Human Voices Wake Us

An episode from 5/25/22: Tonight, I conclude with the last in a five-part series called Notes from the Grid . (A ⁠print version⁠ of NFTG has since been published.) The first section, "Simple Awareness," is followed by "The Uncomfortable, Unsolvable Middle" (begins at 20:30) .The series concludes with "All Its Ways" (starts at 48:40) Taken together, these last three se...

An episode from 5/2/22: Tonight, I continue my five-part series called Notes from the Grid . (A print version of NFTG has since been published.) It asks why we grant so much authority and influence to reviewers and criticism—is it because so few of us will ever create a lasting work of art, but all of us find it easy to give our opinions on everything? In the second half of the episode (beginning...

An episode from 4/14/22: “Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?” Walt Whitman asks. “I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.” Long after so many aspects of his poems have ceased to shock us, Whitman’s attitude towards death remains perhaps the most challenging in all of his poetry. Tonight, I read from my favorite of those poems: the youthful bits from “Song of...

An episode from 4/9/22: Is Whitman our great poet of love, or of longing? Is there a difference? In this episode, I share my favorite of his love poems, many of which are expressed as unfulfilled longing. They can all be found in ⁠ The Selected Short Poems of Walt Whitman ⁠ , and ⁠ The Selected Long Poems of Walt Whitman ⁠ : Selections from “Song of Myself” To You Once I Pass’d through a Populous...

An episode from 4/6/22: Another two-part episode. In the first, we hear from Toni Morrison about the use of anger in writing novels; from the poet Richard Wilbur on the suicide of fellow-poet John Berryman, and the perils of having few interests outside of poetry. Other remarks from Berryman himself, and T. S. Eliot, touch on the general perils of the creative life. In the second part (starting ar...

An episode from 3/29/22: Another two-part episode. The first is a reading of five poems, and my favorites from this batch are Robert Lowell’s “Bobby Delano,” an unforgettable poem about adolescence, and Anne Finch’s “A Nocturnal Reverie,” whose blank verse meditation looks ahead to Wordsworth like few other poems. John Clare’s “An Invite to Eternity,” Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s “A Summer Evening’s M...

An episode from 3/25/22: Why have I always assumed that lovers of poetry want to talk to other people about it? In the first part of this episode, I continue a discussion on Loneliness that began last year , and remind myself that there are a million ways to live with poetry and art. In the second part, I read from Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Shakespeare , where the Bard’s sonnets and love life a...

An episode from 3/22/22 : One of my goals for The Great Myths has been to show how strange, even off-putting, the stories that we know and revere really are. I don’t know of a better example of this than the largest literary text surviving from twelfth-century Ireland, The Tales of the Elders of Ireland ( ⁠ Acallam na Senórach ⁠ ). Using the wanderings of Saint Patrick throughout Ireland as the fr...

An episode from 3/14/22: What happened during ⁠ Jane Goodall’s famous appearance in Gary Larson’s The Far Side ⁠ in 1987, and what can it teach us about the pedestal we place our idols on? What did a child’s introduction to The Beatles’ “Revolution 9” teach me about the power of preconceptions? This grab-bag episode, which includes bits from ⁠ Leon Wieseltier’s 1996 book, Kaddish ⁠ , touches on al...

An episode from 3/8/22: How would you talk about your job, if someone came around asking? Tonight, we hear from Beverly Valentine, a Funeral Home Director, and Jason Groth, a Telemarketer. They were interviewed more than twenty years ago for the 2000 book ⁠ Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs ⁠, and I have yet to find a boring interview in the entire book. The book is clearly meant as an update t...

An episode from 3/2/22: At a listener’s request, the first part of this episode is devoted to the earliest bookstores I remember, from childhood through adolescence. The Friday night in high school that I spent, buying a copy of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, remains an especially formative experience. The second part of this episode takes up the creation and immediate fame of Pablo Picasso’s Guer...

An episode from 2/25/22: How important is it for an author to be associated with a certain place—Seamus Heaney and Ireland, Dickens and London, Robert Frost and New England? How does a young mother, stuck at home with her kids, decide to write short stories? What is the difference between writing fiction and poetry—between sitting down to revise the same story every day, and potentially being able...

