Human Voices Wake Us

An episode from 2/4/22: Here are five more poems going back to 1600 or so. Eavan Boland talks parenting and childhood; Wordsworth calls on Milton, and Milton retells our oldest story; Gerard Manley Hopkins writes out of a solitude few ever listened to, in his own life; and Philip Sidney reminds us why our own lives are worthy of poetry. Eavan Boland, “The Making of An Irish Goddess” ⁠ ⁠ Gerard Man...

An episode from 4/19/22: From the opening line of the Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman announced that his great theme was unity: “I celebrate myself,/And what I assume you shall assume,/For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” As the last two episodes show, his best poems on both love and death rise up out of this central belief in humanity’s unity with nature and the animal world, and...

An episode from 1/24/22: How did the evolutionary ability to stand on two feet, freeing our hands for all kinds of practical and creative activities, eventually lead to the development of language? Was the slow and painstaking path that led to what we call creativity, language, art, and religion—was it inevitable? And is it unfortunate what we’ve done with these gifts today? Tonight, I read a hand...

An episode from 1/21/22: How does a great poet come into the world? What is their childhood like, their education? What was the first poetry they knew, and when did they realize they wanted to write poetry themselves? Tonight, we hear the Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s answers to these questions. As usual, these remarks come from Dennis O’Driscoll’s book-length collection of interviews with Heaney, ⁠...

An episode from 1/18/22: Our anthology series presents a handful of poems from the past five centuries. How much or how little has our language changed since Roy Fisher remembered the London Blitz, Coleridge drew the greatest lesson he ever did from nature, and Emily Brontë experienced a haunting evening? A reading of five poems: The Entertainment of War , by Roy Fisher (1930-2017) Danse Russe , b...

An episode from 1/15/22: Tonight we read from perhaps the great love story from the Middle Ages, since without it there would be no romance of Tristan and Isolde. How the Irish story of Gráinne, a young woman who casts a magic spell and puts her wedding party to sleep (she has just been married to a much older man) so that she can run off with a man named Diarmuid instead--how this tale grew and c...

An episode from 1/4/22: What can we learn from the Roman author Seneca's thoughts on education, speaking to us from the middle of the first century? And what can we glean from Alexis De Tocqueville's (to me) amazingly short-sighted thoughts on the rich and the poor, from only two hundred years ago? The excerpts come from Seneca's Letters to a Stoic , AD 64; and from Alexis De Tocquevil...

What can we say when we're told that poetry no longer matters, especially when it's another poet who says it? The first eleven minutes of this episode are my best defense for what poetry is and can be, while the rest offers and handful of poems which suggest that poetry is as powerful as it ever was. My answer at least would be: live with and become enthralled with the poetry that has last...

An episode from 12/25/21: Tonight, we hear five poems from four centuries: Amy Lowell on unrequited love, Thomas Hardy bringing in the twentieth century, William Cower's winter evening, John Donne trying to defuse the power of death, and Christopher Marlowe trying to get the attention of that shepherdess: ⁠ “New Heavens for Old,” ⁠ by Amy Lowell (1874-1925) ⁠ “The Darkling Thrush,” ⁠ by Thomas...

An episode from 12/21/21: Tonight, I read five poems from Ted Hughes’s last book, Birthday Letters (1998). This is the book where Hughes finally addressed his relationship to Sylvia Plath in verse, nearly forty years after her suicide. In my introduction to the poems, I also talk about the strangeness, both of audiences demanding such a confession over a private matter, and the weight that Hughes...

An episode from 12/18/21: Tonight, I read five poems going back four hundred years. Edgar Lee Masters channels the unsung poet and victim of horrendous violence, Tennyson takes a crack at Odysseus, Mary Robinson describes the morning, Henry Wotton gets religious, and Walter Raleigh wonders aloud about truth and lies. As a bonus, I read a poem of mine about Raleigh as well, "The Historian.&quo...

An episode from 12/7/21: Tonight, I read eleven short poems from a handful of books that Ted Hughes published during the 1970s. As I talk about in the introduction, this decade saw the writing and publication of Hughes's most powerful books: Crow , Moortown Diary , Remains of Elmet , and River (which themselves did not find their final form until the 1990s). In between these books, Hughes publ...

