Literary figures/poets

Poets Sonia Sanchez and Michael Harper. The two are featured on a new CD anthology, "Our Souls Have Grown Deep Like the Rivers" (Rhino) a collection of African American poetry from 1919 to 1999. It Includes the work of Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Maya Angelou, Gil Scott-heron, Amiri Baraka and others.

Poet David Lehman is the editor of “The Best American Poetry” and on the faculty of Bennington College and The New School. His new book of poems chronicles his attempt to write a poem a day. It’s called “The Daily Mirror: a journal in poetry.” (Scribner)

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic. He is part Serbian, and was born in Belgrade. He emigrated to the U.S. as a teenager over 40 years ago. His new collection of poems is "Jackstraws" (Harcourt Brace). SIMIC also edited and translated an anthology of Serbian poetry, "The Horse Has Six Legs" (Graywolf Press, 1992)

Poet Seamus Heaney has released a new collection of his poems called "Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. He resides in Dublin, Ireland and in Boston where he teaches at Harvard University.

Lehman is the series editor of "The Best American Poetry." His new book "The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets" (Doubleday) is a cultural history about a group of poets in the 1950s who he says helped to reinvent literature, like John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler. They took their cue from the Abstract Expressionistic painters of the time who were also in New York.

Our classical music critic will read two of his poems written about his 94 year old mother who has Alzheimer's and in a nursing home. The poems are: "The Two Horses (A Memory)" and "He Tells His Mother What He's Working On."

Dickey has written a new memoir about his relationship with his father, the late poet and novelist James Dickey. It's called "Summer of Deliverance: A Memoir of Father and Son" (Simon & Schuster). Dickey writes that his father was "a great poet, a famous novelist, a powerful intellect, and a son of a bitch I hated." But Dickey writes that he also loved his alcoholic, abusive father. And as an adult, he picked up his relationship with his father again, after a 20 year absence.

Sze has a new collection of poems, "The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998" (Copper Canyon Press) Sze is second-generation Chinese-American. His poems reflect his many different influences: science and math, Asian ancestry, Buddism, and the American Southeast were he lives. Sze is a Professor of Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Poet Myra Shapiro talks with our Book Critic Maureen Corrigan about her life and work. Her first collection "I'll See You Thursday" was published in 1996 by Alley Press.

Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz on poet Elizabeth Bishop and how he saved a poem of hers from obscurity. It's called "Breakfast Song." Lloyd is the editor of "Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art" (University of Michigan Press).