Poems for the Speed of Life

This is Episode 92 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "Driving Dad to The Dog Museum" by Gailmarie Pahmeier. Gailmarie Pahmeier is the Poet Laureate of the state of Nevada in the US. She taught creative writing and contemporary literature at the University of Nevada, Reno, for thirty-seven years. She has published three collections of poetry and a number of chapbooks. Th...

This is Episode 91 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "Neither Now Nor Never" by Kaveh Akbar. Kaveh Akbar is an Iranian-American poet. Born in Tehran, he has lived in the US since he was two years old. Still just 34, he teaches at a number of colleges and universities, including the University of Iowa, Randolph College Virginia and Warren Wilson College North Carolina. S...

This is Episode 90 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "I love the dark hours of my being" by Rainer Maria Rilke. Rainer Maria Rilke was a poet who came from the old Austro-Hungarian empire which existed until the end of World War I. This is the second piece by Rilke to feature in this podcast. You can find "Go to the Limits of Your Longing" in Episode 41 . One...

This is Episode 89 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "Something wonderful has happened it is called you" by Emily Critchley. Emily Critchley is a Greek-born English poet, writer, editor and academic. She is the author of Ten Thousand Things and editor of Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK and co-editor of #MeToo,...

This is Episode 88 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "The Mayo Tao" by Derek Mahon Derek Mahon was an Irish poet who died in the autumn of 2020 at the age of 78. One of the things I noticed when I picked up the New Selected Poems published by Faber and Faber was how lovely the poems look on the page. They are neat, tidy, structured, but they’re not afraid to go to place...

This is Episode 87 of Poems for the Speed of Life. It is the first time Philip Larkin has featured on this podcast but it's unlikely to be the last. Larkin was a 20th century English poet, writer and career librarian. He is raw, rambunctious, rude, sometimes lewd. This poem, "Money", is Larkin’s reflection on the role of cash and consumerism in life. It was first published in 1973 an...

This is Episode 86 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem "Funeral Prayer" by Don Paterson. Don Paterson is a Scottish poet, writer and jazz guitarist. He was the poetry editor for London publishers Picador for over 25 years and teaches in the school of English at the University of St Andrews. He was written or edited more than 15 collections and anthologies, including 40 Sonne...

This is Episode 85 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is a passage from "An Essay on Criticism" by Alexander Pope. Alexander Pope was an English poet of the 18th century. When he was 12 he contracted an illness — most probably a form of tuberculosis — which left him in poor health for the rest of his life. He was a lifelong Catholic at a time when that meant being barred fr...

This is Episode 84 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "Detail" by Eamon Grennan. Eamon Grennan is an Irish poet who has lived and worked in the USA for more than half a century. He taught English at Vassar University in Poughkeepsie, New York and has published 25 collections of poetry over the past 40 years. Billy Collins, the former US Poet Laureate — whose poem "F...

This is Episode 83 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "Houston, 1965" by Loren Broaddus. Loren Broaddus is an American teacher, poet and lifelong baseball fan. His debut collection Joe DiMaggio Moves Like Liquid Light was published in 2019. If you celebrate Easter, this weekend will be a time of rebirth, redemption, change. This poem is not an Easter poem, but it is a po...

This is Episode 82 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "The East-West Border" by Jaan Kaplinski. Jaan Kaplinski was a linguist, anthropologist, researcher of languages and one of Estonia’s leading poets who died in 2021 at the age of 80. Born to a Polish teacher and an Estonian dancer, he witnessed throughout his life the fragility of boundaries and identities — Estonia w...

This is Episode 81 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "In a Restaurant" by Stephen Santus. Stephen Santus is an English teacher and poet. His influences include the Japanese forms of haiku and tanka — the tanka is typically 31 syllables over five lines, the haiku even shorter at 17 over three, each form aiming to capture something tiny and vast — and his late, great, raw...

