Multi-Verse: A Perspective on Poetry

The liminal space at the beach, where lands meet sea and vice versa, also brings us to a liminal space in our pysche as well, where we can be both alive in moment, flush with memories of the past, and sober about our mortality. Join for a brief exploration of this theme in Sarah Dickenson Snyder's poem 'Eve at the Beach.'

Where to find meaning in this muddle of confusion, in the way our brain clings to binary reasoning and heuristics and paradoxes? This week's poem points us towards a conclusion that perhaps meaning is in the act of merely existing. 

Authority, identity, causality, being able to view your role and privilege through the lens of another - these all feels like very modern, very meta concerns. But are they? Around roughly 800 CE, in China's Tang dynasty, Bao Juyi wrestled with these same concerns, with both an incisiveness and lightness that might be instructiveness for our modern, digitally fractured culture.

Yeats and the important of voice, or how to turn a quiet moment of reflection into a journey through time and space, and yet you never feel like you left your rocking chair.

What is the power of symbolic language, particularly about so old a topic as love and heartbreak?  Passent les jours et passent les semaines            Ni temps passé      Ni les amours reviennent Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine            Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure            Les jours s'en vont je demeure

For the inaugural episode of the Multi-Verse podcast, we look at poem 1263 by the inimitable Emily Dickinson, and ask about our relationship to the truth.