Human Voices Wake Us

An episode from 7/7/23: Tonight, I talk about writing my long poem, To the House of the Sun , published in 2015. The poem follows an Irish immigrant making his way through the American South, North and West, during the Civil War. The book is part travelogue, battle epic, and spiritual biography, and after describing how the book was written, I read one of my favorite sections from late in the poem...

An episode from 6/30/23: Tonight, I read from three books that have been important lately in the writing of my long poem, The Great Year. First is the entry on Weaving from Taschen’s Book of Symbols ; next, from Michael Pye’s The Edge of the World , is the story of the city of Domburg, in the Netherlands, and the tremendous archaeological finds that storms and the shifting North Sea have revealed...

An episode from 6/12/23: Tonight, I read from James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough , and the accounts he collected on the midsummer fire festivals in premodern Europe. I also discuss the relevance of these stories to a long poem-in-progress of mine, The Great Year , as well as my own adventures in acquiring all thirteen volumes of Frazer’s great work. The sections I read from all appear in the f...

An episode from 7/27/22: Tonight, I read from Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith’s ⁠ Van Gogh: The Life ⁠ , sharing the sections covering Van Gogh’s ⁠ two Starry Night paintings ⁠ , and his ⁠ many paintings of sunflowers ⁠ . Before these images became cultural touchstones, they were the product of a largely unknown artist working in the south of France in the late 1880s. Each of these paintings...

Tonight, I'm thrilled to read a poem that I began working on three years ago on the life, teachings, and mysticism of the Greek philosopher, Pythagoras (c. 570- c.495 BCE) . I am also thrilled that the poem is being simultaneously published at The Basilisk Tree . Many thanks to its editor, Bryan Helton, for coordinating all of this with me. For anyone who wants to look closer at the earliest C...

An episode from 5/15/23: What can the Poetic and Prose Eddas, the Icelandic sagas, and skaldic poetry tell us about the most important god in the Norse pantheon, Odin? Tonight, I devote an entire episode to Odin’s many masks: as poet and shaman, as god of death and war, and as the perfect embodiment of the world as the Norse knew it, filled with brutality and betrayal. The episode is divided into...

An episode from 5/3/23: Tonight’s episode is a response to those wonderful lines from William Carlos Williams: “It is ridiculous what airs we put on to seem profound, while our hearts gasp dying for want of love.” If these lines have the ring of truth, what aspects of our lives have we built up so meticulously, when all we really want is love? In my own life, I ask if perhaps poetry, writing—and e...

An episode from 4/26/23: What can the stories of the early lives of famous people teach us about our own upbringing, all the details nobody would know if they aren’t told to someone? Tonight, I read from the scattered remarks of John, Paul, George, and Ringo that are found at the beginning of the huge hardcover book The Beatles Anthology , and which cover their childhoods and the years before The...

An episode from 4/19/23: In 2020, the Irish historian and biographer R. F. Foster published a wonderful and brief book, On Seamus Heaney . It is a great introduction to Heaney, and tonight I read my favorite passages from it. The book spans his entire career, and his lifelong preoccupations with history, violence, family, and mythology. Don’t forget to support Human Voices Wake Us  on Substack , w...

An episode from 3/29/23: Why should we continue to read the poetry of William Wordsworth? Tonight’s episode is devoted to Jonathan Bate’s biography, Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World , where he more than answers the question. For me, anyone who cares about poetry devoted to nature, introspection, and autobiography, can still learn the most from Wordsworth. And his concerns—the nec...

An episode from 3/19/23: Around the year 1509, Leonardo da Vinci began his great anatomical work, dissecting upwards of thirty human bodies and making drawings of what he saw. Tonight’s episode is a poem about that experience – all that was isolating, exhilarating, gruesome, beautiful. How did Leonardo go past art, and past science, in search of something stranger, human, divine? The poem is also...

An episode from 1/26/23: Tonight I read a handful of poems on the theme of How to live, what to do ? How to get by in the world as a devotee of culture, solitude, ritual, beauty, tradition and individuality? There is of course no one answer, and anyway, poetry should stay as far away from direct “advice,” or proscription of any kind. Still, when I sit back and think about the kind of poems that he...

An episode from 1/10/23: Tonight we hear from two great writers of fiction, Charles Dickens and Alice Munro. Through a handful of readings from Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens: A Life , we see how Dickens (1812-1870) was able to juggle, for almost a year, the writing of two novels simultaneously, both for serial publication. Thanks to a letter written by Fyodor Dostoevsky, who visited Dickens in...

