Watch Bill Murray Read Empowering Poetry on ‘Kimmel’
In celebration of National Poetry Month, Bill Murray contributed a list of his favorite poems to a piece for the April issue of Oprah Winfrey’s O Magazine. The actor/bon vivant marked that occasion Thursday on Jimmy Kimmel Live! with a dramatic reading of Lucille Clifton’s “What the Mirror Said.”
“Listen, you a wonder,” Murray reads in the clip, delivering the lines with zest. “You a city of a woman. You got a geography of your own. Listen, somebody need a map to understand you. Somebody need directions to move around you. Listen, woman: You not a no place, anonymous girl. Mister with his hands on you, he got his hands on some-damn-body.”
Murray landed his poetry gig about after O‘s Books Editor Leigh Haber reached out through a mutual friend and left a voicemail. She didn’t hear back for two months, but Murray returned her call one day before deadline and coordinated an in-person poetry reading. The resulting piece features annotations from the actor; for “What the Mirror Said,” he wrote, “Everybody needs an ‘Attagirl!’ now and then.”
Clifton, a two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee, died in 2010. Murray previously read her poem at a December benefit for New York City’s Poets House.