories; the "Strawberries like Raspberries" he tasted in Bulgaria; on his audacious (and hilarious) "Monkey House"; and finally; "Prayer", the poem that first appeared as a souvenir broadside celebrating Flint's swearing-in as Maryland Poet Laureate in September 1995.

This edition originally aired in 1999.

Marie Arana hosts Michael Dirda

This month on The Writing Life writer and editor Marie Arana hosts her Pulitzer-Prize winning colleague at The Washington Post Book World, "beloved literary critic" and columnist Michael Dirda. The best of his pieces are collected in a new book, Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments.

A self-motivated reader from a working class family, Dirda memorized poetry while walking to and from high school. He is grateful for the influence of such literary figures as H.L. Mencken and Clifton Fadiman - people who, like Dirda, sought to promote the pleasures of reading and of great books. Briefly reading aloud from his essay "Read at Whim!" Dirda expresses confidence in the survival of modern fiction amidst so many competing forms of expression. Read, he urges, "marvels wait to be discovered."

Richard Wilbur on his Translations

This is a rare one-hour edition from 1988 featuring poets Richard Wilbur and Henry Taylor recently digitally re-mastered by HCC-TV.

"To be a great translator, it helps to be a great poet," says host Henry Taylor. Richard Wilbur ~ then National Poet Laureate ~ reads his rhythmical, moving translations of seven lyric poems. In the first half-hour, he reads and discusses four poems from the French, Baudelaire's "L'Invitation au Voyage", Charles d'Orleans's "Rondeau", Phillipe de Thaun's "The Pelican" and François Villion's "Ballade of the Ladies of Time Past." Wilbur also reads Jorge Guillén's "The Horses" (from the Spanish) "Phone Booth" by Andrei Voznesensky (Russian), and "Song" by Vinicius de Moraes (Portuguese).

In the second half-hour, Wilbur shares his superb rendering of key speeches from three French verse comedies of Molière: The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, and The Learned Ladies; as well as from Phaedra, a tragedy by Racine.

Four Maryland Poet Laureates

A quartet of distinguished Maryland Poets chat and read together on The Writing Life: Roland Flint, the current Maryland Poet Laureate, and three past laureates, Reed Whittemore, Linda Pastan, and Lucille Clifton. Reminiscing about their experiences as laureates, they take turns, round robin style, each reading three poems during this engaging half-hour show.

Background: The poets laureate are appointed for three or four year terms by Maryland’s governors, after consultation with leaders of the literary community. Although the prestigious post is an honorary one, the laureates are active in promoting poetry throughout the state. Lucille Clifton was the bi-centennial laureate, appointed in 1976 by Governor Harry Hughes. When she moved to California in 1985, Reed Whittemore was named to the post. A new Governor, William Donald Schaefer, appointed Linda Pastan in 1991. At ceremonies in Annapolis, in September 1995, Ms. Pastan yielded the laurel branch to Roland Flint -the current laureate - appointed by Governor Parris Glendening.

All four poets have been active in HoCoPoLitSo’s programming since its founding in 1974 - at community readings, in the Howard County high schools, as well as individually on HoCoPoLitSo’s regional cable television series, The Writing Life. Now in its fourteenth year on the air, The Writing Life has been accessible since 1996 to more than two million Marylanders in five counties and Baltimore City over educational channels.

In 1974, Lucille Clifton inaugurated HoCoPoLitSo’s first three-part program day. The author of nine books of poetry, her Good Woman (1987), which incorporates four earlier books of poems and a 1976 memoir Generations, was runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize. The Terrible Stories (1995) was a finalist for the National Book Award. “Lucille Clifton’s poems are made with an unerring ear and a burning mind,” writes Adrienne Rich, “There are very large psychological reaches within this taut, spare poetry.” In April of this year, Lucille Clifton was elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and makes her home in Columbia, Maryland.

