Poems for the Speed of Life

Dale Wimbrow was an American music composer, radio artist and songwriter, but who among us really knows for what we’ll be remembered for? (A quick aside to point you for a moment to Episode 81, "In a Restaurant" by Stephen Santus , which has a playful little take on the tiny things we might be remembered for.) Wimbrow, who died in 1954 at the age of 58, wrote this piece for The American...

WB Yeats asked in his poem "Among School Children", how can we know the dancer from the dance? This fusion — the artist with the art — presents us with fascinating and troubling questions. Is the artist an artist solely? Where does humanity enter and exit? In what way is the art itself more important than love and kindness, even if the love and kindness might in some way threaten the art...

Today’s poem is not dissimilar in tone or content to the piece included in Episode 159 recently. That piece, by Mary Schmich, and now popularly known as “Wear Sunscreen” , was a sort of commencement address, a speech delivered to college graduates as they prepare to enter the “real world” and find their way. This poem by Max Ehrmann also has that air. Max Ehrmann was an American writer and poet wh...

Poetry, says Wendy Morton, is the shortest distance between two hearts. The first time I read that quote, I read it as the shortest dance between two hearts, and I like that too. Wendy Morton is a Canadian writer and poet. The blurb of her memoir, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: Taking Poetry Public Across Canada, says that she has “probably done more to bring poetry and publicity together...

As I record this, in September, the year has swayed totally from summer to autumn. A week ago we had a heatwave, the mercury rose past 30 degrees Celsius and everyone went to work in shorts. Today, the branches are swaying in the wind, the rain is heavy, the temperatures have dropped and the evenings are closing in. This poem by Seamus Heaney is set in late August, at that moment between the passa...

Patricia Williams is an American poet and retired former professor in design at the University of Wisconsin. She started to write poetry in 2013, believing that (in the words on her LinkedIn page): “Art, design, music and the literary arts are natural partners. All creatively examine life and living.” “A creative examination of life and living” could be the tagline for this podcast. Williams has p...

Emily Dickinson was an American poet, who lived in Amherst, Massachusetts between 1830 and 1886. She wrote more than 1800 poems in her lifetime but just 10 of those were published while she was still alive. She was reclusive and considered eccentric, but in many ways she was far from withdrawn — she maintained regular written correspondence with at least a hundred people during her life. Her poems...

I have memories of my grandparents, who seemed to give everything. They didn’t have money to give, but giving was not about money. Giving was everything else. It was the open door, kettle on and a packet of biscuits always stowed away, ready and waiting for a visitor. That way of being seems to be rare nowadays. As people went from having nothing to having something, they suddenly had something to...

Mary Schmich (”Schmeek”) is a retired American journalist and columnist, who wrote for the Chicago Tribune for most of her career. She won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2012, for, the Pulitzer prize ran, “her wide range of down-to-earth columns that reflect the character and capture the culture of her famed city.” This is her most famous piece, a column that appeared on the first of June 1997...

I found this poem in a little anthology called Poetry for a Lifetime, selected and annotated by Samuel Norfleet Etheredge in 1999. Poetry for a Lifetime is available on that treasure trove of the Internet, archive.org, where you can borrow a PDF for an hour. I dipped in and I found this poem. Samuel Norfleet Etheredge was a World War II veteran, and heart surgeon, and lifelong advocate for poetry...

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a 19th century American poet and educator. Wikipedia tells me he was the first American to complete a full translation of Dante's Divine Comedy and he was one of the so-called Fireside Poets of New England, a hugely popular set of 19th century poets who became the first Americans to really rival English poets in popularity. That status — the poet of the common ma...

I am a great believer in personal development. In fact, this podcast, this project, is a marriage of two things that interest me greatly — the yearning that seems to be innate in the human mind and human heart to improve ourselves, to develop our skills and knowledge, to broaden our mind and our horizons, and the power of literature to move us and transcend us. Great literature — novels, poetry, p...

