Literary figures/poets

Poet and teacher Frank Bidart. His new collection of poems is "In the Western Night, Collected Poems 1965-90." It's published by Farrar Straus & Giroux.

Poet VIikram Seth (VICK-ram SATE) He was born in India and has lived in England, China and the U.S. He's just completed his first novel -- a novel written in verse, "The Golden Gate" (published by Knopf). David Rieff of "Vanity Fair" says of the book, "At once a bittersweet love story, a wickedly funny novel of manners and an unsentimental meditation on mortality and the nuclear abyss."

Poet Mark Halliday reads two new poems.

Poet Mark Halliday joins us again to read a poem.

Cuban-born poet Heberto Padilla (air-BARE-toe puh-DEE-uh). He was a friend of Castro and an early supporter of the revolution in Cuba. But later he became disillusioned and was imprisoned by Castro as a counter-revolutionary in 1971. He left Cuba in 1980 and has been living and teaching in the U.S. He has a new memoir, "Self Portrait of the Other," published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Poet, critic and translator Robert Hass. He won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for his first volume of poetry, "Field Guide," published in 1973. He translated, with poet Robert Pinsky, Czeslaw Milosz's "The Separate Notebooks." His essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Antaeus, and Salmagundi. Many of those essays are collected in his book, "Twentieth Century Pleasures." Hass's new book, "Human Wishes," mixes verse, prose poems. and essays.

Poet Michael Ryan. Ryan's poems have earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship and a nomination for the National Book Award. He's just released his third collection of poems, called "God Hunger."

Poet Mark Halliday reads two poems about the passage of time.

Poet Mark Halliday reads one of his works.

Poet and essayist June Jordan. In her poems and political essays, she addresses issues of racism, oppression and dispossession. She was born in Harlem and grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. She currently teaches English at the University of California at Berkeley.