Born in Mexico City, Monica de la Torre came to the United States in 1993 on a Fulbright scholarship to study at Columbia University. Her poetry explores with great depth both the boundaries and the permeability of imposed identity, combining a playful use of form and dry humor with a hint of hopefulness. (28 minutes)

Natasha Trethewey is author of Native Guard, for which she won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize; BellocqŐs Ophelia, named a 2003 Notable Book by the American Library Association; and Domestic Work, selected by Rita Dove for the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She received the 2008 Mississippi Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts for Poetry. Currently, she is Professor of English and Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Emory University. (28 minutes)

At nearly 90 years old, Richard Moore is the last of the legendary San Francisco Renaissance poets. Arriving in 1934, he was among the many ŽmigrŽs to California during the Great Depression. His debut collection Writing the Silences marks his reemergence into today's literary world.

Former Poet Laureate of the United States, Hass is a UC Berkeley professor who has made important contributions in poetry, criticism, and translation. His books of poetry are Sun Under Wood, Human Wishes, Praise, and Field Guide, the latter winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award. His critical essays are assembled in Twentieth Century Pleasures, and the poets he has translated include Czeslaw Milosz, Tomas Transtršmer, and masters of Japanese haiku. (46 minutes)

Born in San Francisco, Robert Haas is a California poet but his poetry, translations, and essays reveal an intimacy that transcends the borders of states and nations. With his direct clarity and promotion of literacy in "places where poets donŐt go," he served two years as U. S. Poet Laureate (1995-97). His numerous books include "Sun Under Wood," "Time and Materials," and "The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems." HassŐs numerous accolades include the MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, two National Book Critics' Circle Awards, and the Pulitzer Prize. Hass has translated many of the works of Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz. (51 minutes)

Robin Blaser emerged from the Berkeley Renaissance of the 1940s and Ô50s along with Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan, and later established himself as one of CanadaŐs foremost experimental poets. In addition to numerous works of poetry, criticism, and translation, Blaser has also penned an English and Latin opera libretto entitled The Last Supper in collaboration with Sir Harrison Birtwistle. (49 minutes)

The student reading includes winners of the following prizes: Academy of American Poets, Cook, Rosenberg, and Yang, as well as students nominated by BerkeleyŐs creative writing faculty, Lunch Poems volunteers, and representatives from student publications. (42 minutes)

Winners of the Academy of American Poets, Cook, Rosenberg, and Yang prizes, as well as students nominated by BerkeleyŐs creative writing faculty, Lunch Poems volunteers, and representatives from student publications read their work. ( minutes)

"There's love and sadness at the root of those Poems. There is also a bridge, a language that reads," writes Yusef Komunyakaa who selected Kim for the 2002 Walt Whitman Award for her debut collection of poetry, Notes from the Divided Country. Garrett Hongo writes of the collection, "Kim's brilliantly crafted, brave new Poems move us into an emotional union with the seemingly far-flung past of Korea political geography...what voice, what witness, what glorious descendancy." Formerly a Stegner fellow and Fulbright scholar, Kim now resides in New York State. (28 minutes)

One of the great postwar Central European poets, Slovenian Tomaz Salamun has published over thirty books. He has taught at universities around the world. He reads to an audience at UC Berkeley. (29 minutes)

Tracy K. Smith received degrees in English and creative writing from Harvard and Columbia, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford. Her first book, The Body's Question, was awarded the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and her most recent collection, Duende: Poems, received the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. She teaches creative writing at Princeton. (29 minutes)

June 1841, from Robert Merry’s Museum

Robert Merry’s Museum children’s magazine (1841-1872) featured works by nearly every 19th century children’s writer. It also excerpted works for adults. Pat Pflieger has indexed several works from the magazine online, and notes that “The Moon”, as a piece, “wanders from lyricism to science to speculation as it explores the effects of the moon on earth, and, evidently, on the human imagination”.

Keri McAllister uses technology, workstations, and a lot of choice to turn her students loose on a unit on poetry. In workstations students watch "poetry in motion" videos, create a podcast about their chosen poet, and post reflections on a chosen poem on their class blog.

"Reading Poetry" has several aims: primarily, to increase the ways you can become more engaged and curious readers of poetry; to increase your confidence as writers thinking about literary texts; and to provide you with the language for literary description. The course is not designed as a historical survey course but rather as an introductory approach to poetry from various directions – as public or private utterances; as arranged imaginative shapes; and as psychological worlds, for example. One perspective offered is that poetry offers intellectual, moral and linguistic pleasures as well as difficulties to our private lives as readers and to our public lives as writers. Expect to hear and read poems aloud and to memorize lines; the class format will be group discussion, occasional lecture.

This unit looks at the short poems in German that were set to music by Franz Schubert (1797-1828) for a single voice with piano, a genre known as 'Lieder' (the German for 'songs'). Once they became widely known, Schubert's Lieder influenced generations of songwriters up to the present day. This unit then discusses a selection of Schubert's settings of Goethe's poems, and recordings of all of them are provided. You can find the poems, in German with parallel translations into English and the music scores of four of the song settings, on the unit home page. You are not expected to be able to read the music, but even if you are not very familiar with musical notation, you may well find the scores useful in identifying what is happening in the songs.

Do poems think? Recurrent images of the poet as an inspired lunatic, and of poetry as a fundamentally irrational art, have often fostered an understanding of poets and their work as generally extraneous to the work of the sciences. Yet poets have long reflected upon and have sought to embody in their work the most elementary processes of mind, and have frequently drawn for these representations on the very sciences to which they are thought to stand - and sometimes do genuinely stand - in opposition. Far from representing a mere departure from reason, then, the poem offers an image of the mind at work, an account of how minds work, a tool for eliciting thought in the reader or auditor. Bringing together readings in British poetry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with writings from the emergent sciences of psychology and the physiology of the brain, this interdisciplinary course will explore the ways in which British poets, in years that witnessed the crucial development of these sciences, sought to capture an image of the mind at work. The primary aim of the course is to examine how several prominent genres of British poetry - the lyric, for instance, and the didactic poem - draw from and engage in this period with accounts of cognition within the sciences of psychology, physiology, and medicine. More broadly, the course aims to give undergraduates with some prior experience in the methods and topics of literary study an introduction to interdisciplinary humanistic research.

This course focuses on the period between roughly 1550-1850. American ideas of race had taken on a certain shape by the middle of the nineteenth century, consolidated by legislation, economics, and the institution of chattel slavery. But both race and identity meant very different things three hundred years earlier, both in their dictionary definitions and in their social consequences. How did people constitute their identities in early America, and how did they speak about these identities? Texts will include travel writing, captivity narratives, orations, letters, and poems, by Native American, English, Anglo-American, African, and Afro-American writers.

This activity is a creative writing assignment in which first graders create poetry from scientific information about dragonflies.