Reed Whittemore published his first book of poems in 1945, fresh from his World War II army experience. Twice Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, he was literary editor of The New Republic and is a biographer of William Carlos Williams. The most recent book of his ten books of poems is The Past, The Future, The Present (1990). “Often funny in their detail, in the brilliance and accuracy of their notation,” writes Howard Nemerov, Whittemore’s poems bear “witness to an inwardness immensely sober and moving.”

Carnival Evening, New Selected Poems 1968-1998, representing thirty years of creative work, made Linda Pastan a finalist for the 1998 National Book Award for Poetry. Now at the height of her powers, she is “one of the most satisfying of contemporary American poets.” The San Francisco Review of Books sees in Pastan a return to the poet’s ancient role: “to fuel our thinking, show us our world in new ways, and to get us to feel more intensely.”

“Roland Flint is one of our best poets,” says Linda Pastan. A former football player, a Marine during the Korean War, Flint became a prize-winning poet and teacher (for 28 years at Georgetown University) rather to his own surprise. Notable among his nine books are Resuming Green (1982), Stubborn (1990), chosen for the National Poetry Series, and his latest, Easy: Poems (1999). “Few have written with such powerful candor about themselves, " says Thomas McGrath about the longtime Maryland resident, “Flint is from North Dakota, a place of few voices; now it has a powerful new one . . . lean, tough and supple.”

This edition of The Writing Life produced by HoCoPoLitSo, was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and by the Rouse Company Foundation.

Madison Smartt Bell hosts Mary Gordon

What secrets drive a writer's work? How do they become metaphors? Mary Gordon is the highly praised author of six volumes of fiction - among them Final Payments, Temporary Shelter and The Rest of Life - and one of essays, Good Boys and Dead Girls. Interviewed by friend and fellow novelist Madison Smartt Bell, she reads "Losing My Father," a chapter from her memoir, The Shadow Man.

Bell observes that Gordon's work, though often centered on domesticity and Catholicism, takes on a larger scope. Gordon feels she treats what happens inside the mind, the balance between inside and outside worlds, the differences between ideas and how we really live. For The Shadow Man, she chose a non-fiction form because the facts she uncovered in searching for her father were so "improbable."

This edition originally aired in 1995.

Francine du Plessix Gray hosts David Levering Lewis

Internationally known journalist Gray interviews Lewis about his distinguished work as a biographer and historian. They discuss his double Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of W.E.B. DuBois, his early biography of Martin Luther King, and Prisoners of Honor, his revealing story of the infamous Dreyfus Affair.

Their stimulating and wide-ranging talk touches on always timely issues of race, class and economics.

This edition originally aired in 1995.

Timothy Jenkins hosts Taylor Branch

Pulitzer Prize historian and National Humanities Medalist Taylor Branch has a wide-ranging half-hour talk with host Timothy Jenkins, a long-ago founder of SNCC*. Strictly speaking, Branch's projected trilogy, America in the King Years (1954-68) is not a biography of Martin Luther King, but a massively researched, sweeping history of the civil rights movement. The first two volumes, Parting the Waters and Pillar of Fire, are thousand page narratives that read like thrillers.

Branch and Jenkins touch upon many topics. They contrast Bible-based and politically oriented factions of the struggle for integration (SCLC** vs. SNCC*). They talk about the separatism of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam; the troubling role of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI; the largely unrecognized work of women, the seeding of social movements to come (anti-war, women's rights, etc.) One great contribution of Branch's books, says Jenkins, is the attention they give to many otherwise obscure people "who were the backbone of the enterprise." Because King's leadership had one foot in the U.S. Constitution and the other in scripture, Branch sees King's life - with its flaws as well as its fire - as "the best and most important metaphor for American history" in the watershed 1960's.

This edition originally aired 2000.

* SNCC - Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, "SNICK", founded in 1960 by black and white college students to organize peaceful protests, etc. to speed desegregation in the South.
** SCLC - Southern Christian Leadership Conference, founded in 1957, Martin Luther King's organization.