Elisa New
Founder, Host, and Director, “Poetry in America”
Poetry immerses us in complexity – in the real complexity of our lives – in the way our feelings are always mingled and our thoughts are always full of contradiction… A higher dose of poetry flowing through us might educate ourselves to the real mixture that's in all of us and in all human beings.
Summary
This week on Leadership Matters, Alan was joined by Elisa New, the founder, host, and director of “Poetry in America,” a national PBS series and multi-platform educational initiative that brings poetry into classrooms and living rooms around the world.
Over the course of their conversation, Alan and Elisa explore the professor-turned-television host’s impressive journey and mission of bringing the humanities, literature, and poetry to broader audiences. Together, they take a deep dive into Elisa’s upbringing in Maryland, studies at Brandeis University and Columbia University, and experience teaching at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University.
In addition to exploring the themes, guests, and goals of “Poetry in America,” Alan and Elisa also discuss her important work in delivering credit-bearing courses to students of all ages as the inaugural director of Arizona State University’s Center for Public Humanities. They close their rich conversation with a dive into the many lessons in leadership that Elisa has learned along the way.
Mentions & Resources in this Episode
Guest Bio
Elisa New is the Director and Host of Poetry in America, director of the Center for Public Humanities at Arizona State University, director of Verse Video Education, and Powell M. Cabot Professor Emerita of American Literature at Harvard University.
New created Poetry in America, a PBS series, to bring poetry beyond classrooms into living rooms and onto screens of all kinds. The show can be seen on public television and streaming platforms, in schools and libraries, and on airlines. Guests include Joe Biden, Herbie Hancock, Gloria Estefan, Shaquille O’Neal, Elena Kagan, Nas, John McCain, Sonia Sanchez, Tony Kushner, Bill Clinton, Julia Alvarez, Bono, Cynthia Nixon, John Kerry, LisaGay Hamilton, Caroline Kennedy, Bill T. Jones, Katie Couric, and Al Gore and dozens of others.
Alongside the PBS series, New produces educational materials on American poetry for all ages—from middle- and high-school students, to K-12 teachers, to lifelong learners—distributed by Harvard University, Amplify Education, and Arizona State University. In her capacity as Director of the newly established Center for the Public Humanities at ASU, New will partner with ASU faculty and with partners from an array of other institutions to create relevant, engaging interdisciplinary content that extends beyond poetry: content that will broaden access to the highest quality learning experiences in the Humanities and adjacent fields.
New is the author of The Regenerate Lyric: Theology and Innovation in American Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1992); The Line’s Eye: Poetic Experience, American Sight (Harvard University Press, 1999); Jacob’s Cane: A Jewish Family’s Journey from the Four Lands of Lithuania to the Ports of London and Baltimore: A Memoir in Five Generations (Basic Books, 2009); and New England Beyond Criticism: In Defense of America’s First Literature, A Wiley Blackwell Manifesto (Wiley Blackwell 2014).
Transcript
Alan Fleischmann
I’m joined today by an academic who is on a mission to bring the humanities, literature, and poetry to greater audiences. Elisa New is the founder, host, and director of “Poetry in America,” a national PBS series and multiplatform educational initiative that brings poetry into classrooms and living rooms around the world.
When she's not behind cameras, Elisa is the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard University. She is a highly regarded expert in American poetry and literature, the intersection of religion and literature, and Jewish literature. Since creating “Poetry in American” in 2018, Elisa has greatly expanded the project to include programming and credit bearing courses for students of all ages. As part of this mission, Elisa joined forces in 2021 with Arizona State University to become the Inaugural Director of the School Center for Public Humanities, with a goal of bringing the best of humanity's teaching and learning to worldwide public audiences.
Elisa is helping to expand access and interest in poetry and literature for the next generation. She's a friend and intellectual powerhouse, and a deeply committed scholar. I have wanted her to come on the show to discuss her important work, her inspiring journey, and the many lessons in leadership she's learned along the way. Lisa, welcome to “Leadership Matters.” It is such a pleasure to have you on.
Elisa New
Thank you so much, Alan, I'm thrilled to be here.
