The many books of Chicago poet Sterling Plumpp (b. 1940), including Portable Soul and Horn Man, fuse blues and jazz rhythms with poetic vision to speak of Black lives, here and abroad.

Passwords programs are made possible, in part, by a grant from the New York Council for the Humanities, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities

Two New Yorker editors explore the poetry of these legendary writers and discuss it in relation to the poetry of our time and its time.

Our second in a series of collaborations with NYC galleries, museums, and alternative spaces begins with an exhibit tour of Outside the Frame: Performance and the Object with the Snug Harbor Cultural Center's visual arts director Olivia Georgia. Over 50 artists will be presented through interactive and performative sculpture, installations, puppets, scores, and other work. Live performance excerpts will be given by process-oriented, multi-disciplinary Art Attack and by William Pope.L—rapping and preaching a piece of his agit-poetic lecture Eracism.

Get an early start to summer in NYC with a short walk through this classic poem about a journey through Hell, in its brilliant translation by Robert Pinsky (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994).

Escort students to feast at the buffet of sounds, images, and feelings and they will be encouraged to come back for seconds. Geared for teachers—however, open to everyone—this workshop will give participants hands-on advice and material to create positive poetry experiences for young readers.

Known for his focus on history, political ironies, and homosexual themes, C.P. Cavafy (1863-1933) is the most important Greek poet of this century. George Seferis (1900-1971) is second-and Greece's first Nobel laureate of any kind, who wrote with stylistic purity free from embellishment. A world-renowned scholar of Greek poetry, Edmund Keeley is former professor of English and Creative Writing at Princeton University, and a recent president of P.E.N.

Programs of 1950’s as well as contemporary collaborations will be heard and discussed, including the work of Langston Hughes with Charlie Parker, and Amiri Baraka and Jayne Cortez with their bands. Participants are encouraged to bring and perform their own work.

A seminar-workshop surveying the history of poems connected with art and including a discussion of participants’ own work on the subject (gallery trip will be suggested).

This documentary, produced by Haydn Reiss in 1994, was filmed at each of the poets’ homes in Oregon and Minnesota and uses their friendship to examine the role of poetry in contemporary America—its content, meaning, and sources.