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An episode from 12/9/24: Tonight's episode gathers together all of the readings I've done on this podcast from the poet William Blake (1757-1827). All of these poems can be found online at The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake:
Blake & His Animals: One passage from Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and two from Milton. I hope that plucking these three excerpts from his longer work can suggest how varied—not just how prophetic and opaque, but simply beautiful—so much of his poetry can be. (From the episode Poetry Friday) An excerpt from his long poem Milton. (From the episode Visionary Poems) Another excerpt from Milton, where Blake's personal mythology is given free reign over the city of London. (From the episode Cities Under Siege)Listeners will forgive me for providing an episode that isn't quite brand new. But in the two months since I tentatively ended this podcast, I've seen that a way forward could be to bring out new episodes every few months. My thanks to those listeners who have responded positively to this idea.
Please continue to keep your subscription to the podcast, to share it with others, and leave reviews wherever you listen.
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 5/5/21: Tonight, I read part of John Keats's famous letter of October 27, 1818, where he talks about the poet and the poetic character. He asks the questions: how much of a poet's life is given up by their focus on poetry, by their people-watching and -listening, by their lack of social skills? How much of their lives are left over when they become so consumed (whether attracted or repelled) with the lives and words of others?
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 12/30/20: In this second episode on Mesopotamian myth, we return to the story of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh and Enkidu's destructive adventures lead directly to the latter's death, and here I read Enkidu’s deathbed speech, and the dream he has of the Underworld. The translations I read from are by Andrew George and N. K. Sandars.
Other episodes on Mesopotamian myth can be found here.
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 1/1/24: Tonight, a cold has forced me to hand over the episode almost entirely to some of the greatest music ever written. Here are excerpts of my favorite pieces from Ludwig van Beethoven (1750-1827). It’s hard to think of music that is more passionate, introspective, uplifting, brooding, mournful, and joyous. The sources for the music I use are:
Excerpts from the Ninth Symphony/Op. 125 is conducted by Eugen Duvier. Excerpts from the Piano Sonatas (#1 and #2/Op. 2, #8/Op. 13, #13 and #14/Op. 27 #15/Op. 28, #17/Op. 31, #21/Op. 53, #22/Op. 54, #27/Op. 90), and the Fifth Piano Concerto/Op. 73 come from the complete recordings by Claudio Arrau. The excerpt from the Op. 70 “Ghost” Trio, from the Trio Bell’Arte. Excerpts from String Quartet 13/Op. 130 and String Quartet 15/Op. 132 come from the recordings by the Quartteto Italiano. Excerpts from Missa Solemnis, Op. 123, is conducted by John Eliot Gardiner. The excerpt from Robert Greenberg lecture comes from his Great Courses set on the Piano Sonatas.You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 7/28/23: Tonight's episode looks in on history, creativity, and mourning from three different angles:
In the first part, we hear scattered remarks from Bruce Springsteen over the years, about his low-fi and haunting 1982 album, Nebraska. It is remarkable how the album was made by Springsteen, alone in his bedroom, with a cheap recorder. For someone who bridges and so seamlessly combines music of the fifties, sixties and seventies, Nebraska sounds nearly timeless.
In the second part, I read a small section from Simon Schama's 1995 book, Landscape and Memory. Here, he talks about not just his own Jewish ancestry, who hailed from the woods and forests of Ruthenia (on the border between today's Poland and Lithuania), but also about the fate of one Polish village's Jewish population, during and following World War Two.
In the third part, I read from book 24 of Homer's Iliad, translated by Richmond Lattimore. In one of the most moving scenes anywhere in Homer's epics, Priam, the king of Troy, pays a visit to Achilles, the greatest warrior on the Greek side. Achilles has only recently killed Priam's son, Hector, in battle, and the old man comes to Achilles for beg for his son's body back, so that he can be given a proper funeral and burial.
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 5/9/22: Tonight, I continue my five-part series called Notes from the Grid. (A print version of NFTG has since been published.) I suggest that we don’t need to be missionaries for the culture and politics and even religion we love, and nor should we assume that anybody else needs the very things that we depend upon—“All things can console.” Alongside this, I talk about the virtue of uncertainty, and the difficulties of living with ambiguity of all kinds.
Other episodes from Notes from the Grid are here.
