Poetry Koan

This episode is about Schubert's awful and awesome bohemian life/music/death; a Victor Hugo sonnet from "Les Contemplations" ("La mort et la beauté sont deux choses profondes"); K.G. Nishitani on Nihility, sin and redemption; Fernando Pessoa's Fragment 363 (love, possession and illusion, the interplay of beauty and horror), with visuals courtesy of a walk around Rickman...

Brigit Pegeen Kelly reads for Wallace Stevens' poem "Poetry Is A Destructive Force" and we then discuss. Poetry Is a Destructive Force That's what misery is, Nothing to have at heart. It is to have or nothing. It is a thing to have, A lion, an ox in his breast, To feel it breathing there. Corazón, stout dog, Young ox, bow-legged bear, He tastes its blood, not spit. He is like a m...

Are there any connections to be made between Miroslav Valek's poem Killing Rabbits (read here by the American poet Brigit Pegeen Kelly), and Craig David's R&B "banger" Seven Days from the year 2000? Many. Killing Rabbits On Sunday after breakfast, when air is halfway to ice, and thin flutes of mice squeak in the chimney. On Sunday after breakfast to walk on virgin snow to the...

All we need is love. For something and/or someone. Also poetry.

Inspired by Nader, Farritor and Schilliger's recent AI-assisted decryption of ancient texts, netting them the $1m Vesuvius Challenge Prize , I attempt to crack the code of a 1000 year old Japanese poem using Google's Gemini chatbot. I pose to Gemini the four cryptic questions in the form of a poem about love's paradoxes by Izumi Shikibu, whose work was celebrated by Kenneth Rexroth wit...

An episode inspired by Tadeusz Dąbrowski's poem "Sentence", Nick Flynn's "Tattoo" and Jack Gilbert's "The Answer": SENTENCE It's as if you'd woken in a locked cell and found in your pocket a slip of paper, and on it a single sentence in a language you don't know. And you'd be sure this sentence was the key to your life. Also to this cell. A...

Being an Anne Carson megafan (looking forward to her new collection Wrong Norma published this month) I decided to spend an evening with an artefact she created in 2016 called Float comprising 22 chapbooks held together in whatever order you choose to read them in, one of which is an essay that I’m about to read here. This essay, " Variations on the Right to Remain Silent" , is also link...

An episode inspired by two Dalton Day poems: "Love Poem" and "An Understanding" (from the chapbook Overlay ). All poems referenced in the episode (in order of appearance):   YOU SEE I WANT A LOT You see, I want a lot. Perhaps I want everything: The darkness that comes with every infinite fall And the shivering blaze of every step up. So many live on and want nothing And are rai...

An episode inspired by two Wendell Berry poems: A MEETING In a dream I meet my dead friend. She has, I know, gone long and far, and yet she is the same for the dead are changeless. They grow no older. It is I who have changed, grown strange to what I was. Yet I, the changed one, ask: "How you been?" She grins and looks at me. "I been eating peaches off some mighty fine trees."...

An episode inspired by Noor Hindi's poem 🐳 The World’s Loneliest Whale Sings the Loudest Song 🐳 The World’s Loneliest Whale Sings the Loudest Song & Other Confessions I won’t make metaphors out of fish. If I have to die, I choose the ocean. If I have to live, I choose you. You: Everyone I’ve ever mourned. I believe less & less of sunlight these days. I won’t die alone. To awaken cryi...

In this episode, I explore our longing for basic trust, weaving together poetry (Pat Schneider, Rilke), philosophy (the Stoical idea of Logos, Cosmic Indifference, Animism), and psychology (Ego Psychology, Object Relations, and the developmental impact of early relationships) in order to make sense of mistrust and the desire for deeper, authentic connections in our digital and fragmented world. I...

Primarily an excuse to play you Tindersticks' gorgeous " Travelling Light ", but also an attempt to unravel in 15 minutes the world of referential delusions , where ordinary events assume personal significance in ways that cross the boundary between quirky beliefs and mental disorders. Meet, my ex-client 'Eric' and his unshakable notion that love signals are being played to h...