Alan Fleischmann
You know, I'm such a believer that if we all embrace poetry, and literature, all the big barriers in our lives, all the horrible things that keep us far apart from one another, would all just disappear. And we would enjoy each other in our diversity, we would embrace our intellectual sides and our emotional sides in ways which we have not done because we've not made poetry as important in our society as it is in other countries anc around the world.
Elisa New
I love that as a prescription. Although I can't say that in those countries, some of those countries would include Russia, Argentina, Iran, which value poetry. So it may not be enough to save civilization. But more of it, I think, would be helpful because poetry immerses us in complexity – in the real complexity of our lives – in the way our feelings are always mingled and our thoughts are always full of contradiction… And we often try to will those things away, and, you know, clarify positions, and by clarifying them, we harden them. And, and so I would agree with you that a higher dose of poetry flowing through us might educate ourselves to the real mixture that's in all of us and in all human beings.
Alan Fleischmann
I'm dying to find out how this all came to be. Let's start a little bit with your early life. You grew up in Maryland – actually my home state – what was life like around the house growing up? Tell us a little bit about your parents? I understand your father was a computer scientist with NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and your mother was an events planner. Tell us a little bit about your parents, your family, siblings, life at home?
Elisa New
Oh, how nice. I did grow up in Maryland. And I should say, I found it extremely boring. I grew up in Potomac, in the suburb of Potomac. First in silver spring. But in Potomac, there were no sidewalks. And I was a kid who was eager to have experiences and be in the city and see different kinds of people. What I used to do was walk to Montgomery Mall and take a bus to Georgetown. It would take hours. I guess that says something about me.
I come from wonderful parents. I just spoke to them, they're still alive. My father grew up in a middle class family of Jewish furniture salesmen. And my mother came from a similarly Jewish commercial background. My father discovered in high school that he really was a kind of intellectual. And he went to engineering school – there was no expectation he would go to college – but he went to engineering school and later got a PhD in physics. Then much later in life, he got a degree in computer science, and my father's intellectual drive, even though there was nothing about what he studied that interested me very much, but his habits of study, and his passion for learning.
The example of his having gone his own way in life, you know, breaking away from what would have been a better living selling furniture – that example was really important for me, and he always encouraged me. He never understood my interest in poetry or literature, but he always encouraged me to do what I loved. And you know, to buck, whatever, or whoever, was telling me not to. So that was immensely helpful. My mother had a beautiful aesthetic sense – and still does – and planned gorgeous parties all over the Washington area, weddings, bar mitzvahs, anniversaries. And from her I got a sense how satisfying it can feel to create something beautiful that gives people joy.
So even though my parents were not real readers of poetry and couldn't understand it at all, and when ultimately I went to graduate school and became really interested not only in American literature, but American theology, and not just Jewish things that they'd have understood, but Protestant theology, they remained always sort of mystified by my interests, but immensely encouraging of me.
My brother was a tennis star, a local tennis star in Washington. And our parents were very, very involved in his tennis, which I thought was great because it got them all out of the house and left me at home to read. I think as a child, like many people who end up being professors or poets, that really was my favorite thing. To read. And, and from a very young age to write.
Alan Fleischmann
Were you a writer as a young kid already?
Elisa New
I was a writer as a young kid, I saw myself as a writer, I wrote in fourth grade, I wrote what I called a novel, which meant it had more than 100 pages. I think each page might have had about 30 words on it. But I always had an appetite for big intellectual projects. So yeah, that's me.
Growing up – I went to high school in the 1970s during the Nixon administration – these were powerless days. My high school education was so poor, that I felt like I left intellectually starved. And that starvation, I've been feeding it for the rest of my life. I think that the high school I went to in Washington is now quite a good one. Winston Churchill
Alan Fleischmann
I think it may be the number one public school in the state of Maryland.
Elisa New
Yes, but it was not having good days there in the midst in the early 70s. In fact, I graduated early – I couldn't wait to get out. I then spent a year in Israel exposed to a very, very different culture. And here we are in the mid 70s, just a few years after the Yom Kippur War, and really just a few years after the 67 War, when Israel was sort of in its youth, and I was there for a long period before I went to college. That was a very formative experience for me. It taught me that there are other worlds than the suburban world I'd grown up in, that there had to be more than then the Washington suburbs. I don't mean to diss them, but they weren't to my tastes as a teenager.