This is Episode 80 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "Home-Thoughts, from Abroad" by Robert Browning. Robert Browning was an English poet of the 19th century, seen as a giant of Victorian literature. (His body is interred at Poets Corner in Westminster Abbey in London.) Many of Browning’s poems are long (some are book-length) and are often seen as difficult — he was as...

This is Episode 79 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "Hosing Down" by Hubert Moore. Hubert Moore is a British poet. A retired teacher, he has published nine collections of poetry, including Beautifully Kept Things and The Feeding Station. This poem, Hosing Down, was a highly commended poem in the Forward Book of Poetry 2015. It tells of a single fleeting moment witnesse...

This is Episode 78 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is ""Hay", by Paul Muldoon. Paul Muldoon is a Pulitzer Prize winning Irish poet. He has published 14 collections over half a century (indeed, 2023 is the 50th anniversary of his debut collection New Weather ). Like his near contemporary Seamus Heaney, Muldoon was born and raised in rural Northern Ireland, has been p...

This is Episode 77 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "What the Living Do", by Marie Howe. Marie Howe is an American poet. She has published four collections of poetry. Interestingly, to me at least, she has published just one collection every nine or ten years, towards the end of each decade since the 1980s. This poem, "What The Living Do", is from her 1997 co...

This is Episode 76 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "Call" by Doireann Ní Ghríofa. Doireann Ní Ghríofa is an Irish writer and poet who writes in both English and Irish. Her first prose book, A Ghost in the Throat — which draws a line between her life and the life of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, or Eileen O’Connell, a long-dead and mostly forgotten Irish noblewoman who wro...

This is Episode 75 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "⁠It Aint What You Do It’s What It Does to You", by Simon Armitage Simon Armitage is the British Poet Laureate. He has published more than 20 collections of poetry, starting with Zoom! in 1989. The poem in this episode is one of his “Marsden Poems”, which were gathered together in his 2020 book Magnetic Field, a colle...

This is Episode 74 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "What You Mean to Me" by Penny Boxall. Penny Boxall is a Scottish poet. She has published three collections of poetry, including Ship of the Line, which won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Prize, Scotland’s most prestigious poetry award. She is currently Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Lucy Cavenish College, Cambridge.  As with...

This is Episode 73 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "It's Our Dance", by Brendan Cleary. Brendan Cleary is an Irish-born poet who has lived in England for more than 40 years. He has published a number of collections and was also the publisher and editor of The Echo Room , a poetry magazine which ran in the 1980s and 90s. One of the most powerful capacities of poetr...

This is Episode 72 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "Great Plain" by Kevin Powers. Kevin Powers is an American fiction writer and poet. He is also an Iraq War veteran and he rose to prominence in 2012 when his debut novel, The Yellow Birds , which drew on his experiences of that conflict. That book drew comparisons with a classic of war writing, The Things They Carried...

This is Episode 71 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "Because" by James McAuley. James McAuley was a 20th century Australian poet, essayist and academic. He took poetry’s art and craft so seriously that he was behind one of history’s most elaborate (and successful) literary hoaxes, ridiculing modernist verse by creating a fictional modernist poet and manufacturing his e...

This is Episode 70 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "The Peace of Wild Things" by Wendell Berry. Wendell Berry is a farmer, novelist and activist, has been producing poetry for more than half a century.  It might just be the increased availability of news and events and emotions from across the world through the unprecedented and fundamentally life-changing technology...

This is Episode 69 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "Instructions on Not Giving Up" by Ada Limón. Ada Limon is an American poet and, since 2022, the US Poet Laureate, the first Latina-American woman to hold that position. She has published five collections of poetry. This poem is a sonnet, 14 lines, but it defies the structure that often seems to come with the sonnet f...

This is Episode 68 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "The Lost Land" by Eavan Boland. Eavan Boland was an Irish poet who died in 2020 at the age of 75. She taught at Stanford University professor for the last 25 years of her life.  This poem was written, I believe, soon after she left Ireland for the west coast of America.  Posted here for the first time on March 17th, 2023...