loc.govRobert Pinsky

For example, in April of nineteen ninety-eight, Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky launched the Favorite Poem Project. He asked Americans to send in their favorite poems. Thousands of men, women and children did. The Favorite Poem Project collected video of Americans from all backgrounds, ages and places reading their favorite poems and talking about them.

Seph Rodney, a photographer in California, was one of them. Here he reads part of Sylvia’s Plath’s poem, “Nick and the Candlestick.”

FAITH LAPIDUS: Mister Rodney says he had never considered poetry a very real way of using language. He thought of it as high-minded or self-important.

But, then, he says he came home one night feeling lonely and upset. He had been on an unsuccessful date with a girl he really liked. He picked up a book of Plath’s poems and began to read.

SEPH RODNEY: “It was powerful. It was rough. It was bitter. It was caustic. It was, at the same time, really urgent about a need for love.”

Mister Rodney says he was surprised that this poet who came, in his words, from a very well-heeled New England existence, could move him, a Jamaican immigrant man.

SEPH RODNEY:“You could hardly get two people in the world more distant in terms of social, economic, intellectual, and religious realities. But she spoke to me…she spoke to me. She spoke, it seems, directly to my life.”