Then I went to Brandeis, which was a wonderful place in the 70s. It had a history of radicalism. Angela Davis had been there, and others that just gave us a lot of attitude and a kind of intellectual seriousness. The faculty there were really great. I, as an English major, among a lot of pre law and pre med, kids got a huge amount of attention and support as a poet. I then wrote poetry, and also was somebody who thought would go to graduate school and become a scholar.
Alan Fleischmann
What made you choose Brandeis?
Elisa New
I think at that time, I thought I might want to do Jewish studies of some kind because I always had been and remain really interested in religious traditions. And I got there and just was reminded in my first English class that I was really a literature person. And whatever the literature was about. I was interested in the texts themselves and how they were put together. And I've worked over the years on Jewish literature as well as Protestant literature. But for me, it's really sort of the marvel of how a how a text whether it's a novel or a worship, or a poem, or a play, or, you know, now a, you know, a film that has an organization and a story arc, how it how it's all put together really is, you know, fascinating to me.
Alan Fleischmann
Was there some kind of hero to you in poetry, or authors that you clung to around that period in college, and maybe before?
Elisa New
That's a great question. Well, I'll tell you the thing that comes to mind first. There was an experience I had as a very, very little girl. A really formative experience. I was given a book of poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Child's Garden of Verses.” it was the Golden Book edition, it had beautiful images. And I remember the one about how I love to go up in a swing up in the air. So blue. I do think this is the most pleasant thing ever a child can do, is to have this beautiful image. And so that language could make pictures in our minds and could exhilarate us through its rhythms. I mean, I read that book again and again and again. And now I have that. I think it's from 1955. That edition, it was very, very important for me in high school
I loved to read and I was a very fast reader and I set about reading the classics. So I read Tolstoy and I read Faulkner and liked rich and adventurous language. I think in those years, I was reading Neruda. Yeah, I was reading a range of poets. It was not until I got to college that I began to appreciate the poets who are most meaningful for me, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Frost, sort of the classic American poets who became who became really really important for me. But it was in high school that I had a kind of literary feeding frenzy. And I didn't have many friends in my high school, so I had a lot of time. I had a few friends, but I was not really popular.
Alan Fleischmann
You made your closer friends through your adventures in reading.
Elisa New
Yeah.
Alan Fleischmann
That's pretty cool. What inspired you to study education?
Elisa New
I actually studied English.
Alan Fleischmann
Which makes sense. Did you know at some point while you were at Brandeis, “I love being in the environment of an academic institution, I want to be part of it. I want to be at the university, I want to teach?”
Elisa New
I saw myself at that time as a person with really one talent. I was a good writer, I loved it. I was shy, so I wasn't sure about myself as a teacher. But it was clear that my mentors were kind of guiding me toward graduate school, and I was very flattered by that. And it was, it was absolutely the right thing. And when I taught for the first time, and I mean, when I say the first time I mean the first day, in class, I remember thinking, this is what I was born for, because like many people who are a little bit introverted I have a performative side. And I loved the process of thinking before class, “how am I going to tell the story of how we arrange the pieces so that students understand why Whitman is important. And why you should fall in love with him? How do I tell that story?” Then the kind of immediate gratification of preparing for a class and then going in and doing it and seeing what result I could get? Could I get the students to, you know, bubble? Could I bring the room to a bubble?
Alan Fleischmann
The rewiring of people's minds? To think differently? You can almost physically see the change?
Elisa New
And that's what I mean, when you love teaching. That's what it is. You begin not to be the only one in the room who is experiencing the beauty or the power of this text: everybody else is. Then you all sort of levitate together. Even when I taught largish lectures, I always liked to figure out ways to have student participation, sometimes it was just having groups of students rotate, where, Monday, students could talk in class, and on Wednesday, other students could talk in class so that we wouldn't have a million hands up. But I always wanted to have the opportunity to be in a conversation about a work of art, because I think that's actually the most rewarding thing to do with a work of art. That ultimately has really influenced the format of the television series that I make because I want it to feel interactive.
