Human Voices Wake Us

An episode from 9/7/22: Tonight I spend an hour talking about Stephen King’s 1983 novel, ⁠ Pet Sematary ⁠ . The anxieties attached to being a parent have rarely book put this memorably, cloaked as it is in the kind foreordained doom we expect from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Does the book also succeed so well because King’s usual strengths—gore and horror, sure, but also sheer entertainment, sentimentali...

An episode from 12/15/22: Tonight, I read eleven essential poems from the American poet William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) . In the same generation as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Williams is perhaps best known for never becoming an expatriate, and instead living most of his life as a family doctor in Rutherford, New Jersey. His poems can be found in The Collected Poems Volume I: 1909-1939 , The C...

An episode from 8/30/22: “Give Me a Tarantula” is a scattering of thoughts on: Old Norse & Old English Edward Hopper Kids five Going on Six Droning Sounds, prehistoric & modern Driving in Ohio Vermeer & Personal Nostalgia Dead Can Dance Primo Levi Don’t forget to support Human Voices Wake Us  on Substack , where you can also get our newsletter and other extras. You can also support the...

An episode from 8/22/22: Tonight, we leave the Celtic myths with an overview of all the episodes devoted to it, The Great Myths #8-18 ( ⁠ which can be listened to here ⁠ ). Then I read one final story, of Cuchulainn’s fight with Ferdiad, from Thomas Kinsella’s translation of the Táin bo Cúailnge. As usual, heroism, the supernatural, war, pathos, friendship, and otherworldliness abound. The various...

An episode from 8/4/22: Tonight, listen to my four-part episode on the atomic bomb, from its development, to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and after. I draw almost entirely from the words of those who were there. The full text of the quotations used here can be found ⁠ in the blog versions of these podcasts ⁠ . The books, documentaries, and poems used to make these episodes are: ⁠ The Ma...

An episode from 7/19/22: Sometimes it’s worth just reveling in the way a great historian tells a story, or details and invention, or brings us face-to-face with a familiar topic. Tonight, I read three sections from Jacques Barzun’s book ⁠ From Dawn to Decadence ⁠ , where we hear about: The expedition of French scholars that followed Napoleon into Egypt (about 24: 18) The invention of the printed b...

An episode from 7/11/22: How do we find our way past the image of Emily Dickinson as a distant, unapproachable, recluse? One way is to read a book like Brenda Wineapple’s ⁠ White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson ⁠ , and tonight I share my favorite passages from it. Dickinson and Higginson were both powerful personalities in their own right, and allowing them t...

An episode from 6/26/22: We are incredibly lucky that, in the novelist Toni Morrison (1931-2019), we had that rare thing: a great writer who also achieved great popularity with the general public. This meant that she was interviewed about her life, her books, and about creativity and the news of the day, hundreds of times. Tonight, I’ve gone through my favorite interviews with her and gathered the...

An episode from 6/19/22: We’re lucky that all things Celtic are embedded so deeply into popular culture. Yet every now and then it’s worth sweeping away the kitsch and the clip art knots and the New Age stuff to ask what a good scholarly summation of Celtic myth—the archeology and the literature—has to say. Mark Williams’s ⁠ Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth ⁠ does more than...

An episode from 6/8/22: Tonight, we hear from two of the greatest twentieth century Irish writers. In the first half of the episode, I read from Dennis O’Driscoll’s interviews with Seamus Heaney . Here, Heaney talks about his methods, his inspiration, his favorite time of day to write. In the second part ( beginning around 35:15 ) I read ⁠ James Joyce’s great short story of disappointed young love...

An episode from 5/25/22: Tonight, I conclude with the last in a five-part series called Notes from the Grid . (A ⁠print version⁠ of NFTG has since been published.) The first section, "Simple Awareness," is followed by "The Uncomfortable, Unsolvable Middle" (begins at 20:30) .The series concludes with "All Its Ways" (starts at 48:40) Taken together, these last three se...

An episode from 5/2/22: Tonight, I continue my five-part series called Notes from the Grid . (A print version of NFTG has since been published.) It asks why we grant so much authority and influence to reviewers and criticism—is it because so few of us will ever create a lasting work of art, but all of us find it easy to give our opinions on everything? In the second half of the episode (beginning...

