Human Voices Wake Us

An episode from 12/8/25: Note: A version of this episode was posted last week and quickly taken down when I realized the audio quality was poor. I have rerecorded it here; apologies to those listeners who heard the subpar version. Tonight, I read from John Eliot’s Gardiner’s Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven . Gardiner talks about Bach’s Christian faith, how much we can expect listeners today to...

An episode from 11/24/25: Tonight, I read from one of the best books on religion in ancient Egypt, Erik Hornung’s Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many . Few have written so lucidly on the subject: Egyptians were actually obsessed with life and its renewal, not in wallowing death; the “monotheistic” reforms of Akhenaten were not visionary at all, but largely practical and prett...

An episode from 11/17/25: Tonight, I read a section from David Anthony’s book The Horse, the Wheel, and Language . It is a wonderfully written account of the archeological and linguistic attempts to discover the origins of the Indo-European language families. The part I read from retells the famous story of Sir William Jones , the Welsh linguist and lawyer stationed in British India in the late ei...

An episode from 11/10/25: Tonight, I talk about literacy and education in the ancient world, both the fascinating aspects of memorization and of what “reading” meant back (it was much closer to reading shorthand today), and the precarious reality that anyone who underwent scribal training in Mesopotamia or Egypt might not even live long enough to see their education through. The book I read from i...

An episode from 11/3/25: Tonight, I read what is perhaps Walt Whitman’s greatest poem, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” I also set it in the context of Whitman’s life as a poet: he wrote and published the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855 and was certain that the book would have an immediate cultural and national impact. When this didn’t happen, and while Whitman was preparing the second edition...

An episode from 10/24/25: I’ve been waiting in vain for a cold to pass so I can record a new episode. As that doesn’t seem to be happening anytime soon, the new movie about Bruce Springsteen reminded me that a few years ago I recorded an episode about his 1982 album Nebraska . While the original episode itself is much longer, tonight’s episode presents only the part about Springsteen. I hope you e...

An episode from 10/6/25: Tonight, I read from Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s Two Years Before the Mast , first published in 1840. It tells of the death of one sailor, George Ballmer. The text of this passage can be found here . I also read a quote from the poet Derek Walcott, and part of the poem “ The Burning of the Leaves ,” by Laurence Binyon. The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a revie...

An episode from 9/25/25: Tonight, I read a few entries from the book Gillian Anderson edited, called Want: Sexual Fantasies by Anonymous . It is a collection of sexual fantasies from women all over the world, but as I point out, behind the acrobatics and explicitness of what we assume fantasy to be all about, a much simpler and basic need is also being longed for. (And I have a feeling that men, t...

An episode from 9/15/25: Tonight, I read a long section on the last days of the philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) from the biography Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life , by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. (For those who are interested, the BBC’s In Our Time devotes an entire hour to Benjamin’s life and work.) I also read two small passages from Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Ca...

An episode from 9/9/25: Tonight, I read from three books: A small passage from The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe , by Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, on how pocket calendars were essential references for popular knowledge. A longer passage, on the Protestant Reformation (and the invention of moveable type that facilitated its spread), from Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to D...

An episode from 9/1/25: Tonight, I read a small passage from Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf , and then a much longer passage from Laurie Lisle’s Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe . In it, Lisle describes the weeks and months in late 1915 during which O’Keeffe found herself as an artist after her decision to start from scratch and devote herself to drawing only in charcoal . It was...

An episode from 8/27/25: Tonight, I read from Amanda Podany’s wonderful book, Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East . After a royal wedding took place in the ancient Syrian city of Ebla around 2300 BCE, the new king and queen spent no less than three weeks among the tombs and statues of their royal forbears. I conclude the episode with the response of one listener to...

An episode from 8/23/25: Returning to the podcast after a long hiatus, I read from Henry Mayhew and John Binny’s London Labour and the London Poor , their exhaustive and essential description of life in London for the working poor in the mid-nineteenth century. Far from being a dry and distant document, it is a work of literature in itself, as this description of the London docks—and those hoping...

