Poems for the Speed of Life

Chantal House is a poet whose recent chapbook is titled "Reaching for the Sun". The mission behind her work is that everyone should be a poet, and everyone could have poetry as part of their daily cycle. That mission aligns a lot with the mission of this podcast, to bring one poem, and some of its power, to every day. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠You can read the definition of "Does every generati...

Annie Finch has been publishing and editing books of poetry and poetics for three decades. Her most recent book is Earth Days: Poems, Chants, and Spellsin Five Directions (Nirala Publications, 2023). Samhain is the ancient Irish and pagan festival of the autumn, the Celtic new year and the time when the spirits moved between worlds. It is the ancestor of the modern day Halloween. There is great my...

John Koenig's decade-plus-long project, "The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows", earned a fitting celebration in 2021 when the book based upon it became a New York Times Bestseller. Koenig set out to fill the gaps in our language of emotion, creating words such as kenopsia, dès vu and énouement. One of the definitions that went viral in the early days of the project, and which continued...

David Gate is an English poet based in the United States. Per his own website , his work centers around care for the individual (heart, mind, body & soul) and the nurture of community (culture, the earth & environment, the dignity of others and spiritual communities). Those values vibe strongly with the ethos of this podcast. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠You can read "Friendship is what will save us&...

Raymond Carver was an American writer and poet who died in 1988. You can find an earlier poem by Carver, "Happiness", in Episode 5 of this podcast. This poem is the final poem in Carver's final collection, A New Path to the Waterfall . Please share your thoughts by ⁠⁠joining the Poems for the Speed of Life Substack community here⁠⁠ . ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠You can read "Late Fragment"...

Vaclav Havel was a Czech writer, dissident and statesman, who was President of Czechoslovakia and later of the new Czech Republic. This short piece is an essay on the meaning and importance of hope, especially in difficult times. Please share your thoughts by ⁠⁠joining the Poems for the Speed of Life Substack community here⁠⁠ . ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠You can read "Hope" here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ *** For a d...

Gwen Harwood was an Australian poet. In the male-dominated publishing world of the mid-20th century, she had a difficult time getting published, and resorted to submitting work under a range of male pseudonyms. This poem is an insight into her complex and fraught relationship with womanhood, with motherhood. Please share your thoughts by ⁠joining the Poems for the Speed of Life Substack community...

Some poems are straightforward to break down into paragraphs, sentences and clauses, to better extract their meaning. This one is a little more difficult. There are three sentences here, but the last of them, when you see the poem laid out on page or screen, spans six stanzas, and takes us to several places in both the physical world and the interior world. Who is the true love? Is it the love and...

A gorgeous little poem that takes Charles Darwin and his reputed love of stories as its starting point. This symbol - one of the fathers of modern science, upholding the value of story as something vital, alongside the scientific fact of his work - presents questions about what truth is. And asks us to consider whether truth is something more than just a collection of facts. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠You can read...

What is the role of England in this poem? Is "The Soldier" a nationalist polemic, glorifying war? Or can we read the ideal, idyllic England of Rupert Brooke as a symbol of something else? ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠You can read "The Soldier" here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ *** For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life...

Breda Wall Ryan is Irish writer and poet. She has published ⁠two collections of poetry⁠ , In a Hare’s Eye and Raven Mothers . Her poems are full of powerful imagery, and she often brings the lives of women into sharp focus. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠You can read "Tremolo" on her website here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ *** For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100,...

Hugo Dewar was an English poet and communist of the 20th century. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠You can read "Barcelona" here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ *** For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠click here to listen on Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ . If you’re on social media, you can follow o...

Nanao Sakaki was a Japanese poet and wanderer, who has been an inspiration to poets, artists and musicians around the world for the past half century. In his foreword to Sakaki's collection, How to Life on Planet Earth , his fellow poet Gary Snyder (whose work you can hear in Episode 24 and Episode 116 of this podcast) wrote that he was known as "a uniquely free and bold-spirited wanderer...

Douglas Dunn is a Scottish poet, who has been publishing collections for more than 50 years. This poem, "France", was part of a collection of poems written following the death of his wife, Lesley Balfour Wallace, in 1981. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠You can read the poem here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ *** For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the...

Bertolt Brecht was a Germany playwright and poet of the first half of the 20th century. He was influenced by and part of the modernist movement which also included the writer James Joyce, the filmmaker Sergey Eisenstein and the artists Pablo Picasso, all of them trying to make sense of a world of rapidly encroaching technology, politics and violence. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠You can read the poem here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ *** For a...

Many listeners will be familiar with Mary Oliver. This is the fourth Mary Oliver poem to feature on this podcast. You can find Snowy Night in Episode 2, The Journey in Ep. 34 and Wild Geese in Episode 143. This one returns to some gorgeous familiar ground with Mary Oliver — the tension between the sweetness and slowness of the natural world, and the restlessness of human ambition. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠You can rea...

Sharon Olds is an American poet. She has been publishing poetry for more than 40 years, most recently Balladz, published in 2023. She has written a lot about men. One of her most famous poems is titled "Ode to the Penis", and in another, "My Son the Man", she write about how she must “get over my fear of men now my son is going to be one”. This poem is about the terminal diagno...

Note: This episode is in a new format. I read the poem twice through and then talk a little about why it's on the podcast and what it might be saying. If you're listening on Spotify, please find the Interact question that reads "What did you think of this episode?" and let me know what you think of this experimental format! This is a poem that's often attributed to Charlie Ch...

Note: This episode is a slightly different format than usual. It's a small experiment to see how it goes down with listeners, where I read the poem twice through and then ad-lib a little about why it's on the podcast and what it might be saying. If you're listening on Spotify, please find the Interact question that reads "What did you think of this episode?" and let me know w...

Note: This episode is a slightly different format than usual. It's a small experiment to see how it goes down with listeners, where I read the poem twice through and then ad-lib a little about why it's on the podcast and what it might be saying. If you're listening on Spotify, please find the Interact question that reads "What did you think of this episode?" and let me know w...

Note: This episode is a slightly different format than usual. It's a small experiment to see how it goes down with listeners, where I read the poem twice through and then ad-lib a little about why it's on the podcast and what it might be saying. If you're listening on Spotify, please find the Interact question that reads "What did you think of this episode?" and let me know w...

Note: This episode is a slightly different format than usual. It's a small experiment to see how it goes down with listeners, where I read the poem twice through and then ad-lib a little about why it's on the podcast and what it might be saying. If you're listening on Spotify, please find the Interact question that reads "What did you think of this episode?" and let me know what you think of this...

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an eminent American writer and philosopher of the 19th century. He is also heralded as the forefather of Transcendentalism, a literary, philosophical, religious, and political movement of that century. Emerson and his fellow Transcendentalists criticised the society of which they were a part, calling to task its unthinking conformity. They urged that each person find, in Em...

Charles Bukowski was a German-born American poet who died in 1994 at the age of 73. His poems are raw, written in the spoken language of ordinary people, and opening up their hearts and their nerves to the possibilities of pain that are ever-present in the everyday. Lurking beneath that pain, though, there is always with Bukowski some slight sense of humour — the humour to be found in bleakness an...

Yehuda Amichai was an Israeli poet who died in the year 2000 at the age of 76. His lifetime showed him all sides of persecution and despair, war and violence. Born in Germany in the 1920s, his Jewish family fled in the 1930s to Palestine and later Israel. A teacher, he served in the Israeli forces in the Sinai War in 1956 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973. With these experiences, and his own sensibil...