An episode from 4/14/22: “Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?” Walt Whitman asks. “I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.” Long after so many aspects of his poems have ceased to shock us, Whitman’s attitude towards death remains perhaps the most challenging in all of his poetry. Tonight, I read from my favorite of those poems: the youthful bits from “Song of...

An episode from 4/9/22: Is Whitman our great poet of love, or of longing? Is there a difference? In this episode, I share my favorite of his love poems, many of which are expressed as unfulfilled longing. They can all be found in ⁠ The Selected Short Poems of Walt Whitman ⁠ , and ⁠ The Selected Long Poems of Walt Whitman ⁠ : Selections from “Song of Myself” To You Once I Pass’d through a Populous...

An episode from 4/6/22: Another two-part episode. In the first, we hear from Toni Morrison about the use of anger in writing novels; from the poet Richard Wilbur on the suicide of fellow-poet John Berryman, and the perils of having few interests outside of poetry. Other remarks from Berryman himself, and T. S. Eliot, touch on the general perils of the creative life. In the second part (starting ar...

An episode from 3/29/22: Another two-part episode. The first is a reading of five poems, and my favorites from this batch are Robert Lowell’s “Bobby Delano,” an unforgettable poem about adolescence, and Anne Finch’s “A Nocturnal Reverie,” whose blank verse meditation looks ahead to Wordsworth like few other poems. John Clare’s “An Invite to Eternity,” Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s “A Summer Evening’s M...

An episode from 3/25/22: Why have I always assumed that lovers of poetry want to talk to other people about it? In the first part of this episode, I continue a discussion on Loneliness that began last year , and remind myself that there are a million ways to live with poetry and art. In the second part, I read from Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Shakespeare , where the Bard’s sonnets and love life a...

An episode from 3/22/22 : One of my goals for The Great Myths has been to show how strange, even off-putting, the stories that we know and revere really are. I don’t know of a better example of this than the largest literary text surviving from twelfth-century Ireland, The Tales of the Elders of Ireland ( ⁠ Acallam na Senórach ⁠ ). Using the wanderings of Saint Patrick throughout Ireland as the fr...

An episode from 3/14/22: What happened during ⁠ Jane Goodall’s famous appearance in Gary Larson’s The Far Side ⁠ in 1987, and what can it teach us about the pedestal we place our idols on? What did a child’s introduction to The Beatles’ “Revolution 9” teach me about the power of preconceptions? This grab-bag episode, which includes bits from ⁠ Leon Wieseltier’s 1996 book, Kaddish ⁠ , touches on al...

An episode from 3/8/22: How would you talk about your job, if someone came around asking? Tonight, we hear from Beverly Valentine, a Funeral Home Director, and Jason Groth, a Telemarketer. They were interviewed more than twenty years ago for the 2000 book ⁠ Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs ⁠, and I have yet to find a boring interview in the entire book. The book is clearly meant as an update t...

An episode from 3/2/22: At a listener’s request, the first part of this episode is devoted to the earliest bookstores I remember, from childhood through adolescence. The Friday night in high school that I spent, buying a copy of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, remains an especially formative experience. The second part of this episode takes up the creation and immediate fame of Pablo Picasso’s Guer...

An episode from 2/25/22: How important is it for an author to be associated with a certain place—Seamus Heaney and Ireland, Dickens and London, Robert Frost and New England? How does a young mother, stuck at home with her kids, decide to write short stories? What is the difference between writing fiction and poetry—between sitting down to revise the same story every day, and potentially being able...

An episode from 2/21/22: Most people will tell you that jealousy is a destructive mindset to get lost in, but tonight I wonder under what circumstances it’s justified. Starting from a simple observation—that Joan Didion’s memoir about the death of her husband would have probably gone unpublished or unnoticed without her name on the cover—I ask how many stories we aren’t hearing and will never hear...

An episode from 2/14/22: One way that storytellers have always illustrated the radical nature of creativity has been to give an unusual talent to children, and set them loose in the adult world. Everything from superhero movies to The Shining has done this, and it’s not surprising to find it in the Welsh tale of ⁠ Taliesin . Tonight, we see how this child became a great poet and seer, while also u...

An episode from 2/4/22: Here are five more poems going back to 1600 or so. Louise Bogan realizes mysticism isn’t it, anymore than hedonism; Elizabeth Barret Browning continues to “to shoot/My soul's full meaning into future years”; William Blake is his visionary self; and Anne Bradstreet and Henry Vaughan, both born in the early seventeenth century, sound positively modern, writing a poem abou...