92Y Video: A Rational Approach for Improving Health Care
Everywhere you look, the health care debate is making headlines and presenting problems that can’t be solved in soundbites or through partisan politics. How can we implement a rational, real-world approach to improving health care? What do professionals working in the field have to say about the future of the health care industry and its relationship to the government?
Lesley Stahl, a 60 Minutes host and one of the country’s most esteemed journalists, talked with former US Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill, Kenneth G. Langone, Chairman of the Board of Trustees, NYU Langone Medical Center, Robert I. Grossman, The Saul J. Farber Dean and Chief Executive Officer, NYU Langone Medical Center, and Donald Berwick, chief administrator of the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, at 92nd Street Y this Sunday to discuss these questions and more.
David Orr argued in The New York Times recently that poetry performances “give us the possibility that is the poem itself.” To quote Paul Muldoon, readings are “an act of creativity and criticism combined.”
Readings allow for the poet and audience to join together in the act of meaning-making.
With this in mind, the Unterberg Poetry Center has asked some contemporary poets to report on our poetry evenings this year. First up is Camille Rankine, author of the chapbook Slow Dance with Trip Wire and recipient of a 2010 “Discovery"/Boston Review Poetry Prize. She was featured as an emerging poet in the fall 2010 issue of American Poet and the April 2011 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine. She is Manager of External Relations and National Programs at Cave Canem Foundation.
Rankine’s assessment of Seamus Heaney’s reading (video excerpt here) on September 26 follows:
I confess: I’ve always felt a bit distant from the poetry of Seamus Heaney. He is one of those poets I pretend to be more familiar with than I actually am. He is also one of those poets I keep meaning to read more of. So when I was invited to attend his reading to open the Poetry Center’s 73rd season, I accepted with interest. Here was a chance to see what lay beyond Death of a Naturalist.
Heaney’s demeanor, despite his seventy-odd years and his Nobel Prize, was boyish and unassuming. He cracked jokes. He stumbled over the maddeningly similar terms “epitaph,” “epigraph” and “epilogue.” A sense of humor? Grammatical blunders? Maybe, I thought, borrowing the tried-and-true logic of Us Weekly, Seamus Heaney was just like me. As he went on to read poems dotted with hen houses, harvest bows, cattle, lorries, a stick of keel, I thought again: maybe not.
There aren’t many shared traits between my landscape and that of Seamus Heaney: he grew up in rural Ireland in the mid-twentieth century; I was raised in the 80s and 90s between suburbs of Portland, Oregon and the island of Jamaica. And Heaney’s poetry is very much tied to its landscape. Atsuro Riley, who introduced him, compared this quality of Heaney’s work to Dr. William Kolodney’s mission in founding the Poetry Center in 1939: “To give poetry a local habitation and a name, to make it belong, to give it a body, to humanize it.”
Even though I have no significant emotional connection with Heaney’s particular “local habitation,” there remains something eminently relatable about his words: wherever his poetry takes place, and whether it’s mournful, sweet, sharp or serene, Heaney’s work is always undeniably human. With his twelfth collection, The Human Chain, Heaney says he is coming back to the “old language of the soul moving through time.” Time, the human soul: these are landscapes we can all relate to, and struggle to understand.
Tonight at 6:30pm, New York City Council Member Dan Garodnick is co-sponsoring a panel discussion with the Living Wage Campaign that will feature author Caitlin Kelly and leaders of the Retail Action Project. The event will be a discussion on low retail wages, the role that shoppers can play in re-valuing the work of people employed on the front lines of our retail economy and recent efforts to legislatively support a living wage.
The event, free and open to the public, will be held at Marymount Manhattan College, Regina Peruggi Room on 221 East 71 Street (between 2nd & 3rd Avenues)
RSVP to or on the event’s Facebook page. Read below for more information about the event and scheduled speakers, and to view the event flier.
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Tonight at 6:30pm, New York City Council Member 
