Human Voices Wake Us

An episode from 5/5/21: Tonight, I read part of John Keats's ⁠ famous ⁠ ⁠ letter ⁠ of October 27, 1818, where he talks about the poet and the poetic character. He asks the questions: how much of a poet's life is given up by their focus on poetry, by their people-watching and -listening, by their lack of social skills? How much of their lives are left over when they become so consumed (whether attr...

An episode from 12/30/20: In this second episode on Mesopotamian myth, we return to the story of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh and Enkidu's destructive adventures lead directly to the latter's death, and here I read Enkidu’s deathbed speech, and the dream he has of the Underworld. The translations I read from are by  ⁠Andrew George⁠  and  N. K. Sandars . Other episodes on Mesopotamian myth  can be found he...

An episode from 7/28/23: Tonight's episode looks in on history, creativity, and mourning from three different angles: In the first part, we hear scattered remarks from Bruce Springsteen over the years, about his low-fi and haunting 1982 album,  ⁠Nebraska⁠ . It is remarkable how the album was made by Springsteen, alone in his bedroom, with a cheap recorder. For someone who bridges and so seamlessly...

An episode from 5/9/22 : Tonight, I continue my five-part series called Notes from the Grid. (A  print version  of NFTG has since been published.) I suggest that we don’t need to be missionaries for the culture and politics and even religion we love, and nor should we assume that anybody else needs the very things that we depend upon—“All things can console.” Alongside this, I talk about the virtu...

An episode from 10/20/21: Tonight, we hear anecdotes from the lives of two very different poets, Walt Whitman and W. B. Yeats. The remarks from Whitman come from the journals he kept while working out the poems that went into the first edition of Leaves of Grass , while the comments from Yeats span the first half of his life. Should we be surprised that both poets experienced extreme doubts not ju...

An episode from 12/19/20: Tonight, I begin perhaps the most important series of episodes on this podcast, a deep-dive into my favorite stories from mythology and religion. All episodes of The Great Myths are here . I begin with the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh. Reading from the translation by Andrew George (and an earlier one, by N. K. Sandars ), I enter the story of Gilgamesh through his friend...

An episode from 10/8/24 : Tonight, four years to the day after starting this podcast, I end it with a reading of Theodore Roethke’s (1908-1963) long poem, “The Rose.” I also reread the poem I shared in the very first episode, Louise Glück’s (1943-2023) “Messengers.” Many thanks to my listeners over the past four years. You can continue find my books, notices about new publications, and daily poems...

An episode from 9/23/24 : Tonight, I read seven poems by the American poet, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961). Over the course of fifty years her work – which includes fiction, memoir and translation – provides an incredible example of how a writer can handle mythology, mysticism, sexuality and autobiography. The poems can be found in Collected Poems 1912-1944 : Sea Iris (1916) The Helmsman (1916...

An episode from 9/11/24 : Tonight, I read six poems by the Welsh poet, R. S. Thomas (1913-2000). A priest in the Anglican church from 1936 until 1978, Thomas wrote some of the most moving poems we have about religious belief, rural life, and the simple feeling some of us have of belonging nowhere. It is said that he barely lost out on the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995. They can all be found i...

An episode from 8/30/24 : Tonight, I read four poems by the American poet Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982). A few years ago, when I began digging through anthologies of American poetry, Rexroth stood out immediately among the usual names from the twentieth century. I can't think of many American poets who have written so beautifully about nature, about being a parent, or about love: Halley’s Comet...

An episode from 8/14/24 : Tonight, I read excerpts from the poet Robert Pinsky’s 1995 interview with  The Paris Review . It is fascinating to see how much of what he says seems timeless and wise (everything on creativity, writing habits, high and low speech, etc.), and those things that seem stuck in the amber of 1995 (the phenomenon of poets teaching at universities). I end the episode with a rea...

An episode from 8/1/24 : Tonight, I read seven poems from Seamus Heaney’s 1974 collection, North . Few poets from the last century took on the reality of violence in the ancient and modern world the way Heaney does in his poems about Iron Age bog bodies , the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and ruminations through mythology and Viking history. I also read four poems from Heaney’s previous books, tha...

An episode from 7/19/24: Tonight, I read the small biographies of nearly two dozen poets, the kind of colorful summaries usually found in poetry anthologies. In many cases, reading a paragraph or two about twenty people is enough to get the sense of a life, and of just how varied the lives of poets (or anybody) can really be. The biographies come from Volume One and Volume Two of the Poem a Day se...

