In 1244, Jelaluddin Rumi, a Sufi scholar in Konya, Turkey, met an itinerant dervish, Shams of Tabriz. A powerful friendship ensued. When Shams died, the grieving Rumi gripped a pole in his garden, and turning round it, began reciting imagistic poetry about inner life and love of God. After Rumi's death, his son founded the Mevlevi Sufi order, the whirling dervishes. Lovers of Rumi's poems comment on their power and meaning, including religious historian Huston Smith, writer Simone Fattal, poet Robery Bly, and Coleman Barks, who reworks literal translations of Rumi into poetic English. Musicians accompany Barks and Bly as they recite their versions of several of Rumi's ecstatic poems.

Smoky little clubs, late nights, late nights of conversation over a glass of beer and a guitar. The ...

A short film, based on a series of poems, about childhood, the break with parental, and war.

A portrait of Baba Vanga, born Vangeliya Pandeva Dimitrova, a blind Bulgarian prophet, mystic, clair...

Acclaimed author Gary Lachman looks at renowned psychoanalyst C.G. Jung's work from an esoteric view...

A documentary about Néstor Perlongher. His life, his poems, and his activism in Argentina's Frente d...

Fernando Lemos, a Portuguese surrealist artist, fled from dictatorship to Brazil in 1952 searching f...
After World War II a group of young writers, outsiders and friends who were disillusioned by the pur...

Samuel Beckett has fascinated Adrian Dunbar since he was a young student. Now, 30 years after Becket...

The Hurricane Maria represented a historic event for the island of Puerto Rico. The Puerto Rican spi...

Examines the career and literary output of Pablo Neruda, who makes his home at Isla Negra on the coa...

Song is a story of the last Finnish rune singer and his pupil, and the comforting power of singing.

Robert Burns was well aware of the revolution taking place across the Atlantic as he grew up. The po...

He is considered the greatest European poet of the Middle Ages and his work unfolds the whole panopt...

About Jösta Hagelbäck (1945-2009), Swedish film director, writer, poet, musician, actor etc. A human...

The story, hidden by historians and biographers, of Jeanne, a black woman, whose real name is unknow...

In his lifetime, Thomas Merton was hailed as a prophet and censured for his outspoken social critici...

Cacaso, a Brazilian poet, lived in Rio de Janeiro. Born Antonio Carlos de Brito (1944-1987) he was o...