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 10/20/21: Tonight, we hear anecdotes from the lives of two very different poets, Walt Whitman and W. B. Yeats. The remarks from Whitman come from the journals he kept while working out the poems that went into the first edition of Leaves of Grass, while the comments from Yeats span the first half of his life. Should we be surprised that both poets experienced extreme doubts not just at the beginning of their writing lives, but all through them?
The passage from Whitman can be found in the appendices of Gary Schmidgall's edition of Whitman's poems; the quotations from Yeats can be found in the first volume of R. F. Foster's biography of Yeats.
Listen to other episodes on creativity here.
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 12/19/20: Tonight, I begin perhaps the most important series of episodes on this podcast, a deep-dive into my favorite stories from mythology and religion. All episodes of The Great Myths are here.
I begin with the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh. Reading from the translation by Andrew George (and an earlier one, by N. K. Sandars), I enter the story of Gilgamesh through his friendship with the typical "man of nature," Enkidu, and the "civilizing" process he undergoes.
Other episodes on Mesopotamian myth can be found here.
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 10/8/24: Tonight, four years to the day after starting this podcast, I end it with a reading of Theodore Roethke’s (1908-1963) long poem, “The Rose.” I also reread the poem I shared in the very first episode, Louise Glück’s (1943-2023) “Messengers.”
Many thanks to my listeners over the past four years. You can continue find my books, notices about new publications, and daily poems from Old English till now, over at wordandsilence.com. You can always reach me at [email protected].
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An episode from 9/23/24: Tonight, I read seven poems by the American poet, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961). Over the course of fifty years her work – which includes fiction, memoir and translation – provides an incredible example of how a writer can handle mythology, mysticism, sexuality and autobiography. The poems can be found in Collected Poems 1912-1944:
Sea Iris (1916) The Helmsman (1916) Adonis (1913-1917) Lethe (1924) Wine Bowl (1931) Eros (Uncollected/Unpublished poems, 1912-1944) Tribute to the Angels #29 (1945)You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 9/11/24: Tonight, I read six poems by the Welsh poet, R. S. Thomas (1913-2000). A priest in the Anglican church from 1936 until 1978, Thomas wrote some of the most moving poems we have about religious belief, rural life, and the simple feeling some of us have of belonging nowhere. It is said that he barely lost out on the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995. They can all be found in Collected Poems 1945-1990:
Affinity (1946) The Country Clergy (1958) Ap Huw’s Testament (1958) The Face (1966) Suddenly (1983) The Moor (1966)Audio of Thomas reading “The Moor” comes from the incredible collection R. S. Thomas Reading the Poems. Sections from his biography come from his page at the Poetry Archive and his obituary at the Guardian.
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 8/30/24: Tonight, I read four poems by the American poet Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982). A few years ago, when I began digging through anthologies of American poetry, Rexroth stood out immediately among the usual names from the twentieth century. I can't think of many American poets who have written so beautifully about nature, about being a parent, or about love:
Halley’s Comet (1956) When We with Sappho (1944) The Wheel Revolves (1965) Hapax (1974)They can all be found in The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth.
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.
Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 8/14/24: Tonight, I read excerpts from the poet Robert Pinsky’s 1995 interview with The Paris Review. It is fascinating to see how much of what he says seems timeless and wise (everything on creativity, writing habits, high and low speech, etc.), and those things that seem stuck in the amber of 1995 (the phenomenon of poets teaching at universities).
I end the episode with a reading of his incredible visionary poem, “The Figured Wheel.” (The poem is available in many books, but as I say in the beginning of this episode, it was an early collected volume with that name where I first discovered him.)
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I’ve also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.
Email me at [email protected]
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An episode from 8/1/24: Tonight, I read seven poems from Seamus Heaney’s 1974 collection, North. Few poets from the last century took on the reality of violence in the ancient and modern world the way Heaney does in his poems about Iron Age bog bodies, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and ruminations through mythology and Viking history. I also read four poems from Heaney’s previous books, that can serve as a prologue to North:
Personal Helicon (from Death of a Naturalist) Dream (from Door into the Dark) Bogland (from Door into the Dark) The Tollund Man (from Wintering Out)Poems from North:
Belderg Funeral Rites Bone Dreams pt. II Bog Queen The Grauballe Man Punishment KinshipAudio of Heaney reading “Personal Helicon” comes from his 1971 appearance at the 92nd Street Y. The episode also includes excerpts from Dennis O'Driscoll's Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, and The Letters of Seamus Heaney. This episode is revision and complete re-recording of an episode first released in June, 2021.