An episode from 7/5/24: Tonight, I devote an hour to wondering how we talk about childhood and memory, how we live with memory and meaning, how we perceive time and recollect the most vivid events of our lives. For me, music is inseparable from all of this, and I play a few songs in this episode: Mother Nature’s Son (The Beatles), High Hopes (Pink Floyd), T. S. Eliot reading from East Coker , the...

An episode from 6/18/24: This is the seventh in a series of readings from biographies of Walt Whitman. I continue with  Paul Zweig's Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet , which focuses on the years preceding the publication of Leaves of Grass . Previous readings from Whitman biographies are here . Tonight, Zweig discusses the nature of Whitman's notebooks and journals up through the 1855...

An episode from 06/06/2024: Tonight, I share two stories from the Shoah, or Holocaust. The first is about the Sonderkommando , those prisoners forced to do the most devastating work in the concentration camps. During a 2015 Fresh Air interview with László Nemes and Géza Röhrig about their 2015 film, Son of Saul , a brief story about an actual Sonderkommando member is told. It remains one of the mo...

An episode from 5/8/24: Tonight, I read fourteen poems from Ted Hughes's 1970 collection, Crow . His books Crow , Moortown Diary , Remains of Elmet , and River contain his best poetry, and they are models for any artist in how handle nature, animal life, myth, and autobiography in their work. The poems that read are: A Childish Prank (the audio of Hughes reading the poem comes from here ) Crow...

An episode from 4/30/21: Here is a collection of all of the recordings I've made of the poetry of Robinson Jeffers from November of 2020 until this month. Jeffers' collected poetry spans three huge volumes, and nearly every individual collection included a narrative poem alongside the shorter lyrics. While Jeffers seemed to have believed that his reputation would rest on these longer poems, none o...

An episode from 4/17/24: Tonight, I read a handful of poems on modern life—whatever “modern” might mean in words spanning the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. In many of the poems we hear the complaint of every age, that “the world has never been so bad.” In others, descriptions of the suburbs are enough, or of car culture, or of how we get our news or even begin to live with stories of atr...

An episode from 4/3/24: Tonight, I interview the poet, novelist, and translator, Amit Majmudar. You can find a full list of his books ⁠ here ⁠ , but we spend most of our time talking about his 2018 translation of the Bhagavad Gita, ⁠ Godsong ⁠ . Along the way, we also get his take on many of the preoccupations of this podcast: how a life devoted to creativity, religion, family, and an awareness of...

An episode from 3/15/24: Tonight, I read eleven poems from Ted Hughes's 1979 collection, Remains of Elmet . His books Crow , Moortown Diary , Remains of Elmet , and River contain his best poetry, and they are models for any artist in how handle nature, animal life, myth, and autobiography in their work. The poems that I read from Remains of Elmet are: Light Falls through Itself Crown Point Pen...

An episode from 2/19/24: Tonight, I read eleven essential poems by the American poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). All of them can be found in his Collected Poems . I also read from his letters , and the essay about Stevens at The Poetry Foundation . The poems are: Anecdote of the Jar The Snow Man Six Significant Landscapes Anecdote of Men by the Thousand How to Live. What to Do Gallant Château Bou...

An episode from 2/7/24: Tonight, I read six poems from Ted Hughes's 1983 collection, River . His books Crow , Moortown Diary , Remains of Elmet , and River contain his best poetry, and they are models for any artist in how handle nature, animal life, myth, and autobiography in their work. The poems that I read from River are: October Salmon (the audio of Hughes reading the poem comes from here...

An episode from 1/31/24: Tonight, as a companion to last episode of poems on being a child, I read a handful of poems about being a parent: “Morning Song,” by Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) “Child Crying Out,” by Louise Glück (1943-2023) “First Snow” read by Louise Glück ( audio from here ) “This Be the Verse,” by Philip Larkin (1922-1985) “Lucinda Matlock,” by Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950) “On My First...

An episode from 1/19/24: Tonight, I read a handful of poems about childhood. How does poetry capture our earliest memories, and how can it express the act of remembering itself, of nostalgia? The poems are: The Pennycandystore Beyond the El, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021) "Other echoes/Inhabit the garden," from Burnt Norton , by T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) Squarings #40 , by Seamus Hea...