Alan Fleischmann
When you were getting your PhD as well as your masters to Columbia, and you're in New York, did you do other things off campus in the literature world, and the book world, and the music world, and the art world?
Elisa New
Well I was poor, but the street is a feast of stimulation. I lived on upper Broadway and would walk miles and miles and miles. And that I don't anymore need quite that much stimulation. In fact, I really it's a little too much for me. But that was a really important part of my education and I had a really good friend who lived in the Bronx, and who loved the Bronx, and this was a period in the early 80s, when the Bronx was really not it. Let's just say it wasn't gentrifying.
With that friend, we would walk through historic neighborhoods in the Bronx and go to Orchard Beach. And I learned about city dwellers who were different from me who weren't university students who are of different races and colors. And really the most exciting and very transformative thing that happened to me at Columbia, that also has affected me for the rest of my career was that I had a fellowship from Columbia. They didn't need as many teaching assistants as they had students. And so they said, “you have a fellowship, your money's already being dispersed. We don't need to make you teach,” but I really wanted to teach. So I got a job at Queens College, which took me almost two hours to get there from Columbia, often, not always, but it could certainly be an hour and a half, like three trains and a bus and a walk, it was really long. But at Queens College, I was teaching people who came from countries I had never even heard of.
I'd been raised a girl in the suburbs and I'd gone to Brandeis. So all of the experiences provincialized me over here, and here: I had a little more understanding that there's a bigger world. I still do think, “What would it be like to live here?”
Alan Fleischmann
That was eight years?
Elisa New
That’s in a way, the adventure of a poem, poem takes you to a place – it sort of delivers you into another world where you kind of acclimatized. But we can talk about that.
Alan Fleischmann
I imagine that also changed the way you appreciate poetry, because then all of a sudden, your lens, through your experiences in New York, and then subsequently, you just looked at poetry differently. I mean, poetry probably opened up your mind to look at these communities differently than you ever could.
Elisa New
Poetry is language that is expressing a very particular point of view or a personality. Great poets aren't just good writers: they offer a vision of the world that’s all their own. And it is like a foreign country. “Oh, where am I? What does it sound like and smell like and look like in this world?” But yes, my broader experience in New York and in Queens, some of the Bronx, the Israel experience, and even at taking the bus from Montgomery Mall. These were all broadening and made me appreciate broader life than at universities. I might be a little controversial here. I think universities are not, or sometimes always, broadening. And ultimately, I found them to be not broad enough for me at that time of life.
Alan Fleischmann
So when you were 20 years in New York, at Columbia, and then you went to Penn?
Elisa New
My then husband got a job in Miami. And so I spent a few years in Miami, writing my dissertation teaching, another broadening experience teaching at the University of Miami, usually, mostly at night while finishing my dissertation and while having my first child. And then I got my first job at the University of Pennsylvania. And I spent 10 years there, and had two other children there before I was recruited to Harvard.
Alan Fleischmann
What are the highlights for Penn?
Elisa New
Oh, I loved Penn. I really did. Well, it was the place where I became a teacher and a scholar. I wrote books there, that's what you have to do to get tenure. And I found that I loved doing it. Although, even as I was writing scholarly books on American poetry and publishing scholarly articles on American poets, I was beginning to wonder who I was doing that for. It didn't seem it was valued more than my teaching. And I was good at it, and I enjoyed it. But I really wasn't sure whether it was the best use of my time.
After I wrote the two books – that got me tenure, and the second of which caught Harvard's attention and they started looking at me – I thought, “I really need to write something that has a larger audience, I need to learn a different kind of writing.” Why don't I take a family story that had long intrigued me, that was a story of American history. And a Jewish Historical saga became my third book: a memoir, a historical memoir of global commerce. It allowed me to learn a different kind of writing and become more of a historian, but also begin to think about the audience in a way and how you organize material for a broader audience.
That was really important to me, because, haven written two academic books and articles, I was thinking “well, this is fun.” But, what these artifacts that I've created are used for is to evaluate whether I should be promoted. I didn’t know if that's the best use of all my love for this.
