Favorite Poems: Hopkins, Dickinson

Melissa Stein and David Baker

At the 2015 Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference this year, our team at tatestreet.org were excited to kick off a new collaboration between Tate Street, Robert Pinsky, and the Favorite Poem Project (favoritepoem.org). The FPP was created by Robert Pinsky during his time as Poet Laureate (1997-2000) of the United States to celebrate and document the role of poetry in the lives of Americans. Tate Street filmed a new and more informal branch of the FPP’s online collection of short video documentaries. These videos showcase individuals reading and speaking personally about their favorite poems. Robert Pinsky, the Favorite Poem Project and Tate Street selected a diverse group of readers from the writing conference—composed of editors, translators, educators, fiction writers, and poets—to participate at AWP 2015.

Read Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death”.

David Baker is author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Never-Ending Birds (Norton), which won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize in 2011, and a forthcoming volume, Scavenger Loop. His five books of prose include Show Me Your Environment: Essays on Poetry, Poets, and Poems (Michigan, 2014) and, with Ann Townsend, Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry (Graywolf, 2007). Among his awards are prizes and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Society of America, and Society of Midland Authors. He holds the Thomas B. Fordham Chair at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, and is Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review.

Website: http://www.kenyonreview.org/about/masthead/david-baker/

Read “The Windhover” by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Melissa Stein is the author of the poetry collection Rough Honey, winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. Her work has appeared in New England Review, American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, Harvard Review, Southern Review and many other journals and anthologies. She is a freelance editor and writer in San Francisco.

Website: http://melissastein.com