The Favorite Poem Project: Global Connections through Poetry

For over twenty years, The Favorite Poem Project has been dedicated to celebrating, documenting and encouraging poetry’s role in our lives. Robert Pinsky, the 39th Poet Laureate of the United States, founded the Favorite Poem Project shortly after the Library of Congress appointed him to the post in 1997. Through our video portraits of people reading poems they love, and through our work with poetry educators, we have documented international and multilingual relationships to poetry in the classroom and beyond. In each of the four videos below, a reader’s voice serves as the medium for international connections through poetry.

• Kiyoshi Houston reads Sone No Yoshitada, “The Lower Leaves of the Trees” (trans. Kenneth Rexroth)
• Merav Opher reads Elisabeth Bishop, “One Art”
• Emilio Aponte-Sierra reads Antonio Machado, “Caminante, No Hay Camino/ Traveler, There Is No Road” (trans. Mary G. Berg and Dennis Maloney)
• Xu Xing reads Walt Whitman, from “Song of the Open Road”
• Dawn Hannham reads Aleksander Blok, “The Night, the Street, the Streetlamp…” (trans. Dawn Hannham)