Episodit
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Sophie Herron on their selection:
Last July, I read John McPheeâs Basin and Range for the first time and was immediately captured by the slim volumeâits structure, its fluid sentences, the breadth and depth of its probity and its wry and ever-present humor. The titular basin and range is an area between Utah and California, but the book is as much about geology itself, both the movement of rock and the movement of minds that have studied it. In 1785, a Scottish geologist, James Hutton, presented to the Royal Society a new theory: that landmasses were formed over an indescribable amount of time, and that the evidence of these changes were in the different formations of rocksâwhere one era of rock met another. Iâve chosen to read McPheeâs accounting of Huttonâs search for this geological evidence; a narrative in which McPhee coins the term âdeep time,ââa piece of history writing which, it seems to me, enfolds the transcendent experience of humanityâs tiny place in time and, concurrently, love for the work of discovery, communication, and of changing minds. It has stayed with me in the moments of excruciating ephemerality and eternity in the past year. Sometimes both at once. I hope, as a final episode for Read By, it serves for you, also, as a microscope that explodes.
Basin and Range, by John McPhee
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
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Kenzie Allen on her selection:
Growing up, I spent precious time each summer on a fire lookout, Sand Mountain, in the Oregon Cascades, and I still return there to volunteer with my father, as happened just last week. Each time I read âdeer crowd up to see the lamp,â and âpancakes every morning of the world,â Iâm transported back to the mountains, even (and especially) when Iâm sitting on the fire lookout itself. For Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, and for me, these places invite philosophy and meditation, and an openness to wonder, which I hope Whalenâs âSourdough Mountain Lookoutâ can inspire for others.
"Sourdough Mountain Lookout," by Philip Whalen
Music: âShift of Currentsâ by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
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Puuttuva jakso?
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Alexandra Zuckerman on her selection:
In her book, On Beauty and Being Just, it is as if, in Elaine Scarryâs view, the external world has the power to tumultuously expose to us our errors of judgment; wrong beliefs cannot merely be held. Her small anecdote about a palm tree that compels her to experience âbeing in errorâ about beauty has stayed with me through the years. She argues that such small experiences guide our instinct to be just. Her palm, its leaves âbarely moving, just opening and closing slightly as though breathing,â reveals to her its true beauty. She had denied it even the right to be a tree. On Beauty and Being Just is grounding and gives me hope when it is hard to see where true change comes from.
On Beauty and Being Just, by Elaine Scarry
Music: âShift of Currentsâ by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
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Mag Gabbert on her selection:
I read Kathryn Nuernberger's essay "A Thin Blue Line," which comes from her wonderful collection of essayettes, Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past. I return to these pieces often because they give me new ideas about limitsâwhat can happen to a poem if it's allowed just a little more room to breathe, if those braces or splints that keep it packed into tight lines and stanzas are taken off? And: what happens to prose when it's distilled down to marrow? "A Thin Blue Line" somehow accomplishes both of these, and it does so while weaving Nuernberger's personal narrative together with bits of research material and shreds of fairy tale. To me, this piece strikes the perfect note between genres; it isn't hybrid in the sense that it checks none of the boxes, but because it checks all of them. And this is the kind of work I turn to when I need to reimagine the boundaries of my own relationship with language, to see how I might shape it differently and ask it to function in new ways.
Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past, by Kathryn Nuernberger
Music: âShift of Currentsâ by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
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Ina Cariño on her selection:
Aracelis Girmayâs âYou are Who I Love,â first published in 2017, is still so, so needed today. The repetition of the title throughout the poem gives it a musicality that mimics the chants of those who march in the streets. I chose this poem because it calls to and speaks for all of us: those who fight for what is dear to them, those who heal and need healing, and those who give and give even when no one is looking. Itâs my hope that this poem and poems like this can be not just rallying cries for social justice, but also love songs to ourselves and to each other.
the black maria, by Aracelis Girmay:
Music: âShift of Currentsâ by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
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Tracie Morris on her selection:
I have the great pleasure of sharing small excerpts from Brent Hayes Edwardsâ wonderful book, Epistrophies. In it, I repeat a quote from the legendary Mary Lou Williams to introduce Edwardâs commentary on Sun Ra at the dawn of the Space Age.
Epistrophies, by Brent Hayes Edwards
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
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Rowan Ricardo Phillips on his selection:
The poem "This Lime-tree Bower my Prison'' was written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the summer of 1797. He had been set to journey the Quantocks with a group of friends but burned his foot in an accident and thus was left behind, under a lime tree in the garden of a friend's home, while othersââincluding William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Charles Lamb (to whom the poem is addressed)ââembarked on the anticipated journey without him. Coleridge's poem nevertheless travels with them ("Beneath the wide wide Heaven") and in doing so makes something from nothing, pleasure from pain, and love from loneliness. I love the poem's own subtle journey from day to night unbowed by the encroaching dark. In light of recent times, Coleridge's dream of social connection from his position of isolation feels fitting and is a beautiful example of poetry's unique imaginative power.