This "poem" is a monologue from the end of one of the most astonishing songs I have ever heard. I first heard of Ren when a friend Whatsapp’ed me eight or nine months ago encouraging me to check him out. Of course, in our attention-deficit age, I said I would and then forgot. Alan messaged me again two or three months later: "Did you check out Ren?" I remembered that I had not...

Bipolar disorder, formerly known as manic depression, has been a recognised mental health disorder since the publication of the DSM-3 (The Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders) in 1980. In no way to diminish the reality of those who suffer from bipolar, human beings have always found themselves beset by extremes of emotion and experience. Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī most commonly k...

There’s a famous book by David Graeber called Bullshit Jobs. It outlines the way the corporate world has evolved in recent decades, with the growth of massive companies of tens of thousands of staff, most of them fulfilling roles that are painfully detached from meaning. Work is a strange thing. There’s a great short story by the writer Denis Johnson, called “Work”. It’s about two guys who have be...

Zhuangzhu was a Chinese philosopher who lived in or around the 4th Century BC. Virtually nothing is known about his life, but he is held to have written the text that bears his name, the Zhuangzi, which is one of the primary foundational texts of the Chinese set of philosophies, traditions and religions known as Taoism. Taoism emphasizes living in harmony with the "Tao", the way or path...

This poem has been on my to-read list for this podcast for a while. I kept passing it over. Why? Eventually I realised that for some reason it scared me. What right did I, a white Irishman, have to read this poem by a flag-bearer of black American feminism? Then I realised, that’s no reason not to read it here. In fact, isn’t it all the more reason to read it here? Yes, it seems like cultural appr...

⁠You can read the text 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 on ⁠Twitter here⁠ , ⁠Instagram here⁠ and ⁠Facebook here⁠ . Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you...

Hello and welcome back. Welcome to September! The every-weekday podcast has been on a break for the summer months, when I’ve been publishing an occasional series of three poems on a theme. But it’s September now, and here we go! If this is your first time here, you’re very welcome. My name is Shane Breslin and words matter to me. I’m a writer, and my day to day work is with businesses who want to...

Welcome to another episode in the summer series of Poems for the Speed of Life. My name is Shane Breslin and if this is your first time here, two quick things. First, you’re welcome. In the first eight months of this podcast, since Episode 1 back in December 2022, this podcast has had listeners in 85 countries around the world. This is staggering to me. It’s clear that people all over the world fi...

Hello and welcome to another episode in the summer series of Poems for the Speed of Life. If this is your first time listening to the show, welcome. My name is Shane Breslin and I really hope this podcast meets and exceeds your expectations. Poems for the Speed of Life is, for most of the year, a Monday to Friday podcast, where I introduce and read one poem that, I think, contains some meaning and...

Welcome to this episode of the summer series. Today’s episode includes three poems about nature, and more specifically, about how our engagement with the natural world can make the world of people maybe more bearable, certainly more beautiful. The three poems are: The Peace of Wild Things, by Wendell Berry Hideout, by Desmond Egan Blessings, by Francis Harvey. Each of them, in their own unique way...

Welcome to the second episode of the Summer 2023 series of Poems for the Speed of Life, where each episode brings you three poems connected by some thread or theme. The theme for this episode is male experiences. The poems are: Tent, by Pat Boran Digging, by Seamus Heaney Praise of a Man, by Norman MacCaig Please search in the archives to listen to the original episodes, each of which contains an...

Welcome to the first episode of the Summer 2023 series of Poems for the Speed of Life, where each episode brings you three poems connected by some thread or theme. The theme for this episode is ageing. The poems are: Japanese Maple, by Clive James Driving Dad to the Dog Museum, by Gailmarie Pahmeier Forgetfulness, by Billy Collins Please search in the archives to listen to the original episodes, e...

Welcome to the final episode of the current series of Poems for the Speed of Life. My name is Shane Breslin, and I live in the Irish countryside, where I’ve spent most of my life. When I stepped out on this podcast journey December 2022, I had no real idea what I was doing, or why. I just felt compelled to read more poetry, to read it aloud and to share it with whoever might seek it out or stumble...