An episode from 12/5/21: Tonight, I read from chapter six of Peter Ackroyd’s history of early seventeenth-century England, ⁠ Civil War (or Rebellion ⁠ , as the book has been retitled in its America). As usual, few writers are as ablet as Ackroyd to bring the past to life, and he uses two texts to paint a brief picture of London at the time: Thomas Dekker’s ⁠ The Seven Deadly Sins of London ⁠ (1607...

An episode from 11/19/21 , where I read about two disasters separated by nearly two thousand years: the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in the year 79, and the earthquake that destroyed so much of San Francisco in 1906. My sources are a letter from Pliny the younger ( ⁠ read it here ⁠ ), where he describes Vesuvius and Pompeii, while an article by Jack London ( ⁠ read it here ⁠ ) takes us to San Francisc...

An episode from 11/16/21: Tonight, I read from a few books on Pablo Picasso, where he talks about how the power behind his own paintings, and his huge output, remained a mystery for him as much as anyone else. The lasting nature of his work seems to be less about how consciously he went about it, than how intuitively he was able to deal with an impulse he barely understood himself. The books I rea...

An episode from 11/13/21: Tonight, I read eight poems from Louise Glück's 1992 collection, The Wild Iris. Following these are an episode from March, 2021, of six poems from her 1990 book, Ararat . A good barometer for determining any poet's best work is "the poems nobody else could have written," and indeed there is nothing else like these two books that I know of in English. Amo...

An episode from 11/4/21: Tonight, I read four of William Wordsworth's greatest poems. On some days, it's only rolling along with Wordsworth's rhymed or unrhymed reminiscences or descriptions of nature, that teaches again what poetry is about, what poetry can do: Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood London (1802): "Milton! thou should'st be livi...

An episode from 11/2/21: Tonight, I read a letter written by the British poet Ted Hughes, to a friend and critic, Al Alvarez, in November of 1971. At the time, Alvarez was publishing an intimate (and to Hughes's mind, exploitative) account of the 1963 suicide of Hughes's wife, the poet Sylvia Plath. The letter can be found in The Letters of Ted Hughes , pages 321-326. I use this letter as...

An episode from 10/30/21: In this seventh episode on Celtic mythology, I review one of the greatest surviving stories in the tradition, Togail Bruidne Dá Derga , or The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel . Since it is also fairly long, I only share two small sections from the story itself: a piece from the beginning, and from the story's conclusion. You can read more about it here , or in th...

An episode from 10/24/21: Tonight, I read from the letters of Ted Hughes, on how he came to discover a love for poetry, the natural world, as well as folklore and mythology, and how all three became intertwined and essential to his life. All of these can be found in Letters of Ted Hughes . Don’t forget to support Human Voices Wake Us on Substack , where you can also get our newsletter and other ex...

An episode from 10/17/21: The death Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) came after a long series of illnesses. By then, friends and admirers and hangers-on sought out the composer in his last days. Tonight, I read Jan Swafford's account of Beethoven's death in his incredible biography,  Beethoven: Anguish & Triumph . Swafford’s book also includes one of the most moving details from any bi...

An episode from 10/14/21: What does culture and education mean when literacy, let alone the owning of books, is so rare? Tonight, I read two chapters from Peter Ackroyd's book, ⁠ Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination ⁠ . The first covers education in eighth-century England, and specifically the life of the Venerable Bede. The second is a brief look into Anglo-Saxon/Old English poetry,...

An episode from 10/11/21: Tonight, a small episode where I talk about working, and about empathy and sympathy for those who live doing work they do not love, and which they derive little meaning from. Perhaps it describes you, or someone you know. 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 podcast by o...

An episode from 10/1/21: A reading from one of my favorite books, Studs Terkel's Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do . Here, Terkel interviews a waitress named Dolores Dante. 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 podcast by ordering any of my bo...

An episode from 9/28/21: Tonight, I read a poem of mine called "Unfinished Michelangelo." The entire poem takes up Michelangelo's many unfinished works, but it begins, specifically, talking about his unfinished slave sculptures . You can read the poem here . I introduce the poem by mentioning how, very often poets and writers (and sculptors and painters) don't choose their subjec...