Connecting With Poetry
Connecting With Poetry  
Podcast: The Brian Lehrer Show
Published On: Mon Apr 13 2026
Description: Steve Zeitlin, founding director of City Lore and author of The Poetry of Everyday Life: Storytelling and the Art of Awareness (Cornell University Press, 2016), and Bob Holman, poet, filmmaker and proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club, talk about their forthcoming book, Across the Great Divides: A Search for Poetry, Soul and Understanding in a Divided Nation (New Village Press, 2027) and about building a shared civic culture with poetry. They want you to send them your poems for possible inclusion in the book to poetry@citylore.org.   Begin writing “I am from. . .” expressing details that capture the places and families you come from, and then some of your political beliefs.  The poems they are looking for are, in a sense, your political family tree, or help provide context for the world view you’ve come to believe in. Or send  them a poem you’ve written –– or a poem you love –– that mentions the iconic American symbols such as the American flag, the Statue of Liberty or other monuments.   photo: Dancing Yiddish POMO (JimmyShelter95, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)