Human Voices Wake Us

An episode from 1/10/24: Tonight, I read seven poems from Ted Hughes's collection of farming poems, Moortown Diary , first published in 1978. 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 Moortown Diary are: Rain Bring...

An episode from 12/21/23: What is it like for your country to declare war, and then wait for it, and then live through it? Tonight, I read only a small sampling from Norman Longmate's How We Lived Then: A History of Everyday Life During the Second World War . The book focuses on the home front in Britain and the experiences, mostly, of everyday civilians, the elderly, women, and children: How...

An episode from 12/13/23: There’s a certain lesson I’ve learned from sports figures, poets, and critics, and I was reminded of it while watching Bradley Cooper’s new movie about Leonard Bernstein, Maestro . What does it mean that the attention and opportunities that so many aspiring musicians and conductors dream of, only ever lands on a few people, like Bernstein? And what does it mean that the e...

An episode from 11/15/2023: Only a short episode tonight, where I wonder about the future of this podcast. Using an essay by a fairly prominent author, who writes movingly about the sense of community she had found online since around 1990, I come to realize that I've never had an equivalent experience online. I wonder what this has to do with how this podcast is made and received. The best wa...

An episode from 10/30/23: Tonight, I read a handful of poems about autumn: Laurence Binyon (1869-1943), from “The Burning of the Leaves” Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864), “The leaves are falling; so am I” Louise Glück (1943-2023), “All Hallows” John Keats (1795-1821), from “To Autumn” W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), “The Wild Swans at Coole” Vernon Watkins (1906-1967), from “For a Wine Festival” and from...

An episode from 8/20/21: A collection of all the poems by Seamus Heaney I have read here over the past few months, spanning his entire career. Each of his collections of poetry can of course be purchased on their own, but nearly everything I read here can be found either in his career-spanning 100 Poems , or in the two volumes of his selected poetry: Selected Poems 1966-1987 and Selected Poems 198...

An episode from 9/15/23: Earlier this year, I thought it was possible to supplement this podcast with one weekly (and shorter) additional reading over at Substack ; for many reasons, that ambition proved impossible to maintain. Since an illness has kept me from recording a new episode this week, I thought it worthwhile collecting those six weeks of shorter readings here: 3 Poems from my long work-...

An episode from 9/8/23: In the first part of tonight's episode, I read from Peter Robb's M , a biography of the painter Caravaggio (1571-1610). Through a discussion of two of his paintings which depict decapitation, we can understand how, in Caravaggio's early career, he was able to paint directly from life; but when he went on the run to escape a charge of murder, he depended instead...

An episode from 9/1/23: In the first part of tonight’s episode, I read from Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, & the Search for Identity , where Solomon talks about musical prodigies and the difficulties they face as children and adults. In the second part, I read one of the most powerful pieces of poetry to come out of the ancient world, God’s response to Job, from the Heb...

An episode from 8/25/23: Tonight, I read ten essential poems from one of the great and most public poets of the last seventy years, Seamus Heaney (1939-2013). It isn’t hard to come by details of Heaney’s life, but Stepping Stones (where Heaney is interviewed at length in what amounts to an autobiography), is a good place to start. His poems are collected in 100 Poems , and in the individual collec...

An episode from 8/18/23: What makes a story or prayer or poem last? What circumstances can lead one monarch to order the execution of another? And why, over the past twenty years, was Mary Oliver the best-selling poet in America? Tonight's episode is another three-parter: In the first part, I read from one of the great scholars of the Hebrew Bible in our time, James Kugel. I focus on a passage...

An episode from 8/11/23: Tonight, we look into libraries and learning: In the first part, I read from Jonathan Bate’s biography of Shakespeare, Soul of the Age . Based on Shakespeare’s education and the evidence of the plays, Bate gives a thorough guess as to the essential twenty or thirty books that the Bard might have had on his shelf. In the second part, I read from Serge Sauneron’s Priests of...

An episode from 5/16/22: Tonight, I continue my five-part series called Notes from the Grid . (A print version of NFTG has since been published.) In this part, I ask perhaps the core questions that inform the entire book: why do we assume that "civilization" is itself a civilizing force, when it oftentimes just presents articulate excuses for tribalism and arrogance? And why does our culture seem...

An episode from 8/4/23: Tonight, we hear from cities under siege: In the first part, I read from the Roman historian Livy’s account of the sack of Rome by the Gauls in 387 BCE. The translation is by T. J. Luce . In the second part, I read from the diary of the French art historian Agnès Humbert , who lived in Paris during the first months of the German occupation in World War Two, and who was invo...

An episode from 7/14/23: Tonight, I read from two great writers on the history of the sea. The first is an excerpt from Rachel Carson's (1907-1964) ⁠ The Sea Around Us ⁠ , on the deep history of the sea, and the beginnings of all life within it. Next is an excerpt from archaeologist Barry Cunliffe's ⁠ Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and Its Peoples ⁠ , where he illustrates all the strategie...

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...