Alan Fleischmann You were feeling the pressure everybody does, you publish or perish?
Elisa New
I did. I mean, I learned how to do it. And I enjoyed it. And I wasn't going to perish. Once you get tenure, you're imperishable. That has its own drawbacks, and I began to feel them soon enough. But I didn't feel a ton of pressure to publish, because I really loved writing. It was not hard for me to just sit down in a chair. And some people find that really hard, you know, sit and write for years on end to get a book done. I loved it. So it wasn't it wasn't that hard for me. But whether it was the most meaningful thing to be doing. I wasn't sure. And as I got to Harvard, some of those doubts grew.
Alan Fleischmann
Was it a big culture shock? When you went back to Massachusetts?
Elisa New
Harvard was a big culture shock. Brandeis had been a very different kind of institution. I was also a mother with three children and divorcing. So as I made the transition from Penn to Harvard, there were definitely bumps. But Harvard is a completely unique institution that, whether or not the eyes of the world are always on it, is always thinking that it has the eyes of the world. And so that has an effect on absolutely every part of being a faculty member. And I didn't like it very much from the beginning, and I was there for 20 years.
I'm just going to be honest here. I was there for two years. And I was considering going back to Penn. Because I really, I really didn't like it. Like having been elevated to a pantheon, and now expected to spend as much of my time as was expected, selecting other members of the Pantheon like that, and it was very much boring to me. So I was thinking of going back, but then I fell in love with Harvard's new president, Larry Summers. So then a different adventure began.
Alan Fleischmann
And Harvard became a little more beautiful.
Elisa New
Although, anyone who's read that history knows that it had its complexity. I stayed at Harvard certainly through Larry's presidency, but after that, I started to think about whether I wanted to spend my whole career there. And I've recently retired at a relatively very young age from Harvard.
Alan Fleischmann
Was that part of the the the impetus to create your work with “Poetry in America?
Elisa New
Yeah. “Poetry in America” came out of a combination of things, but the deepest was my sense that this very beautiful art form that I cared about, and was pretty good at communicating about, I shouldn't make the main way I communicated about it the reviewing of scholarly articles. There was much more receptivity to poetry out there than everyone believed. And I got interested in initiating the unconverted. In some ways, that’s a very unfashionable idea.
In literary circles, we read poetry to live better lives. It’s medicine for human beings, and not just a scholarly topic. It was pretty taboo in the academy, and really still is, to act like the reason we do it is that we love it, and that it helps us. And I felt that I wanted to feel free to, you know, to release the joy and not hide it behind scholarly arguments that this interpretation is better than this interpretation, because this one is flawed for various reasons – who cares? I didn't care. I stopped caring.
Alan Fleischmann
Was a big part of this also that you wanted to bring poetry to the living rooms?
Elisa New
Well I should tell that story. And I have Harvard to thank for that – and for many other things. Not everybody is made for academic tenure for their whole career. And I'm just not really made for that. But, at a point in 2013, when I knew that I didn't really want to write another academic book, I was in the middle of writing one and I thought this was my last. And I actually started writing a novel. I thought, “Okay, I'm gonna do something else.”
I heard that Harvard was actually giving video crews, assigning video crews to people who wanted to make online courses. And I, in the classroom, had for many years been bringing in old magazines and bringing in cassette tapes of whale songs. And, Bessie Smith albums. I’d been teaching poetry in cultural contexts using a lot of visual material and sound. Because in the history of poetry, it hasn't always just lived on the frozen cold page. Over time, it’s been part of ritual politics – illustrated magazines.
Anyway, I was already doing all that. And when I heard that Harvard was giving people video crews In order to make online content, I said, “Oh, I'd like a video crew.” And I went in and claimed one, and began to make my first MOOC. And early on in making that, no one told me how to do it. And I thought, well, it should be more like documentary television than like standing behind a podium, giving a PowerPoint. So I began to take that crew and film on location. And I began to do a lot of archival research. And we began to make course, and we started to make course material that looked like a documentary. And we rolled it out. And people really seem to love it. I mean, nobody, you know, MOOCs are, we don't use the word MOOC anymore, a massive open online course, because it really kind of fizzled out as the transformative thing it was supposed to be, but I had something.