Parallels drawn between Marcus Aurelius's Meditations and Byron Katie’s Loving What Is , with a nod to the Philosopher King’s son, Commodus (“a bit of a shit” - Cassio Dio, History of the Roman Empire ). Also, some late Wallace Stevens, doing " The Work ”. The Plain Sense of Things After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the...

Our desire for meaningful communication with an inner or outer You in W.S. Graham's What Is The Language Using Us For , and Maureen McClane's Open Sky . OPEN SKY open sky— what you want? what you want I want for you, want whatever you want when you say you want everything under the sky— is that what everyone wants never to die— what you want? what you want I want for you, want what you wan...

An exploration of Rilke's poem " ⁠Du im Voraus verlorne Geliebte⁠ ," ("You Who Never Arrived"), alongside Leon Russell's " ⁠A Song for You⁠ ," and Martin Buber's book   ⁠ I and Thou ⁠ , delving into themes of elusive love, the intricacies of human connection, and the profound nature of both inner and outer I-You-ness.  (00:00) " ⁠You, In Advance, Lost...

What might the essence of Rilke’s Egoic soul reveal to us, if we tried to put it into words, using all our knowledge of the poems transmitted through an Ich, Rilke’s Ich (aka Ego), over many years, as well as the letters, and notebooks, and biographies we have of him to guide us? This might also include our ability, now a century after Freud, to apply everything we have learnt in the last 100 year...

On the 1st of May 1889, the young (33 year old) psychoanalyst-on-the-make Sigismund Schlomo Freud took on the case of a “a lady of about forty years of age”, a Frau Emmy von N., who we now know to be the Swiss noblewoman Baroness Fanny Louise von Sulzer-Wart.  Baroness Fanny had married 29 years previously at the tender age of 23 the 65 year-old Swiss watchmaker and industrialist Heinrich Mos...

An exploration of The Tower via Frost's Fire and Ice. The Tower is an archetype which invites us to explore and consider sudden change, upheaval, and chaos in our lives, as well as a kind of revelation or awakening sometimes associated with the word "enlightenment" as it is sometimes linked to personal transformation.  This particular exploration of The Tower, we make together via the followi...

Accepting the mixed-bag Now of our lives. Hard. -- THE THING IS to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs; when grief weights you down like your own flesh onl...

THE MOTHER The girl wrote a story. “But how much better it would be if you wrote a novel,” said her mother. The girl built a dollhouse. “But how much better if it were a real house,” her mother said. The girl made a small pillow for her father. “But wouldn’t a quilt be more practical,” said her mother. The girl dug a small hole in the garden. “But how much better if you dug a large hole,” said her...

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly, Asleep on the black trunk, Blowing like a leaf in green shadow. Down the ravine behind the empty house, The cowbells follow one another Into the distances of the afternoon. To my right, In a field of sunlight between two pines, The droppings of last year’s horses Blaze up into golden ston...

PRAYER Every day I want to speak with you. And every day something more important calls for my attention – the downloads, the books-to-read, the collapsible dog bowls I need to buy on Amazon. Even now I can hardly sit here among the falling piles of paper and clothing, the garbage trucks outside screeching and banging. The mystics say you are as close as my own breath. Why do I flee from you? My d...

Some reflections on Chio Nakamura's Wild Strawberries via The Book of Job, Hansel & Gretel, 22 year-old Amy in Madison Wisconsin struggling with Covid-19, Bergman's Seventh Seal, and a brief (but very effective) psychological grounding practice called 3-2-1.  WILD STRAWBERRIES You’re having a bad day. Chased by a tiger to the edge of a cliff, you scramble over and grab hold of a vine. But...

Some reflections on Caedmon's hymn via Beckett, Barthes, Foucault, Dracula, Corona, poem-twittery as identity politics, and why poetry koans are (maybe?) more important than the poets who wrote them. “Someone speaks, someone hears: no need to go any further. It is not he, it is not she, it’s I. (Or another, or others – what does it matter?) The case is clear: it is not he, she, they who I know I a...

THE WAREHOUSE This is not a false alarm. This is not a drill. This is an emergency. It’s not just about an emergency. It’s not just on the subject of an emergency, it doesn’t merely refer to some emergency that’s taking place elsewhere. Neither is it a metaphor for an emergency, or an exclamation drawing attention to an emergency. It is actually the emergency, and it requires attention. It’s not s...