Human Voices Wake Us

An episode from 12/18/21: Tonight, I read five poems going back four hundred years. Edgar Lee Masters channels the unsung poet and victim of horrendous violence, Tennyson takes a crack at Odysseus, Mary Robinson describes the morning, Henry Wotton gets religious, and Walter Raleigh wonders aloud about truth and lies. As a bonus, I read a poem of mine about Raleigh as well, "The Historian.&quo...

An episode from 12/7/21: Tonight, I read eleven short poems from a handful of books that Ted Hughes published during the 1970s. As I talk about in the introduction, this decade saw the writing and publication of Hughes's most powerful books: Crow , Moortown Diary , Remains of Elmet , and River (which themselves did not find their final form until the 1990s). In between these books, Hughes publ...

An episode from 12/5/21: Tonight, I read from chapter six of Peter Ackroyd’s history of early seventeenth-century England, ⁠ Civil War (or Rebellion ⁠ , as the book has been retitled in its America). As usual, few writers are as ablet as Ackroyd to bring the past to life, and he uses two texts to paint a brief picture of London at the time: Thomas Dekker’s ⁠ The Seven Deadly Sins of London ⁠ (1607...

An episode from 11/19/21 , where I read about two disasters separated by nearly two thousand years: the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in the year 79, and the earthquake that destroyed so much of San Francisco in 1906. My sources are a letter from Pliny the younger ( ⁠ read it here ⁠ ), where he describes Vesuvius and Pompeii, while an article by Jack London ( ⁠ read it here ⁠ ) takes us to San Francisc...

An episode from 11/16/21: Tonight, I read from a few books on Pablo Picasso, where he talks about how the power behind his own paintings, and his huge output, remained a mystery for him as much as anyone else. The lasting nature of his work seems to be less about how consciously he went about it, than how intuitively he was able to deal with an impulse he barely understood himself. The books I rea...

An episode from 11/13/21: Tonight, I read eight poems from Louise Glück's 1992 collection, The Wild Iris. Following these are an episode from March, 2021, of six poems from her 1990 book, Ararat . A good barometer for determining any poet's best work is "the poems nobody else could have written," and indeed there is nothing else like these two books that I know of in English. Amo...

An episode from 11/4/21: Tonight, I read four of William Wordsworth's greatest poems. On some days, it's only rolling along with Wordsworth's rhymed or unrhymed reminiscences or descriptions of nature, that teaches again what poetry is about, what poetry can do: Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood London (1802): "Milton! thou should'st be livi...

An episode from 11/2/21: Tonight, I read a letter written by the British poet Ted Hughes, to a friend and critic, Al Alvarez, in November of 1971. At the time, Alvarez was publishing an intimate (and to Hughes's mind, exploitative) account of the 1963 suicide of Hughes's wife, the poet Sylvia Plath. The letter can be found in The Letters of Ted Hughes , pages 321-326. I use this letter as...

An episode from 10/30/21: In this seventh episode on Celtic mythology, I review one of the greatest surviving stories in the tradition, Togail Bruidne Dá Derga , or The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel . Since it is also fairly long, I only share two small sections from the story itself: a piece from the beginning, and from the story's conclusion. You can read more about it here , or in th...

An episode from 10/24/21: Tonight, I read from the letters of Ted Hughes, on how he came to discover a love for poetry, the natural world, as well as folklore and mythology, and how all three became intertwined and essential to his life. All of these can be found in Letters of Ted Hughes . Don’t forget to support Human Voices Wake Us on Substack , where you can also get our newsletter and other ex...

An episode from 10/17/21: The death Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) came after a long series of illnesses. By then, friends and admirers and hangers-on sought out the composer in his last days. Tonight, I read Jan Swafford's account of Beethoven's death in his incredible biography,  Beethoven: Anguish & Triumph . Swafford’s book also includes one of the most moving details from any bi...

An episode from 10/14/21: What does culture and education mean when literacy, let alone the owning of books, is so rare? Tonight, I read two chapters from Peter Ackroyd's book, ⁠ Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination ⁠ . The first covers education in eighth-century England, and specifically the life of the Venerable Bede. The second is a brief look into Anglo-Saxon/Old English poetry,...