In addition, and here’s the thank you to Harvard, so many people came through Harvard that I began to invite them on camera to talk about poems with me. And so early on, I talked to Elena Kagan, who came through, and I talked to Bill Clinton, and, and the hip hop artist, Nas, and I showed some of this material to a friend of mine at WGBH, and she said, “Oh, we should talk to some producers here. I think there could be a TV show.” And so from very early on, I was thinking, How do I develop content, films, curriculum that is rich in video, and that captures the imagination of learners?” And can be part of for-credit experiences? And how do I create that simultaneously with content for television, and create a kind of ecology where one feeds the other?
Alan Fleischmann
Now you're now in your fourth season, right?
Elisa New
Yeah, we are airing our fourth season of TV and I'm now well into making the fifth.
Alan Fleischmann
That's amazing. And has the audience changed?
Elisa New
It's grown a lot. Streaming has changed it tremendously. When we launched the series, streaming was – you know, 2018 is a long time ago. And 2018 is pre pandemic. Everything was changed by the pandemic. Before the pandemic, we had in the first season an amazingly large pickup from airlines. And so people were watching “Poetry in America” on planes. In the first season, five different airlines. That was great. The pandemic killed that. But streaming now means that even though the show airs in something like 90% of markets across the United State, that's just a fraction of the audience because most people are streaming and so they can stream it on PBS or on Amazon. And those numbers have gone way up, which is to say people like poetry more than the world thought they did.
Alan Fleischmann
They also probably need poetry more than they thought they did, I would argue?
Elisa New
I think so too. There's so many people who tune in to the show. Some of them say “I don't understand poetry, I think of myself as a cultured person. But poetry? I always hated it.” So they tune in to give it a try. And our data suggests they come through something that seems familiar. So we have an episode on Langston Hughes, they come through that we have an episode on Robert Frost, they come through that. But once they watch one – because we are part of a culture that likes to binge, we like to have just a decision made. It's like, oh, “I don't have to think about the next thing I'm gonna watch. I'll just watch this next thing.” The numbers for poets you've never heard of, are pretty robust as well. So lots of people watch the whole season, and then watch them again.
Alan Fleischmann
That's really cool. So it's not one of the things you can only do once and know how to do it again, there's a lot to dive into and enjoy each time.
You've had some amazing guests on – tell us a little bit about your guests. They’re pretty unexpected, between Joe Biden, right, Bill Clinton, Shaquille O'Neal, Gloria Estefan. You've had so many interesting guests. What made you decide which ones and have their experiences that they shared, insightful things to you about? Poetry is reading for them as well?
Elisa New
Well, I knew that I didn't want this show to be driven by experts. Because that puts the learner or the viewer in a completely different position. It's like, “okay, the expert is telling me how to read this poem. This is what it means.” I wanted those on camera to be learners. And sometimes, experts are learners as well. I wanted the viewer to feel this person who might, “oh, I've always thought of as a great basketball player” – “wow, I can't believe he said that about this, about this line of poetry. I was thinking that too.” Or, “gosh, Bill Clinton just said something in the exact same words as a fourth grader on a playground.” And so I wanted the democratizing power of a mostly non-expert, ensemble cast episode of interpreters.
It's incredibly fun to think about, “okay, we're going to do this episode, who could be in it? Who can we get?” And like anything else, it’s a chase. It's on. It helped in the early years that we were able to get Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, Bono. Yo Yo Ma, Shaquille O'Neal, Anna Deavere Smith, John McCain, on and on. It's easier to get other people to come on and do it because they say, “Oh, they did it? I can do it.”
