Human Voices Wake Us

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...

An episode from 9/7/22: Tonight I spend an hour talking about Stephen King’s 1983 novel, ⁠ Pet Sematary ⁠ . The anxieties attached to being a parent have rarely book put this memorably, cloaked as it is in the kind foreordained doom we expect from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Does the book also succeed so well because King’s usual strengths—gore and horror, sure, but also sheer entertainment, sentimentali...

An episode from 12/15/22: Tonight, I read eleven essential poems from the American poet William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) . In the same generation as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Williams is perhaps best known for never becoming an expatriate, and instead living most of his life as a family doctor in Rutherford, New Jersey. His poems can be found in The Collected Poems Volume I: 1909-1939 , The C...

An episode from 8/30/22: “Give Me a Tarantula” is a scattering of thoughts on: Old Norse & Old English Edward Hopper Kids five Going on Six Droning Sounds, prehistoric & modern Driving in Ohio Vermeer & Personal Nostalgia Dead Can Dance Primo Levi Don’t forget to support Human Voices Wake Us  on Substack , where you can also get our newsletter and other extras. You can also support the...

An episode from 8/22/22: Tonight, we leave the Celtic myths with an overview of all the episodes devoted to it, The Great Myths #8-18 ( ⁠ which can be listened to here ⁠ ). Then I read one final story, of Cuchulainn’s fight with Ferdiad, from Thomas Kinsella’s translation of the Táin bo Cúailnge. As usual, heroism, the supernatural, war, pathos, friendship, and otherworldliness abound. The various...

An episode from 8/4/22: Tonight, listen to my four-part episode on the atomic bomb, from its development, to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and after. I draw almost entirely from the words of those who were there. The full text of the quotations used here can be found ⁠ in the blog versions of these podcasts ⁠ . The books, documentaries, and poems used to make these episodes are: ⁠ The Ma...

An episode from 7/19/22: Sometimes it’s worth just reveling in the way a great historian tells a story, or details and invention, or brings us face-to-face with a familiar topic. Tonight, I read three sections from Jacques Barzun’s book ⁠ From Dawn to Decadence ⁠ , where we hear about: The expedition of French scholars that followed Napoleon into Egypt (about 24: 18) The invention of the printed b...

An episode from 7/11/22: How do we find our way past the image of Emily Dickinson as a distant, unapproachable, recluse? One way is to read a book like Brenda Wineapple’s ⁠ White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson ⁠ , and tonight I share my favorite passages from it. Dickinson and Higginson were both powerful personalities in their own right, and allowing them t...

An episode from 6/26/22: We are incredibly lucky that, in the novelist Toni Morrison (1931-2019), we had that rare thing: a great writer who also achieved great popularity with the general public. This meant that she was interviewed about her life, her books, and about creativity and the news of the day, hundreds of times. Tonight, I’ve gone through my favorite interviews with her and gathered the...

An episode from 6/19/22: We’re lucky that all things Celtic are embedded so deeply into popular culture. Yet every now and then it’s worth sweeping away the kitsch and the clip art knots and the New Age stuff to ask what a good scholarly summation of Celtic myth—the archeology and the literature—has to say. Mark Williams’s ⁠ Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth ⁠ does more than...

An episode from 6/8/22: Tonight, we hear from two of the greatest twentieth century Irish writers. In the first half of the episode, I read from Dennis O’Driscoll’s interviews with Seamus Heaney . Here, Heaney talks about his methods, his inspiration, his favorite time of day to write. In the second part ( beginning around 35:15 ) I read ⁠ James Joyce’s great short story of disappointed young love...