vietnam war

Yusef Komunyakaa reads widely from his poetry published in the 1980s, including many poems from Dien Cai Dau (1988). He also reads poems that would soon thereafter be collected in Magic City (1992) and Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems (1993).

Denise Levertov briefly reads from Relearning the Alphabet (1970) and Footprints (1972) before turning to poems that would be collected in The Freeing of the Dust (1975). Many of the pieces reflect Levertov's antiwar commitments, and three of the more recent poems were written in response to Levertov's visit to Hanoi, Vietnam, in 1972.

George Hitchcock reads from his first four books: Poems & Prints (1962), Tactics of Survival (1964), The Dolphin with the Revolver in Its Teeth (1967), and A Ship of Bells (1968). He also reads work that will later be collected in The Rococo Eye (1970) and Lessons in Alchemy (1976). He opens the reading with a selection of found poems from the volume Pioneers of Modern Poetry (1967), which he crafted with Robert L. Peters.

This reading opens with Lawrence Ferlinghetti reading from his journal about stopping in Salome, Arizona on his way to perform for the Poetry Center. He reads primarily from A Coney Island of the Mind but also includes a performance of Walter Lowenfels's anti-war poem "Where is Vietnam."

Leroy V. Quintana reads from The History of Home (1993), My Hair Turning Gray Among Strangers (1996), and The Great Whirl of Exile (1999).

In this reading, Robert Bly treats the audience to translations of Issa, Neruda, and Kabir more than five years before they began to be collected in his books. He also reads uncollected poems and poems from his book The Light Around the Body, which was published the year following this reading.

In this reading, originally given with Peggy Shumaker, Eloise Klein Healy reads from the collection A Wild Surmise: New & Selected Poems & Recordings (2013).

Ocean Vuong reads poems from Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016). This reading was originally given with Camille Rankine.

Mai Der Vang reads from her second book, Yellow Rain (2021), a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize. In this collection, Vang reinvestigates the "yellow rain" incident, in which a chemical biological weapon was unleashed upon Hmong refugees as they fled Laos near the end of the Vietnam War. Grounded in a documentary approach to poetry, Vang's poems center the testimonies of the Hmong, whose voices were erased in the subsequent geopolitical fervor around the investigation. This reading was originally given alongside Anthony Cody.