âThis Lime-tree Bower my Prison,â by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
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Sheila Heti on her selection:
I chose a chapter from Stefan Zweigâs The World of Yesterday, which he wrote between 1934 and 1941. It is one of the most fascinating and vivid descriptions I have ever readânot only of what Victorian manners and morals were like, but what it feels like to have lived through history, in particular the great political and social upheavals that occurred between his birth in Vienna in 1881 and his death in 1942. He gave his publisher the typewritten manuscript of this memoir the day before he and his wife died, by suicide. Zwieg grew up in a prosperous Jewish family, and this is the world he is writing about. I found in these pages one of the greatest and most fascinating and sensitive eyewitness accounts of history I have ever read. I love the details. I love the feeling that I am seeing the truth about another world with such intimacy. This chapter has stayed with me since I first encountered it years ago. I am at about the age he was when he wrote it, and though I donât think the changes I have witnessed have been as dramatic, I feel I know what itâs like to remember a lost world, and to set now against then and to weigh all of it up.
The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
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Hi! Read By is taking a vacation this month. We'll be back in July with more episodes, from more great writers. Thanks for your support and see you soon! Stay safe.
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Tobias Wolff on his selection:
I read three poems, two by my longtime friend and colleague, Eavan Boland, who died last year, a loss that I feel still. There is a tradition in Irish poetry, inflected by the long Independence movement and a certain kind of heroic poetry, that Boland confronts. The third poem is one by John N. Morris, a poem I have carried in my mind since the mid-70s, that has gathered meaning for me as I had my own children, and now grandchildren: the heroism of learning to let go.
New Collected Poems by Eavan Boland
The Life Beside This One by John N. Morris
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
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Howard Norman on his selection:
I read two diary entries by the iconic haiku master, Masaoka Shiki, which I translated with Kazumi Tanaka while in Japan in 2007. Shiki was often confined by his lifelong illness to his bed; a recurring image is a parade of the tops of black umbrellas seen just over the top of a wall.
Masaoka Shiki: Selected Poems, trans. Burton Watson
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
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Chris Kraus on her selection:
A friend recommended The Executionerâs Song to me when I started researching a book set on the Iron Range of northern Minnesota. Mailer wrote it in 1979 based on events that occurred in Utah between 1976-1977. The culture described in the book feels close to the world I observed on the Range a half century later ⊠different drugs, different guns and vehicle models, but the values and mindset are remarkably similar. Mailerâs book could not be more prescient.
The Executionerâs Song, by Norman Mailer
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
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Paul Tran on their selection:
The handprint is one of the earliest examples of self-representation. I can hardly imagine what it was like, thousands and thousands of years ago, to seek shelter in a cave; to find others had been there; to see the animals they painted; and then to join the animals by leaving their handprint on the wall. Maybe the word for it is hope. Maybe itâs realizing Iâm not alone. Iâm here, still.
âBetween Darkness and Light,â Paul Tran, Shantell Martin and Shamel Pitts (TRIBE)
âThe Cave,â by Paul Tran
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
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Valzhyna Mort on her selection:
On April 26th, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred in Chernobyl. I am reading from Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Keith Gessen. Voices from Chernobyl is the first book to present personal accounts of what happened to the people of Belarus, and the fear, anger and uncertainty that they still live with.
Voices from Chernobyl, by Svetlana Alexievich, trans. Keith Gessen
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
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Paisley Rekdal on her selection:
Charming may not be a word commonly associated with Alexander Pope, but for me, âEpistle to Miss Blount, On Her Leaving the Town, After the Coronationâ may be one of the most charming poems I know. Pope, famous for âThe Rape of the Lock,â and his exhaustingly didactic essay âA Man,â delights with this epistolary poemâbrief, by Popian standardsâfull of wit and life. Like all his poems, it displays a beautiful facility with rhyme and meter, (Pope was a master of the heroic couplet), and a beautiful sense of compassion to the young woman to whom it is addressed. In his poem, Miss Blount is subject to all sorts of whims and institutionsâmother, aunt, the church, the squire. There are so many daydreams and visions enclosed inside âEpistleâ that by the end of the poem, Iâm almost lost inside its spell. Like Pope, Iâm regretfully startled awake from this enchanting picture of Miss Blount, and want to return immediately to the poemâs beginning: to relive once more the few, evanescent moments in which Miss Blount is again young, willful, aliveâa product both of Popeâs attentive admiration, and mine.
Alexander Pope, âEpistle to Miss Blount, On Her Leaving the Town, After the Coronationâ
Music: âShift of Currentsâ by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
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Jane Hirshfield on her selection:
âThe Lives of the Poetsâ
Poems are about our human lives--their knowing by stories, language, feelings, comprehensions, perplexities, musics. Because the lives of poets include the making of poetry, some poems are about that. I've chosen a half-dozen, from a range of persons, places, and directions, from a folder Iâve long been keeping that I think of as âThe Lives of the Poets.â Because this selection is for the 92nd St Y, a place where people have long come, and will come again, to hear poems said by their makers, and because weâve all been through a year now of pandemic uncertainties, I begin with two that show the other side of the fabric of public readings.
