Poetry in America, Season 3
I tell my students that I am a prose guy, not a poetry guy. So the fact that I enjoy PBS’s weekly lessons about famous American poems should reassure anyone who might be scared off by the subject matter. It is critically informed, deftly hosted by Elisa New, but always carefully mixes in voices of appreciation from non-academics.
Season 3’s best episode, “Looking for the Gulf Motel” is a good example of the now refined formula. New speaks with the poet, Richard Blanco, but also with Gloria Estefan, and with middle-school kids familiar with the Cuban culture of the poem. Kids aren’t afraid to say the obvious, but their observations lend the poem an air of credibility, and their summaries allow the adults spaces to discuss poetic terms and techniques. It helps in all this that New is herself a good reader and selects those who can do justice to the auditory qualities of poetry. Poems are, after all, meant to be heard and not read.
The upcoming slate of episodes includes examinations of poems by two solidly canonical figures: Walt Whitman and Robert Frost. But the show is careful to also feature contemporary voices, including poems from people of color. Evie Shockley’s “you can say that again, billie” uses the haunting song “Strange Fruit” as a foothold to introduce the topics of racism and racial violence.
While the series is not afraid to use celebrities (like Estefan) to attract attention, it has a healthy respect for writers and teachers, more often using the celebrities to introduce and the writers to examine. Tony Kushner, Jay Parini, and former poet laureate Tracy K. Smith all make appearances.
At thirty minutes, the episodes are smartly times to move quickly and leave readers wanting more. If I have a small bone to pick it is that sometimes I wanted to hear the poems read in their entirety rather than broken up into lines for explication. That may not always be possible with longer poems, but when I read some of the poems aloud after episodes, the comments made more sense than they sometimes did in isolated discussion of individual lines.
Poetry in America is a small gem. Think of it as poetry’s answer to the old “Great Books” series on The Learning Channel. And tune in.
