Carl Sandberg once defined a poem as an "echo asking a shadow to dance." NHPR’s Best of Public Radio celebrated National Poetry Month with some dancing in the form of three interviews from the NHPR vaults. All three interviews came from our former arts and culture program The Front Porch; it aired from 2001 to 2007 and welcomed many of New Hampshire’s finest artists as well as artists from beyond our borders.
The first interview is one with poet Naomi Shihab Nye, the daughter of a Palestinian father and an American mother. She spoke to NHPR’s Liz Bulkley.
The master of “light verse,” Ogden Nash was an honorary yankee, spending more than 30 of his summers on NH’s seacoast. His time their inspired the Pontine Movement Theatre of Portsmouth to compose a play using only his poetry. NHPR’s John Walters spoke to Margurite Mathews and Greg Gathers, who composed and performed the piece in 2007. (4/23/03)
In 2006, the Writers Project of NH was hosting the Mt Kearsarge Poetry Festival, to celebrate the works of Kearsarge poets Maxine Kumin, Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon, but also to examine the importance of the Kearsarge area in their works. Ahead of the festival, NHPR’s Liz Bulkley spoke with Kumin and a fellow poet JoycePeseroffto find out what it is about that part of the state that seems to create an unlikely number of excellent poets per capita.