But I think I've had success recruiting these guests because no one ever asks them to read a poem. And they're asked to talk about your latest movie, how did that game go? How do you feel? Most people are asked to, you know, talk about what they do from there, their set of talking points that their staff has assembled. I offer them the opportunity to have a kind of intellectual adventure. Let's, you know, let's see what it feels like to read a poem with all of the guests. I try to invite people whom I think will have some intrinsic attraction to the subject of the poem. So Gloria Estefan, child of Cuban immigrants to Miami, was a great person to ask to read Richard Blanco's poem about Cuban immigrants in Miami. She knew him, she knew that world. And yet the poem magnified and intensified and enhanced some of her own impressions and helped her to see some of the experiences in a new way.
Shaquille O'Neal, we asked to read a poem about basketball, by the great poet Ed Hirsch. And it is a poem, it's a poem that goes through one play, a fast break. It takes you from beginning to the end of a fast break, and Shaquille O'Neal sure knows fast breaks. And so he rolled in really confident and excited. What happened with him was very beautiful, because he didn't realize he had read the poem quickly. And as most people do before they come in. And he didn't realize that the poem was also about friendship, and the friendship of people who play together. And that in particular, the poem is dedicated to someone who has died. And that there it's an elegy for a beloved friend. In the middle of reading the poem with me, he had the experience any reader might have: “I like this poem. It's about basketball, and then you Oh, wait, God.” And Shaquille said to me, “did he die?” And I said yeah.
It’s that kind of intrinsic attraction to the theme of the poem that I look for: who's going to resonate with Joe Biden? Let's have Joe Biden read a poem about Father's Day. Let's have him read a poem about fathers. And even though he really loves Seamus Heaney, and really loves Irish poetry, this series is called “Poetry in America.” When I filmed him, he was the Vice President of the United States. I said, you know, I think we should read an American poem. He agreed. I said, “Let's have Joe Biden read a poem about fathers.” He had never read this poem before. But his mind was open to the process of discovery – “Oh, I understand what it's like to feel love and debt to a father, but wow! The repetition in this poem, that moment of repetition, or the way in which particular sound patterns are giving me a particular feeling. It seems to deepen his knowledge on camera, and that's what I look for.
Alan Fleischmann
You also got him to share a vulnerability that you've seen before, obviously, but to see it over something that was third party-ish. It is pretty powerful. It's one thing when you're talking about your feelings, but when you're actually allowing for something that we can look at together, it becomes a common vulnerability or a common observation – a common feeling that you don't get when someone's just telling you about their own feelings.
Elisa New
That's exactly right. That and that's the real power. And that's, I think, the power of art. I sometimes say, “What's the difference between going out with a friend and having your friend tell you about what's going on in his or her life?” That's powerful and important. But sometimes you go into a movie together, or go to a museum together, where there's a triangulation and you share something that takes you out of yourself. And that allows you to see something in a new way along with someone else that's really powerful.
Alan Fleischmann
I love the idea that you took something that was precious and extraordinary inside a classroom, and then you brought it into living rooms, and then share with the world the special guests on your show. Now you have your fifth season coming up. In your other project – well, you have many projects – you created free online courses, which are K through 12, as educational programming. And then, as I mentioned in my introduction of you, you're the inaugural director of the Center for Public Humanities at ASU, which, by the way, for those who don't know about Arizona State University, it is now for the ninth year in a row, considered the most innovative university in the United States, ahead of MIT ahead of Stanford ahead of Harvard. And it is an incubator of brilliant, brilliant ideas. We've had Michael Crow on the show here. And it's just an incubator for creating what he talks about as the new American University.
If there has to be an example of what is a great example of what is happening at ASU, I would argue it's the Center for Public Humanities as well. I mean, it's the mission, the ability to actually create and scale what I think is your life's mission. Lisa: how you took something that was so special to you, and rather than selfishly hold on to it – which is what often happens in academia – it becomes someone's personal passion, you sharing it, you're sharing it with kids of all ages, you're sharing with adults, you're sharing it with leaders, and now you’re sharing in ways where people can be inspired even when you're not there. That's pretty amazing.
Elisa New
Well, I'm incredibly fortunate. I think most academics, if you gave them a choice: monographs that no one reads, or have a television show, where I managed to reach the many – I've been incredibly fortunate. And Harvard helped a lot with that, when it came to really thinking about scale, and thinking about how I could offer very low cost, educational experiences.
