Welcome to Podium! Issue 10. Podium publishes exclusive work by students who have participated in an Unterberg Poetry Center workshop or class— from first-time to seasoned. At the end of each semester, instructors select either a novel excerpt, short story, poem or other work by one student from each class to showcase his/her work in Podium.
Explore the full issue here. Below is a poem by Helen Barnard, who also has a poem in the new issue of The New Republic.
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Travel writer Pico Iyer first read at 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center in 2005. Today’s featured recording is an excerpt from that appearance. In this video he describes a recent journey to India and the mystifying experience of attempting to decipher the strange English street-signs he encountered all around him.
“Last Wednesday found me sitting in the shadow of the Himalayas, surrounded by snowcaps and red-robed monks. Last Thursday I was in Singapore. Last Friday I was in Los Angeles. Now I don’t have a clue where I am,” he said from stage that night, having been introduced, by Caryl Phillips, as “the most global of souls—sensitive and curious about everything. A shining example of how one might live in this brave, new, hybrid world as both a writer and a thinker.”
Iyer’s new book, The Man Within My Head, focuses on his obsession with Graham Greene while also featuring passages of memoir about his family and dispatches from faraway places. He’ll be at 92Y on February 9th for a reading from this book.
What gives the book its distinction is “the range of [Iyer’s] sympathies—for a diversity of cultures, for varieties of religious belief, for opposed political positions—and his luminous intelligence,” wrote The Wall Street Journal. Iyer’s reading partner on February 9th will be Rebecca Solnit, whose own work is well known for its range of sympathies and luminous intelligence. Her new book, From the Faraway Nearby, comes out in 2013, and we hope she’ll read some passages from it.
Pico Iyer and Rebecca Solnit are here on February 9.
Share the video above with your friends on Twitter and Facebook.
Coming up at 92Y Poetry: Jean Strouse and Colm Toibin on Alice James on February 26.
In an ongoing effort to share with our readers some of the great literary moments which the Unterberg Poetry Center has presented across the decades, this blog has begun to feature regular postings of archival recordings. For access to other recordings, please click here.
Unterberg Poetry Center webcasts and access to our archive are made possible in part by the generous support of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation.
Posted in Humanities All topics of 92nd Street Y at 12:14pm | Link to this item |
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The book consists mainly of interviews with seniors — ages 70 and up from all walks of life. Some, like TV host Hugh Downs, age 88, are well known. Among Downs’ comments is this: “It’s really hard for a young person to understand, when they see a senior citizen, that the older person, inside, is just as vital and just as interested in things as anybody else.”
The forward by author Marianne Williamson mentions “It took my own mother’s death’ to reveal to me the level of indifference bordering on criminal neglect that permeates our social, medical and personal attitudes toward the elderly in America today. Death is inevitable but unkindness and lack of understanding are not.”
Dr. Ruth Westheimer is quoted in the book as well. “Older age doesn’t mean the end of desire and excitement,” she said. “gOLD demonstrates beautifully how new adventures continue to unfold in later life and this is certainly good news for the baby boomers.”
Speaking of Dr. Ruth Westheimer, she’ll be at 92Y on January 30 to launch her 37th book, in a free event: Sexually Speaking: What Every Women Needs to Know about Sexual Health. Joining her will be two senior physicians from NY Presbyterian, Amos Grunebaum, MD, and Frank Chervenack, MD.
Related: Here’s Dr. Ruth Westheimer’s Poppy Seed Hamantaschen recipe for Purim, the holiday on which we read the Book of Esther (also called the Megillah), a salacious story of seduction, sexual manipulation and feasting!
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Posted in Humanities All topics of 92nd Street Y at 3:35pm | Link to this item | Comments (0)
Walter Isaacson, author of a new Steve Jobs biography, spoke with TIME‘s Rick Stengel on January 24 at 92Y about the significance of Jobs’s contributions to the business world and industries he revolutionized.
As compiled on our Storify page, audience members shared their observations and reports on Twitter during the talk. One noted that Stengel asked Isaacson: Could Jobs have been “nicer”? “Maybe his reactions were instinctive,” Isaacson responded, “but when I asked him, he said ‘This is who I am.’”
