When discussing verse, Elisa New says, celebrity quickly drops away
Elisa New is used to being asked about celebrity. Even before the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature launched the television part of her multimedia initiative “Poetry in America” in April, New had hip-hop artist Nas reading Walt Whitman and Pritzker Prize-winning architect Frank Gehry reading Carl Sandburg in her online Extension School course, “Poetry in America for Teachers: The City from Whitman to Hip Hop” (created in part with a faculty fellowship from the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning). For the television series, presented by WGBH Boston and distributed by American Public Television, she reaches further, sitting down with the likes of Bono, Bill Clinton, and Shaquille O’Neal for in-depth discussions of one poem in each 24-minute episode. “Celebrities?” Sitting in a conference room down the hall from her Vanserg studio, New muses on the word. “I think of them as readers, as poetry readers. Whether that person is...