An episode from 1/18/23: Tonight I ask the question: what is love, and what is love poetry? Are poems about family and friendship love poems, just as much as those about romantic feeling, and longing, and heartbreak? And even more: what is romantic love? What, for instance, did T. S. Eliot mean when he said, “Love is most nearly itself/When here and now cease to matter,” or when Emily Dickinson wr...

An episode from 12/23/22: How did the Viking Norse tell a story as important as Ragnarok (the end of the world) in poetry, and then in prose? What does prose require that poetry does not, and vice-versa, especially when the accounts we have are separated by centuries of historical change, and religious conversion?  In this third episode on Norse Mythology, I read the story of Ragnarok from the Pro...

An episode from 11/29/22: "Give Me a Tarantula" is shorthand for a scattering of thoughts on a handful of things that can't fill their own episode. The first Tarantula collection is here , but tonight I talk about: What happens when two comedians lose all their confidence when they meet in an elevator? What is the happiest story you can think of (hint: it almost always comes from chi...

An episode from 11/4/22: Tonight, I read ten essential poems from the American poet, Robert Lowell (1917-1977). Lowell was perhaps the last American poet we could possibly call “famous” during his lifetime. The combination of his early success and subsequent struggles with mental illness meant that the public witnessed all of it, from his slow break with formalism, his stint with “Confessional” po...

An episode from 11/4/22: Tonight, I talk about creativity and wonder what actors and writers have in common. In the most general sense of finding solace in the anecdotes from the working lives of other creative people, I also mention the revelation that Inside the Actor's Studio was, for me, in my early twenties. The springboard for much of what I say is Simon Callow’s ⁠ article in the New Yor...

An episode from 10/27/22: Tonight, I talk about our love horror and true crime, and ask: what makes a story truly frightening, instead of just entertaining? What kinds of movies or books, or ways of storytelling, take us beyond entertainment to true horror, to actual fear? For instance, how does the disturbing story of Ed Gein end up, filtered through convention and expectation, as “standard” (eve...

An episode from 10/19/22: In this second episode on Norse Mythology, I read from the creation myths found in the poem, “Voluspa,” found in the Poetic Edda, and from its corresponding sections in the Prose Edda. I also read from commentaries on these sections. The translation of the Poetic Edda that I read from is by ⁠ Andy Orchard ⁠ , and the Prose Edda by ⁠ Anthony Faulkes ⁠ . The commentary I re...

An episode from 10/11/22:  Tonight I talk about a dear friend from my youth, who made a great impact on my late teens and early twenties. Somehow he was the person who introduced me to Huston Smith’s World Religions , the poetry of Seamus Heaney and Francis Thompson, the novels of Hermann Hesse, and so much more. Far from a merely “intellectual” acquaintance, he was one of the first adults I knew...

An episode from 10/3/22: Over the course of forty years, Ted Hughes (1930-1998) wrote some of the best poetry of the twentieth (or any) century. Tonight, I read twelve of Hughes’s essential poems, where we see his primal concerns—the violence but also beauty of nature and animal life; mythology and religion; and his own autobiography—expressed in language as powerful as any that has ever been writ...

An episode from 1/31/22: Tonight, I collect all of Ted Hughes’s poetry that I have recorded and posted here over the past year. They can all be found in his Collected Poems (smaller selections of his poetry include Selected Poems 1957-1994 and A Ted Hughes Bestiary ). Rather than organizing my readings of Hughes’s poetry chronologically, I start with what seems to me his best poetry (and some of t...

An episode from 9/23/22: What twentieth-century American poet devoted so much time to the environment, and to humanity’s place in it, other than Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)? What other poet devoted his powers not to the puzzles of Modernism but to the plain-spoken strengths of science, prophecy, and myth? Tonight I read ten of Jeffers’ essential poems, and I hope you are as stunned by them as I a...

An episode from 9/15/22: For the next year or more, my series on The Great Myths will focus on Norse mythology. Tonight I introduce the subject and read one of its foundational texts, a poem from the Poetic Edda called the “Voluspa.” The Voluspa takes its form as a prophecy spoken by a female seeress, or Völva, who tells the story of the world—from creation through Ragnarok—in an astonishingly bri...