Here’s what Nick Carbone wrote in TIME Business:
Could a “nicer” Jobs have been as successful? “Could he have put that filter in place and said, ‘I’m going to be just as effective as I am now, but I’m also going to bite my tongue and stop myself’?” [Isaacson] wondered. “That is a fundamental question in life.” If he didn’t quite offer an answer, Isaacson did point to the company’s unusually high retention rate, and suggested that, contrary to conventional wisdom, it was Apple’s culture – not its products – that ultimately set it apart. “Creating a great product isn’t the hard part,” Isaacson said. “The hard part is creating a great company that will continue to create a great product that will be at the intersection of creativity and technology.”
Another interesting piece of information shared that evening: Isaacson informed his next biography might be of Ada Lovelace. Read more reports from audience members on our Storify page.
Related: Google’s Marissa Mayer joins Normal Pearlstine at 92Y on March 27. Get your tickets now.
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Posted in Humanities All topics of 92nd Street Y at 12:30pm | Link to this item | Comments (0)
I was intrigued by Salatin’s call for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing freedom of food choice. “Carve out a spot for artisanal food commerce, like we did for home schooling,” he said. “We have a government that says it’s okay to eat Twinkies and Cocoa Puffs and Mountain Dew, but it’s illegal to drink raw milk and eat compost-grown tomatoes and Aunt Matilda’s pickles.”
He also spoke glowingly of the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund. He sees the three-year-old organization as the “NRA of food,” going after “overzealous food inspectors” and helping small- and mid-sized farmers like him who are developing dynamic, local food economies. There’s a lot on the website about raw milk, which I blogged about recently.
Joel Salatin said “historic normalcy” is a “domestic culintary delight.” Food tastes better. He said that, judging from the number of rock star farm-to-table chefs and sustainable, happy meat butchers, people are already discovering this, He said he wants to take it to the next level.
“I want to see rock star farmers.”
Read more on WNYC.
And here’s more from the evening by a blogger at Early Morning Run.
Explore other Food Talks and To Your Health Talks at 92Y.
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Posted in Humanities All topics of 92nd Street Y at 7:56am | Link to this item | Comments (0)
For my birthday this year, my brother got me a cookbook - Shakespeare’s Kitchen: Renaissance Recipes for the Contemporary Cook, by Francine Segan. I’ve been trying to do more cooking recently, and hopefully progress a bit past the “throw together a stir-fry” phase that I’m currently in. In order to force myself to put in some time in the kitchen, I’ve decided to do the Julie & Julia thing, and attempt to make every single recipe in the book before the year is out.
We wish him the best of luck, and look forward to his updates. As he noted: “To successfully complete this project, I need to make an average of two recipes per week.”
Here’s a fun blog post documenting his attempt at Renaissance Rice Balls.
If you’d like to try something as fun, but less ambitious, consider joining one of Francine Segan’s World of Tasting talks at 92nd Street. Programs include rich histories and delicious tastings. See all upcoming World of Tasting events.
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In light of this, we wanted to return to Newt Gingrich’s comments on the issue at 92nd Street Y, when he was here for In The News with Jeff Greenfield in 2010. In response to question about Citizens United, Newt explained: “I believe we need to recognize that the effect of virtually all efforts to limit political speech...have crippled middle-class candidates, helped the very rich, and helped big institutions.’ He continued, “I think you’d have a much healthier and freer system if you said any American can give any amount of after-tax income, as long a they report it every night on the internet so everybody else can determine who’s supporting who.” His answer drew applause from many in the audience, but moderator Jeff Greenfield pressed him further. Watch the video below.
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Today’s guest post on poetry readings at 92nd Street Y is by Billy Merrell, author of Talking In The Dark and co-editor of The Full Spectrum, which received a Lambda Literary Award. He serves as Web Developer for Poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets. Merrell visited the Unterberg Poetry Center on Monday, November 21, for a reading by Sapphire and Sherman Alexie:
I’ve never seen so many young people at a 92Y event before. I’ve attended close to a dozen of them over the years, from readings to centennial remembrances to interviews with singer-songwriters and graphic designers. Not even at 2008’s sold-out tribute to Maurice Sendak, an event I’ll remember for the rest of my life, did I see as many kids as at the recent readings by Sapphire and Sherman Alexie.
Students from three different New York City high-schools were in attendance (part of the Poetry Center Schools Project), and their presence was felt throughout. When Bernard Schwartz, Director of the Unterberg Poetry Center, announced that the students had met with the writers earlier in the evening and would be receiving free copies of their books, there was a collective cheer. It’s rare to hear such enthusiasm at a poetry event—and this was before the authors had even taken the stage. At that moment, I knew something special was in store, and I was right.
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