I should spend a minute on our biggest program, which is a program for high school students in Title One schools, where the students pay nothing for three college credits, which is a pretty valuable thing. The students pay nothing, and typically their school systems or local philanthropic organizations pay $250 for three college credits, which is very little.
This program that I've launched in partnership with the National Education equity lab has enabled thousands of students in just the first few years to not only get college credits – transferable college credits – but to have an experience of what college level work is really like. And for many of these students, especially in Title One schools, who are maybe the strongest students in their schools, there's so much against them, that sometimes they really haven't been put to the test on things like handing work in on time. Which is a life skill, a durable skill. In college, you learn often the hard way and and the students who are dropping out of college often come from Title One schools who are the smartest kids in the school have been recruited to state institutions or small colleges or elite institutions they've been many of them have not had the experience of being told, “no, this paper is due now.” And yes, we know you're smart, but have you done the work
My courses are delivered in a hybrid format online and some of the mechanisms in their design have proven really helpful in the sort of maturing toward college readiness process. I'm very proud that 1000s of students have now studied poetry who thought they didn't care about poetry. They were just going to take anything that would give them three college credits for free. And I don't blame them. But what many of them say is, “this course has made me feel much more prepared for college.” And we'll see, we don't yet have the all the data, but I'm really interested in the next five years at ASU, when with the support of that extraordinary institution, we'll be able to roll out content across fields, not just in poetry, but for many, many more students.
Alan Fleischmann
It is amazing. Again, it goes back to the idea of scale and access and sharing what is so extraordinary. Honestly, this show is called “Leadership Matters.” And the reason why I was so interested in having you on is because I actually think we're better leaders – no matter what your leadership is of – if we actually do, reflect, and think, and curate new ideas. And, as you said, it's an extraordinary form of art. And it gives us a great deal of humility, we can always use more of that. But it also gives a great deal of inspiration and curiosity, and it kind of trains that muscle.
We can make people better family members, better community partners, and certainly better leaders as well by being exposed to your greatest imagination and your greatest empathy skills.
Elisa New
Absolute. I absolutely agree with that.
Alan Fleischmann
Do you have an all time favorite poet?
Elisa New
Oh no. I have many favorite poets. I do think I began with Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. And they're both very special to me. Walt Whitman, because of his insight into America and democracy and what it means to live in a populous and diverse place. Whitman's really such an extraordinary poet, and he's the only poet to whom we've given two television episodes. We decided that Whitman before the Civil War and Whitman after the Civil War were so different that we needed to show both, if not just for the sheer imaginative power.
Emily Dickinson is so amazing. And I think it's partly that she wrote, she wrote more poems than I'm sure I will ever master in my life. I know hundreds of Emily Dickinson poems, but there are 1,800. And they're just so many new ones. Having a poet whose body of work is bigger than me. And always beautiful. It's almost like just wandering into imagination itself. Because she didn't publish. And she had an ordinary little life, really.
Alan Fleischmann
And what an amazing legacy she left behind.
Elisa New
What an amazing legacy – and so many poets are so, so influenced by her. But my curiosity is, one of the things I love about doing the show is, I'm always trying to craft a season out of poems I've loved and taught for a long time, and then also new things that I don't know, and have never thought about. So I also keep learning.
Alan Fleischmann
I knew this hour would go by too fast. So I should just say, you know, I wish we had more time. We should have you back on and talk more and maybe even bring in some poetry that you love and share it. And we could read together. It'd be an unusual show for “Leadership Matters,” but it would be so fun.
You've been listening to “Leadership Matters,” I'm your host Alan Fleischmann, and we just spent the last hour with Elisa New, who is a longtime professor and innovator. She's the director of a wonderful center now at Arizona State University after an extraordinary career at Harvard and Penn, and elsewhere, frankly – a Columbia Graduate – and her show, “Poetry in America,” is now going into its fifth season on PBS. And the lessons and the inspiration and the opportunity to learn with you, is so extraordinary.
So I urge everyone to bring their family on, bring their colleagues at work along, and watch “Poetry in America,” and be exposed to it in a way that I know will be transformational for each and everybody's lives. And so thank you for coming on the show.