Ellen Burstyn: Poetry Says It Better

This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.

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The legendary Academy Award–winning actress reflects on her love affair with poetry and makes us all believers.

We all want inspiration. We want to feel connected to something universal. And we want to be able to share that wonder with friends and loved ones.

In this beautiful volume, Ellen Burstyn celebrates poetic magic and shares her favorite works. Now into her nineties, Ellen reveals she had an evangelical response to learning poetry even as a child and would memorize and recite the works of Edna St Vincent Millay to envelope herself in the poet’s deeper emotional landscape.

As Burstyn continued her epic rise through film and theater—eventually winning an Oscar, a Tony, a BAFTA, and an Emmy—poetry gave voice to her experience as no other literary art form could. She never went anywhere without her curated “poetry pack.” While waiting on set, in rehearsal, on a train, or just relaxing, she found comfort in verse.

For nearly nine decades, poetry has led Ellen on a life of adventure, from a pilgrimage to Rumi’s birthplace to a friendship with Maya Angelou, during which the poet read her work in Ellen’s movie trailer, to selecting the poems to join her in love, in motherhood and in grief.

Featuring work by W.B. Yeats, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Rainer Maria Rilke, Mary Oliver, William Wordsworth, Edgar Allan Poe, Rumi, William Ernest Henley, and others, Poetry Says It Better is a perfect daily companion for everyone looking to deepen and add meaning to their life experience. Throughout, Burstyn’s charming voice and luminous insights help readers meet her in this poetic celebration—soul to soul.

Photo credit: Jee Cihangis Duman

Ellen Burstyn’s illustrious sixty-nine year acting career encompasses film, stage and television. In 1975 she became only the third woman in history to win both the Tony Award and the Academy Award in the same year, for her work in Bernard Slade’s Same Time, Next Year on Broadway and in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, for which she also received a Golden Globe nomination and a British Academy Award for Best Actress. Ellen has been nominated for an Academy Award five other times for The Last Picture Show (1972), The Exorcist (1974), Same Time, Next Year (1979), Resurrection (1981), and Requiem for a Dream (2000). She became a “triple crown winner” when she won her first Emmy for a guest appearance in Law & Order: SVU (2009), to add to her Oscar and Tony. She also won an Emmy in 2013 for USA’s mini-series Political Animals. She has received six additional Emmy nominations. Her most recent films include Draft Day (2014), The Calling (2014), Interstellar (2014), The Age of Adaline (2015), Custody (2016), Wiener Dog (2016), Pieces of a Woman (2020), Queen Bees (2021) Mother Couch (2023) and the soon to be released Place to Be. Some of her additional theater credits include the Broadway productions of 84 Charing Cross Road (1982), Shirley Valentine (1989), Sacrilege (1995), and the London production of Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (2011). In 2014, she was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame. Ellen Burstyn was the first woman elected president of Actors Equity Association (1982-85) and serves as the Co-President of the famed Actors Studio with Al Pacino and Alec Baldwin. Ellen holds four honorary doctorates. She lectures throughout the country on a wide range of topics and became a national best-selling author with the publication of her memoir, Lessons in Becoming Myself (2006).

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