An episode from 7/21/23: Tonight, I read a few dozen quotations from the scientists, politicians, and military figures who were instrumental in the development of the atomic bomb, and in the final decision to drop it on Japan in August of 1945. The most prominent voices here are those of Robert Oppenheimer and his fellow physicists, whose dedication and excitement to develop the bomb was matched o...

An episode from 6/15/25 : Tonight, the podcast returns briefly for a reading of my new short story, "The One Who Sang So Well." The episode coincides with the story's publication in The Basilisk Tree — you can read it here . Many thanks to editor Bryan Helton for taking the story. You can support Human Voices Wake Us here , or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid , To the...

An episode from 4/26/22: Tonight, I begin a five-part series called Notes from the Grid . (A print version of NFTG has since been published.) In this first part, figures as various as Kurt Cobain, Michelangelo, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Albert Einstein are called on to ask: why do so few of us find meaning in private experiences, private thoughts? What does fame do to the people and ideas and events...

An episode from 10/16/23: Tonight, I read my long poem about William Shakespeare, and offer a commentary along the way. It is being published simultaneously at Bryan Helton’s The Basilisk Tree , and once again I give Bryan my infinite thanks. This will be the third long poem of mine that he has published this year to coincide with an episode of Human Voices Wake Us – the other two are on Leonardo...

An episode from 3/12/23: Tonight, I return to new episodes with a handful of poems about the spring. As I mention, living as I do in a city usually inundated with snow, it has been bizarre to have not shoveled the driveway even once. And since the next few weeks of episodes are already planned out, it seemed appropriate to get to spring early, since the earth is doing that already. The poems are:...

An episode from 5/20/24: Tonight, after a long hiatus, we return to Norse myth with the story of Sigurd’s killing of the dragon, Fafnir. Couched in a much longer narrative that contains shape-shifting, war, revenge, brief appearances by Odin and Loki, and finally Sigurd’s ability to hear the language of birds and animals, it is a brilliant and vivid example of storytelling in the twelfth and thirt...

An episode from 11/13/23: Tonight, I talk about our attachment to music as teenagers and adults, and the lessons that loving music—and finding meaning in musicians’ life stories—can teach us. First, I read two passages from Patti Smith’s memoir, ⁠Just Kids⁠ . Those parts on her early life with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, before either of them were well-known, are incredibly moving. Next,...

An episode from 8/12/22: Everybody knows the most famous soliloquy in all of drama, or at least the first line of it: ⁠ "To be or not to be, that is the question," ⁠ from act three of Shakespeare's Hamlet . Tonight, I delve into the speech and try to figure out why it works so well not just as poetry and drama, but why it has leapt beyond literature entirely to become a cultural touchstone. Throug...

An episode from 3/3/24: Tonight, I read from a handful of what I call “visionary” poems. After an introductory section of familiar nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets, I go back to the sources of those, which are found in religious scripture and myth: W. B. Yeats : “ The Second Coming ” T. S. Eliot : sections from The Waste Land and “ East Coker ” Walt Whitman : the first section of “ Crossing...

An episode from 1/2/23: Tonight, I read a handful of voices from those living in Europe and the United States between 1900 and 1914. Rephrased only slightly, nearly all of their concerns (over technology, gender, nationalism, war, eugenics) feel like they could appear in the news or on the street today. Then and now, what is actually going on alongside all the dread? What can we learn from these v...

An episode from 12/7/22: Tonight, we enter into the early years of Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), from his birth in the village of Zundert in the Netherlands, to his time in the Borinage mining region of Belgium. It was there, at the age of twenty-seven—and after years of personal and professional failures—that he hit bottom … and suddenly realized he was an artist. In the first half of the episode...

An episode from 12/9/24: Tonight's episode gathers together all of the readings I've done on this podcast from the poet William Blake (1757-1827). All of these poems can be found online at The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake : Blake & His Animals: One passage from Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and two from Milton. I hope that plucking these three excerpts from his longer wor...