Poems for the Speed of Life

Roger Robinson is a writer and educator who has taught and performed worldwide and is an experienced workshop leader and lecturer on poetry. He has received commissions from The National Trust, London Open House, the BBC, The National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Theatre Royal Stratford East. He won the 2020 TS Eliot Prize for poetry for his collection A Portable Para...

Kaveh Akbar is an Iranian-American poet. He teaches at a number of colleges and universities, including the University of Iowa, Randolph College Virginia and Warren Wilson College North Carolina. In 2020 he was appointed Poetry Editor of The Nation magazine, a position held in the past by WB Yeats, Anne Sexton and Langston Hughes. He has written and spoken about his challenges with addiction, and...

Matt Goodfellow is an English poet, workshop leader and former primary school teacher. With fellow poets Liz Brownlee and Laura Mucha, he published Being Me: Poems about Feelings, Thoughts and Worries , a 2021 collection of poems illustrated by Victoria Jane Wheeler which aims to offer support and guidance for children, families and teachers specifically in relation to children’s mental health. “A...

"Questions of Travel" is the title poem of Elizabeth Bishop’s 1965 collection about her travels to Brazil with her partner Lota de Macedo Soares. Soares, with whom Bishop had been in a relationship for 16 years, died just two years after the publication of the book, having been hospitalized for mental health problems In New York, where she took an overdose of tranquillizers the day she a...

Pale Blue Dot is a photo of Earth taken in 1990 , from a distance of approximately 6 billion kilometers away, by the Voyager 1 space probe as it was leaving our solar system. Carl Sagan was an American  astronomer ,  planetary scientist ,  cosmologist ,  astrophysicist ,  astrobiologist ,  science communicator , author, and professor. He died in 1996 at the age of 62, just two years after he wrote...

I heard the mathematician and intellectual Eric Weinstein talk about this poem recently, saying it is one of the most often misinterpreted pieces in the history of literature. The simple interpretation, and to Weinstein the wrong one, is that the road taken — “I took the one less travelled by” — is the unconventional path, and that the poem is an encouragement to take unconventional paths, to avoi...

Friendship is a strange thing. Isn’t it sometimes true that friendship is something that we only appreciate when it is over with? When something breaks down, or the death of one party brings it to a close. Michel De Montaigne, the 16th century French essayist, and David Whyte, the present-day poet and spiritual teacher, have written powerful short pieces about what friendship is, what friendship m...

If you’ve ever baked bread, or even just walked through city streets in the early morning, you will absolutely appreciate the overload of sensory pleasure that comes with the preparation of bread. Decades ago, my grandmother, who lived on a hillside in County Donegal in Ireland and the greatest woman I’ve ever known, treated us often to a bread made from treacle that was, and will forever be, as c...

Rewatching some scenes from the film Dead Poets Society recently, I remembered the time of my life when I first came across this poem by Walt Whitman, and a time when I was first introduced to the meaning of poetry itself. That film came out in 1989 and I probably saw it for the first time in the early 1990s, at exactly the same time—give or take a few months—as I was being initiated into the worl...

Depending on where in the world you’re listening from, there’s a good chance you’ll have come across this poem during your schooldays. Certainly, for people in Ireland where I am, and in the UK and America, Walter De La Mare’s The Listeners seems to have found a place on a lot of school curriculums. It’s easy to see why. Much of the poetry that is stuffed down children’s throats is the equivalent...

Ada Limón is the 24th US poet laureate. “Wonder Woman” is a poem included in her 2018 collection The Carrying, published by Milkweed Editions. There is so much in this poem. A verdict from an urgent care doctor, delivered abruptly. The pain and medication that may be directly or indirectly related to that verdict. The perceptions of others. And then, the moment the poem arrives, the poetic moment...

I remember spending time with my grandparents. The world of the 1980s seems so long ago now. People seemed to come and go much more often then. People lingered. People were interested, really interested, in each other. Before we became cogs in a grand machine, we were living and breathing nodes of a universal whole. I could of course be guilty of inflicting nostalgia on you here, but I really feel...