Anna Swir: âPoetry Readingâ (translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan) https://bookshop.org/books/talking-to-my-body/9781556591082
Lucille Clifton: âAfter the Readingâ https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-carry-water-selected-poems-of-lucille-clifton/9781950774142
Han Shan: âHere we languish, a bunch of poor scholarsâ (translated by Burton Watson) https://bookshop.org/books/cold-mountain-one-hundred-poems-by-the-t-ang-poet-han-shan/9780231034500
Yannis Ritsos: âNecessary Explanationâ (translated by Kimon Friar) https://bookshop.org/books/yannis-ritsos-selected-poems-1938-1988/9780918526670
Adrienne Rich: âXIII (Dedication),â final section of âAn Atlas of the Difficult Worldâ https://bookshop.org/books/an-atlas-of-the-difficult-world-poems-1988-1991/9780393308310
Frank O'Hara: âAutobiographia Litterariaâ https://bookshop.org/books/frank-o-hara-selected-poems/9780375711480
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
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Stacy Schiff on her selection:
In a contest between the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard and her third husband, Kingsley Amis, I will opt for Howard every time -- with an exception made for Amisâs 1954 Lucky Jim. As laughter seems in short supply these days, I offer up this favorite Amis set-piece, arguably among the funniest pages of 20th century English literature not written by P.G. Wodehouse. Iâm going to do my best to get through them with a straight face, but know that I never have before. Our hero, who is not much of a hero, is Jim Dixon, a lecturer in medieval history at a provincial British university. He is the houseguest of his department chair, who holds Dixonâs fledgling career in his hands. You neednât worry about the minor characters who flitter by, all of them peripheral to the central drama here, which is Dixonâs climbing into bed and out of it, many hours, several surprises, and one epic hangover later.
Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
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Notes on the selections:
Itâs been a year. Thatâs been the chorus for the past couple of weeks, and we're here, saying it too; it feels too notable, too hard-won, too full of loss, too much not to note. This episode is a compilation of some of the poems recorded over 62 episodes: a selection of poems that seem to speak to the intensely individual and communal experiences of grief and hope, of outrage and awe in the past year. Links to the poems and the original episodes below.
From âRead By: Terrance Hayesâ - âThings No One Knows,â by Wanda Coleman
From âRead By: Louise Erdrichâ - âManhattan Is a Lenape Word,â by Natalie Diaz
From âRead By: Douglas Kearneyâ - âBig Thicket, Pastoral,â by Douglas Kearney
From âRead By: Ada LimĂłnâ - âFrom the Other Sideâ and âThe Dwelling Placesâ by Alejandra Pizarnik
From âRead By: Tina Changâ - âThings I Didn't Know I Loved,â by NĂązım Hikmet
Music: âShift of Currentsâ by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
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Producer's note: We return this week to Diana Khoi Nguyen's reading of poems from Asian poets in diaspora. Please support your local Asian diaspora and anti-racist community organizing, as you can. In particular, Nguyen recommends donations to Stop AAPI Hate's fund: https://www.gofundme.com/c/act/stop-aapi-hate
Diana Khoi Nguyen on her selection:
In a time of global isolation unprecedented for multiple generations, I have retreated into the community of words of others, that is, a return to the nook of books, day in, day out, and it is very much a comfort--a return to the routine days of my sequestered childhood. Today found me missing poets, writers, and humans with whom I would have had some kind of social and physical contact in this now long-gone former world of conferences, events, and travel. In a sense, I am able to be with these writers, and now enable for them to be with you--by facilitating an encounter between them and you in this intimate aural space. For this recording, I read the follow poems from the following writers:
Jane Wong, "Everything"
Dao Strom, excerpt from "Self-Travelogue/s (Endemism)â
Mary-Kim Arnold, "American Girlhoodâ
Vaan Nguyen, "Mekong River"
Christine Shan Shan Hou "Amanuensis"
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Yesenia Montilla on her selections:
It seems truly unbelievable that we are coming on a year of this pandemic and I have been like so many: just trying my hardest to survive. How I have survived is by slipping into poetry; my own and others. What deeply moves me about the four poems I chose are their honesty and their surprise, their tenacity and how they unravel a kind of ethos for us all within every line. The words have carried me through even though to me all four seem to work as elegies in a lot of ways; the elegy often times can be the beginning not the end. In this time, right now, I am craving beginning and cursing all the ends that we have suffered and maybe that is why the elegy calls to me. The four poems I am reading for you today are "temporary statement" by Sheila Maldonado; "Vita Nuova" by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado; "This Moment/Right Now" by Roberto Carlos Garcia and "Our Last Summer Together" by Cheryl Boyce Taylor. I hope they strike and move, create fire, or bring peace.
Thatâs What You Get by Sheila Maldonado
The Life Assignment by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado
[elegies] by Roberto Carlos Garcia
Mama Phife Represents by Cheryl Boyce Taylor
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
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