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.
Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 7/19/24: Tonight, I read the small biographies of nearly two dozen poets, the kind of colorful summaries usually found in poetry anthologies. In many cases, reading a paragraph or two about twenty people is enough to get the sense of a life, and of just how varied the lives of poets (or anybody) can really be. The biographies come from Volume One and Volume Two of the Poem a Day series.
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone.
Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 7/5/24: Tonight, I devote an hour to wondering how we talk about childhood and memory, how we live with memory and meaning, how we perceive time and recollect the most vivid events of our lives.
For me, music is inseparable from all of this, and I play a few songs in this episode: Mother Nature’s Son (The Beatles), High Hopes (Pink Floyd), T. S. Eliot reading from East Coker, the Molto Adagio from String Quartet #15/Op. 132 (Beethoven), Mishima (Closing) (Philip Glass), American Beauty (Thomas Newman), the Andante Adagio from String Quartet #3: Reflections on my childhood/Childhood Fantasia in New England (Alan Hovhaness).
This episode grew out of a conversation with Tom Hart at Sequential Artists Workshop, and I dedicate to him.
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.
Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 6/18/24: This is the seventh in a series of readings from biographies of Walt Whitman. I continue with Paul Zweig's Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet, which focuses on the years preceding the publication of Leaves of Grass. Previous readings from Whitman biographies are here.
Tonight, Zweig discusses the nature of Whitman's notebooks and journals up through the 1855 publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass. The necessity Whitman felt, even in his notebooks, for addressing a public audience, and the influence of prose (Carlye, Emerson, the King James Bible) on his revolutionary poetry, all offer great insight into how Whitman was able to achieve what he did.
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I’ve also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.
Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 06/06/2024: Tonight, I share two stories from the Shoah, or Holocaust.
The first is about the Sonderkommando, those prisoners forced to do the most devastating work in the concentration camps. During a 2015 Fresh Air interview with László Nemes and Géza Röhrig about their 2015 film, Son of Saul, a brief story about an actual Sonderkommando member is told. It remains one of the most overwhelming minutes that I have ever heard.
In the second part, I read from Daniel Mendelsohn’s 2006 book, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. The book is Mendelsohn’s attempt to discover what happened to six members of his family who were murdered in the Holocaust, and the section I read from is about the difficulty of truly entering the mind and situation of a sixteen year-old girl, who is rounded up with a thousand other Jews, and murdered.
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I’ve also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.
Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 5/20/24: Tonight, after a long hiatus, we return to Norse myth with the story of Sigurd’s killing of the dragon, Fafnir. Couched in a much longer narrative that contains shape-shifting, war, revenge, brief appearances by Odin and Loki, and finally Sigurd’s ability to hear the language of birds and animals, it is a brilliant and vivid example of storytelling in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
I read from the two great sources of the story, the Volsung Saga (in the Jesse Byock translation) and Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda (in the Anthony Faulkes translation). I also discuss the history of the story, and its reworking in the Nibelungenlied, and Wagnerian opera.
Listen to the other Great Myths here.
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.
Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 5/8/24: Tonight, I read fourteen poems from Ted Hughes's 1970 collection, Crow. His books Crow, Moortown Diary, Remains of Elmet, and River contain his best poetry, and they are models for any artist in how handle nature, animal life, myth, and autobiography in their work. The poems that read are:
A Childish Prank (the audio of Hughes reading the poem comes from here) Crow's First Lesson Crow Tyrannosaurus Crow & the Birds Crowego Crow Blacker than Ever Crow's Last Stand Crow & the Sea Fragments of an Ancient Tablet Notes for a Little Play Lovesong Littleblood Crow's Courtship Crow's Song about GodThis is a revision and complete re-recording of an episode first posted in August of 2021, which included fewer poems. I've used the opportunity to also read from Jonathan Bate's biography of Hughes, Hughes's later notes to the book, as well as handful of letters he wrote about the collection.
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.
Email me at [email protected].
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