Sure, it’s not unusual to see educators, scientists, musicians, athletes, actors, writers and even a Supreme Court Justice or U.S. president or two on PBS, but you don’t typically get all of them appearing on the same series talking about poems – unless you’re Elisa New, the director and host of “Poetry in America.”

Even while recovering from a recent bout of COVID-19, New, a Harvard professor and director of the humanities media nonprofit Verse Video Education, sounded upbeat during a recent phone interview as she discussed the new season of the series that explores great works of American poetry, including poems from Walt Whitman, Richard Blanco, Evie Shockley, Robert Frost and others. 

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If watching a show about poetry sounds dull or dry, well, then you haven’t seen the series, which airs on PBS, pbssocal.org, poetryinamerica.org and streaming sites. The episodes crackle with vibrant images, original music, wide-ranging topics and high-profile guests that this season include Julia Alvarez, Gloria Estefan, LisaGay Hamilton, Ambassador Caroline Kennedy, Tony Kushner, Tracy K. Smith, DJ Spooky, David Strathairn and Cassandra Wilson, among others. Previous guests include Bono, Nas, Shaquille O’Neal, Sen. John McCain, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, and presidents Bill Clinton and Joe Biden.

“I feel immensely fortunate to have the opportunity to talk to so many distinguished people about poems,” says New. “Poetry does give voice to things we all care about – the ethical, the moral, the political questions, that are hard to answer. And it helps us to answer them.”

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. For a show that’s focused on the written word, “Poetry in America” is visually compelling. Can you talk about that?

We do try to create episodes that tell very vibrant visual stories. The episode about the poet A.R. Ammons, and is about waterfalls, is kind of a nature episode. But Ammons, in addition to writing poetry, was also a painter. And so we use his paintings as well as the poems. 

Edna St. Vincent Millay published in Vanity Fair, Edgar Allan Poe published in women’s magazines. Whitman, lots of poets published in illustrated magazines, and I think we lose a lot of that when we just think of poems as these disembodied, decontextualized ahistorical statements from somewhere.

Q. In that Ammons episode, you also speak with a planetary scientist and ask a geologist about the scientific elements within the poem. How far afield are you willing to go or do you want to go?

Really far! [laughs] People write poems. Sometimes the poems are just about poetry, but often they’re fed by passions that they have. Either they’re like Whitman – they’re fired up by the political and cultural issues of their day – or in the case of Ammons, he was a science nerd. He studied general science in college, and as he walked around the world, looking at the features of nature, he was looking both as someone who loved Romantic poetry and that tradition of looking at the natural world and as somebody who looked at a rock and thought, how was it formed, who looked at a stream and thought about gravity. 

The poet Ed Hirsch, who wrote a poem about basketball, loves form in poetry, but he loves form in basketball, too. And the ways in which different domains of human experience speak to each other and can be translated across the bridge of language is what the show is really always trying to get across – that every poem is not just sitting in your English class. It’s touching other worlds. 

Q. What are some of your favorite moments from the season?

I do love when Gloria Estefan bursts into song – that an important recording artist of our time felt a poem so deeply and felt that it was so consonant with what she was trying to do as an artist that she had to sing it, it was definitely one of my favorite moments of the season. That is also something that happened in the season before as when I asked Herbie Hancock, “What do you think about this Langston Hughes poem,” and he just turned to the piano and started to play.

One very moving but also very funny episode about childbirth has Donna Lynne Champlin, whom you might remember from “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.” I love that episode, because it’s about something very profound, having a child, which is an unacknowledged athletic feat. But the episode’s really also very funny.

I feel so honored to have been able to work with Ambassador Kennedy, Caroline Kennedy, on the Robert Frost episode along with Julia Alvarez and David Gergen, because the Robert Frost episode is really about how we live in a civil society. And it goes to, you know, some of the most difficult questions of our time. 

Q. There’s been a lot of attention on a school board in Tennessee banning Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel “Maus.” What are your thoughts on that?

The great works of art like “Maus,” the greater they are the harder the topics they help us explore. I’m sad when we ban or censor almost anything, since I do believe that the best answer to speech we don’t like is more speech. But Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” is a masterpiece.

Art is sometimes upsetting. That doesn’t mean that all art is appropriate for all audiences of every age. But finding ways as a society to face our failures and human experiences that are terrible to consider, I think that’s what art helps us to do. 

Q. Can you talk a little bit about music in the series? 

We think of musicians as people who are really attuned to lyric poetry, and many of them – another example would be Mary Chapin Carpenter – who are songwriters or interpreters, as Cassandra Wilson is, of the lyrics of others and have a special kind of insight. Bono was an amazing interpreter in season one on Allen Ginsberg. Nas [who discusses Walt Whitman]. So musicians have special magical powers. And we love to include them. We hire composers – our Whitman episode, most of the music was composed by an extraordinary composer named Yvette Jackson.

We work with an extraordinary composer named Wendy Ultan who also actually does a lot of illustration. We also have an extraordinary Native American composer named Jerod Tate, who, who is composing for this season, as well. So another thing we tried to do is bring really talented new artists into the show. 

Q. Do you think that or how do you think the pandemic has affected our appreciation of poetry? Or has made it more popular?

Oh, yes. I think people have been slowed down. They have become more mindful, more reflective. We’ve gotten distance from the hurry-scurry, and we’ve thought about meaning in really large terms about our world: Will pandemics continue to sweep through the world? How long will I live? How long will the people I love live? These are the very important elemental questions and we’ve all been thrown back onto them and given more time to think. 

So yes, poetry has for many people been newly discovered as a tool for living.

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