An episode from 10/11/21: Tonight, a small episode where I talk about working, and about empathy and sympathy for those who live doing work they do not love, and which they derive little meaning from. Perhaps it describes you, or someone you know. 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 podcast by o...

An episode from 10/1/21: A reading from one of my favorite books, Studs Terkel's Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do . Here, Terkel interviews a waitress named Dolores Dante. 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 podcast by ordering any of my bo...

An episode from 9/28/21: Tonight, I read a poem of mine called "Unfinished Michelangelo." The entire poem takes up Michelangelo's many unfinished works, but it begins, specifically, talking about his unfinished slave sculptures . You can read the poem here . I introduce the poem by mentioning how, very often poets and writers (and sculptors and painters) don't choose their subjec...

An episode from 9/27/21: In what may be my favorite episode of this podcast, I talk about loneliness: is it really so bad, and is easy sociability really so much better? I also look at where my own experience of loneliness began, as a four year-old who suddenly found himself with hearing problems, and how it has led to my own adult love for interviews, anecdotes on nearly any subject, autobiograph...

An episode from 9/21/21: Tonight I read Walt Whitman's poem, "Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun," first published in the 1865 collection Drum Taps . Among Whitman's shorter poems, there is no better expression of the tension he felt between nature and urban life. You can read the poem here or find it in Walt Whitman: Selected Short Poems . Don’t forget to support Human Voices Wake...

An episode from 9/19/21: Are some topics not fit for poetry and art? Does the intentional crafting of atrocity and genocide into stanzas, scenes, rhymes, drama, or just DVD covers or posters, exploit and cheapen history? Or is this simply the way stories are told and passed down? Tonight, I talk about this in relation to two poems of mine about the Holocaust, "A Ploughed Field" and &quot...

An episode from 9/13/21: Tonight, I read a small section of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself." For those who want to find it for themselves, it later ends up as part of section #33. I can't think of a more life-affirming passage in Whitman's or anybody else's poetry, than this rolling, glorious, catalogue. The best place to find Whitman's poetry and other writing online...

An episode from 9/12/21: Tonight, I gather together all of the poems I've recorded from my 2018 book of poems from prehistory, Bone Antler Stone . You can buy the book here , and read reviews and essays about the book here . The poems are: The Sun Sets into the Sea Poems from traveling through Orkney Pytheas in the Shetlands The Wanderer (Flight to Orkney) Walking Birsay to Swannay The Brough...

An episode from 9/10/21: In this sixth episode on Celtic mythology, I read the famous story of the wanderings of Oisin/Oisín in the Irish Otherworld, the Tir na nÓg. As usual, I make use of from James MacKillop's Oxford Dictionary of Celtic Mythology . The two versions of the story I read from can be found in James MacKillop's Myths & Legends of the Celts and Joseph Campbell's The...

An episode from 9/7/21: Tonight, I read from an interview conducted by the Federal Writer's Project, with a man working the late shift at an all-night diner in Vermont. The excerpt comes from the Winter 2019 issue of Lapham's Quarterly , but a larger collection of WPA interviews can be found in the 2004 book, Men Against Granite . Don’t forget to support Human Voices Wake Us on Substack ,...

An episode from 9/4/21: In this fifth episode on Celtic mythology, I read the famous "pillow talk" between Queen Medb and King Ailill of Connacht. Their dispute over who owns more riches, land, and animals leads to the start of the famous Táin Bó Cúailnge/Cattle Raid of Cooley. The text of the story is taken from Thomas Kinsella's translation of The Táin . I also read a passage about...

An episode from 9/2/21: A reading of Harry Kessler's diary from July 10, 1895, visiting the French poet, Paul Verlaine. From the English translation by Laird Easton, published as Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1880-1918 . 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 podcast...

An episode from 8/27/21: In this fourth episode on Celtic mythology , I read the story of how the great Irish hero, Cúchulainn, got his name by replacing a guard dog at the home of the smith, Culann. In one brief episode, there are so many strands: the early deeds of a hero, the precocious child who outdoes the adults, the Irish system of fosterage, and the mythical link between characters and ani...