sploosh!

Be wise as thou art cruel; do not press My tongue-tied patience with too much disdain; Lest sorrow lend me words, and words express The manner of my pity-wanting pain. If I might teach thee wit, better it were, Though not to love, yet, love to tell me so; As testy sick men, when their deaths be near, No news but health from their physicians know; For, if I should despair, I should grow mad, And in...

Twelve o'clock. Along the reaches of the street Held in a lunar synthesis, Whispering lunar incantations Dissolve the floors of memory And all its clear relations, Its divisions and precisions, Every street lamp that I pass Beats like a fatalistic drum, And through the spaces of the dark Midnight shakes the memory As a madman shakes a dead geranium. Half-past one, The street lamp sputtered, The st...

Hao Yang reads Act IV from 'Uncle Vanya' by Anton Chekhov. Reading begins at around the 4 minute mark.

Artwork on Cover: Tales of the Ember (Elina Waage Mikalsen) Burning the Old Year BY NAOMI SHIHAB NYE Letters swallow themselves in seconds. Notes friends tied to the doorknob, transparent scarlet paper, sizzle like moth wings, marry the air. So much of any year is flammable, lists of vegetables, partial poems. Orange swirling flame of days, so little is a stone. Where there was something and sudde...

i am running into a new year and the old years blow back like a wind that i catch in my hair like strong fingers like all my old promises and it will be hard to let go of what i said to myself about myself when i was sixteen and twentysix and thirtysix even thirtysix but i am running into a new year and i beg what i love and i leave to forgive me —Lucille Clifton, Good Woman: Poems and A Memoir 19...

https://www.alyve.org/english/docs/9.1/Rilke-Letters_to_a_Young_Poet.pdf "We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them."

Hao Yang reads 'Howl' by Allen Ginsberg. Text: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl

Jovan discusses 'The Gallery' by Andrew Marvell. Text: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48326/the-gallery Cover Artwork: Madonna , Edvard Munch

Hao Yang discusses horror in literature, with particular focus on the psychological horror that grew increasingly popular from the 20th century onwards. He then reads 'Howl' by Allen Ginsberg (yes, the entire thing) and talks about a few lines in greater detail. Text: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips' red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damasked, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks; And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know Th...

Hao Yang reads 'Solomon's Wisdom Didn't Keep' by Mark Neely. Solomon's Wisdom Didn't Keep Mark Neely Solomon’s wisdom didn’t keep him from pining for sleek horses, so how am I—with no direct warnings from above— to keep my mind off you in the bar mirror fifteen years ago watching ice pour from the sky, when we still believed in winter and bartenders and Peter Buck, believed no harm could come to u...

Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds Or bends with the remover to remove. O, no, it is an ever-fixèd mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wand’ring bark, Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken. Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle’s...

Those lines that I before have writ do lie, Even those that said I could not love you dearer; Yet then my judgment knew no reason why My most full flame should afterwards burn clearer. But reckoning time, whose millioned accidents Creep in ’twixt vows and change decrees of kings, Tan sacred beauty, blunt the sharp’st intents, Divert strong minds to th’ course of alt’ring things— Alas, why, fearing...

Or whether doth my mind, being crowned with you, Drink up the monarch’s plague, this flattery? Or whether shall I say mine eye saith true, And that your love taught it this alchemy, To make of monsters and things indigest Such cherubins as your sweet self resemble, Creating every bad a perfect best As fast as objects to his beams assemble? O, ’tis the first: ’tis flattery in my seeing, And my grea...

Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind, And that which governs me to go about Doth part his function, and is partly blind, Seems seeing, but effectively is out; For it no form delivers to the heart Of bird, of flow’r, or shape which it doth latch. Of his quick objects hath the mind no part, Nor his own vision holds what it doth catch; For if it see the rud’st or gentlest sight, The most sweet fa...

Jovan discusses 'The Merlion' by Alfian Sa'at. Cover Artwork: Ang Song Nian, Your Blank Stare Left Me At Sea , 2013

Jovan discusses 'Ulysses by the Merlion' by Edwin Thumboo. Cover Artwork: Ang Song Nian, Your Blank Stare Left Me At Sea , 2013

In this episode, Jovan discusses heroes in poetry, coupled with analyses of Edwin Thumboo's 'Ulysses by the Merlion' and Alfian Sa'at's 'The Merlion'. Artwork on Cover: Ang Song Nian, Your Blank Stare Left Me At Sea , 2013

Hao Yang talks about (but does not sing) 'Heroes' by David Bowie. 

How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose, Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name! O! in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclose. That tongue that tells the story of thy days, Making lascivious comments on thy sport, Cannot dispraise, but in a kind of praise; Naming thy name blesses an ill report. O! what a mansion have those vices got Which for their...

Against that time, if ever that time come, When I shall see thee frown on my defects, When as thy love hath cast his utmost sum, Called to that audit by advis’d respects; Against that time when thou shalt strangely pass, And scarcely greet me with that sun, thine eye, When love, converted from the thing it was, Shall reasons find of settled gravity; Against that time do I ensconce me here, Within...

How can I then return in happy plight, That am debarred the benefit of rest? When day’s oppression is not eas’d by night, But day by night and night by day oppress’d, And each, though enemies to either’s reign, Do in consent shake hands to torture me, The one by toil, the other to complain How far I toil, still farther off from thee. I tell the day, to please him thou art bright, And dost him grac...

Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws, And make the earth devour her own sweet brood; Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger's jaws, And burn the long-liv'd Phoenix in her blood; Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleets, And do whate'er thou wilt, swift-footed Time, To the wide world and all her fading sweets; But I forbid thee one more heinous crime: O, carve not with thy hours my love...

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date. Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmed; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed; But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose...

born 19.6.32—deported 24.9.42 Undesirable you may have been, untouchable you were not. Not forgotten or passed over at the proper time. As estimated, you died. Things marched, sufficient, to that end. Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented terror, so many routine cries. (I have made an elegy for myself it is true) September fattens on vines. Roses flake from the wall. The smoke of harmless fire...