An episode from 2/21/22: Most people will tell you that jealousy is a destructive mindset to get lost in, but tonight I wonder under what circumstances it’s justified. Starting from a simple observation—that Joan Didion’s memoir about the death of her husband would have probably gone unpublished or unnoticed without her name on the cover—I ask how many stories we aren’t hearing and will never hear...

An episode from 2/14/22: One way that storytellers have always illustrated the radical nature of creativity has been to give an unusual talent to children, and set them loose in the adult world. Everything from superhero movies to The Shining has done this, and it’s not surprising to find it in the Welsh tale of ⁠ Taliesin . Tonight, we see how this child became a great poet and seer, while also u...

An episode from 2/4/22: Here are five more poems going back to 1600 or so. Louise Bogan realizes mysticism isn’t it, anymore than hedonism; Elizabeth Barret Browning continues to “to shoot/My soul's full meaning into future years”; William Blake is his visionary self; and Anne Bradstreet and Henry Vaughan, both born in the early seventeenth century, sound positively modern, writing a poem abou...

An episode from 2/4/22: Here are five more poems going back to 1600 or so. Eavan Boland talks parenting and childhood; Wordsworth calls on Milton, and Milton retells our oldest story; Gerard Manley Hopkins writes out of a solitude few ever listened to, in his own life; and Philip Sidney reminds us why our own lives are worthy of poetry. Eavan Boland, “The Making of An Irish Goddess” ⁠ ⁠ Gerard Man...

An episode from 4/19/22: From the opening line of the Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman announced that his great theme was unity: “I celebrate myself,/And what I assume you shall assume,/For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” As the last two episodes show, his best poems on both love and death rise up out of this central belief in humanity’s unity with nature and the animal world, and...

An episode from 1/24/22: How did the evolutionary ability to stand on two feet, freeing our hands for all kinds of practical and creative activities, eventually lead to the development of language? Was the slow and painstaking path that led to what we call creativity, language, art, and religion—was it inevitable? And is it unfortunate what we’ve done with these gifts today? Tonight, I read a hand...

An episode from 1/21/22: How does a great poet come into the world? What is their childhood like, their education? What was the first poetry they knew, and when did they realize they wanted to write poetry themselves? Tonight, we hear the Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s answers to these questions. As usual, these remarks come from Dennis O’Driscoll’s book-length collection of interviews with Heaney, ⁠...

An episode from 1/18/22: Our anthology series presents a handful of poems from the past five centuries. How much or how little has our language changed since Roy Fisher remembered the London Blitz, Coleridge drew the greatest lesson he ever did from nature, and Emily Brontë experienced a haunting evening? A reading of five poems: The Entertainment of War , by Roy Fisher (1930-2017) Danse Russe , b...

An episode from 1/15/22: Tonight we read from perhaps the great love story from the Middle Ages, since without it there would be no romance of Tristan and Isolde. How the Irish story of Gráinne, a young woman who casts a magic spell and puts her wedding party to sleep (she has just been married to a much older man) so that she can run off with a man named Diarmuid instead--how this tale grew and c...

An episode from 1/4/22: What can we learn from the Roman author Seneca's thoughts on education, speaking to us from the middle of the first century? And what can we glean from Alexis De Tocqueville's (to me) amazingly short-sighted thoughts on the rich and the poor, from only two hundred years ago? The excerpts come from Seneca's Letters to a Stoic , AD 64; and from Alexis De Tocquevil...

What can we say when we're told that poetry no longer matters, especially when it's another poet who says it? The first eleven minutes of this episode are my best defense for what poetry is and can be, while the rest offers and handful of poems which suggest that poetry is as powerful as it ever was. My answer at least would be: live with and become enthralled with the poetry that has last...

An episode from 12/25/21: Tonight, we hear five poems from four centuries: Amy Lowell on unrequited love, Thomas Hardy bringing in the twentieth century, William Cower's winter evening, John Donne trying to defuse the power of death, and Christopher Marlowe trying to get the attention of that shepherdess: ⁠ “New Heavens for Old,” ⁠ by Amy Lowell (1874-1925) ⁠ “The Darkling Thrush,” ⁠ by Thomas...

An episode from 12/21/21: Tonight, I read five poems from Ted Hughes’s last book, Birthday Letters (1998). This is the book where Hughes finally addressed his relationship to Sylvia Plath in verse, nearly forty years after her suicide. In my introduction to the poems, I also talk about the strangeness, both of audiences demanding such a confession over a private matter, and the weight that Hughes...