This is a poem about friends—and all their maddening changeability, about the weird experience of watching them find themselves or lose their minds. Even more, though, it’s a poem about friendship itself. In his gorgeous little essay titled “Friendship” , the poet David Whyte writes that “friendship is a moving frontier of understanding, not only of the self and the other but also of a possible an...

When Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, there was a bit of an outcry among the high art set. A folksy American singer-songwriter winning the world’s grandest literary award? I loved it. What is the point of literature but to write things that change the world, or at least change the perception of the world, for people who read it, listen to it, experience it. Literature is not a...

This is a poem about the imperfections, the challenge, the despair but still the hope and beauty of being human. It could be read as a paean to life for the unborn, as a map for everything a human life contains—all its challenges to overcome and temptations to avert—but I think of the unborn in this case as a metaphor. It feels to me like the “before birth” here is in some sense about the life we...

There is no real pattern to the selection of these poems. Or at least, none that is intended. But if you’ve listened to the most recent episode, My Mother’s Body by Marie Howe, you might see the overlapping sensibilities between that one and today’s, "Warming-Down" by the Irish poet (and university lecturer and medical doctor) Aideen Henry. I read this poem in a collection called Slow Br...

Whether this is your first time listening to this show, or your 100th time, allow me to take this opportunity to remind you that all my introductions here, every episode of this podcast, my thoughts are only one perspective. The thing about poetry—and from doing this podcast I’ve started to think about poetry not as a piece of writing on a page or screen, but as a transcendent moment of being, a f...

This is Episode 125 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's piece is by Anaximander. One of the things I’ve realised from the first 100 or more episodes of this podcast is that poetry is not always a written poem. Poetry is a feeling, an experience, a dazzling transcendent moment, a transformation of sorts, and the written poem is an attempt to capture this. Seamus Heaney recounted this essenc...

This is Episode 124 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "Wildflowers", by Mark Roper. Mark Roper is an Irish poet whose work often touches on the vitality of nature, and the connection between the lives we live and the world around us, the world we live them in. There’s a line in the first part of this poem that gets close to the heart of things. How teaching can take pla...

This is Episode 123 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "Prayer" by Faisal Mohyuddin. Faisal Mohyuddin is a writer, artist, and educator. The child of immigrants from Pakistan, he is the author of the acclaimed collection, The Displaced Children of Displaced Children . He is an educator adviser and master practitioner for Narrative 4 , a global not-for-profit which aims t...

This is Episode 122 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "Gypsy", by Bo Burnham. Bo Burnham is an American comedian, songwriter, musician, film-maker and actor. He was one of the first YouTube stars in the late 2000s and has released a series of comedy specials, including Inside, his take on the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns, which was released by Netflix in 2021. This p...

This is Episode 121 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "Bani Adam", by Saadi Shirazi. When we see news reports of Asia, of the Middle East, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, all that we see comes to us through a geopolitical prism. Over many decades, technology and globalism has made us hyper-aware of the geopolitical, but humans, up close, are not geopol...

This is Episode 120 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "Everything is Going to be All Right" by Derek Mahon. Derek Mahon was an Irish poet who died in 2020 at the age of 78. He was—and is—a much-loved poet and this poem is one of his best loved. It is a poem of hope, even in difficult times. It is a poem of hope, maybe especially in difficult times. The sun always rises....

This is Episode 119 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "Everything Falls Away" by Parker J. Palmer. Parker J. Palmer is a teacher, author, and founder and senior partner emeritus of the  Center for Courage & Renewal . His books include  Healing the Heart of Democracy ,  Let Your Life Speak , and  On the Brink of Everything . He has also been a contributor to the wide...

This is Episode _ of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is a section of a longer poem called "Ghetto" by Michael Longley. It has also appeared on its own under the title "Belongings". Michael Longley is an Irish poet who was born in 1939. He has published more than 30 collections in his lifetime, most recently collections of his poems based on the Classics of Homer a...