Afleveringen
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An episode from 8/12/22: Everybody knows the most famous soliloquy in all of drama, or at least the first line of it: â "To be or not to be, that is the question,"â from act three of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Tonight, I delve into the speech and try to figure out why it works so well not just as poetry and drama, but why it has leapt beyond literature entirely to become a cultural touchstone.
Throughout the episode I include the performance of this speech from modern actors: the first is by â Paapa Essieduâ , and the second by â Andrew Scottâ . The very last, to give a sense of what the original pronunciation of the speech would have sounded like, is performed by â Ben Crystalâ . A larger compilation of nine different versions â can be found hereâ .
The books read from in this episode are Ben and David Crystalâs â Shakespeareâs Words: A Glossary and Language Companionâ , Marjorie Garberâs â Shakespeare After Allâ , and Peter Ackroydâs â Shakespeare: The Biographyâ .
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 3/3/24: Tonight, I read from a handful of what I call âvisionaryâ poems. After an introductory section of familiar nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets, I go back to the sources of those, which are found in religious scripture and myth:
W. B. Yeats: âThe Second Comingâ T. S. Eliot: sections from The Waste Land and âEast Cokerâ Walt Whitman: the first section of âCrossing Brooklyn Ferryâ William Wordsworth: from the thirteenth book of The Prelude William Blake: from his long poem Milton The first chapter of Ezekiel (from the JPS audio Tanakh) A speech from Euripidesâs Bacchae, tr. William Arrowsmith Part of the eleventh book of the Bhagavad-Gita, tr. by Amit Majmudar in his Godsong I close the episode with a reading that will not surprise long-time listeners.You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at [email protected].
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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An episode from 1/2/23: Tonight, I read a handful of voices from those living in Europe and the United States between 1900 and 1914. Rephrased only slightly, nearly all of their concerns (over technology, gender, nationalism, war, eugenics) feel like they could appear in the news or on the street today. Then and now, what is actually going on alongside all the dread? What can we learn from these voices that sound so much like our own, and what will people look back on 2023 learn for themselves?
Each of these quotations can be found in Philipp Blomâs wonderful book, â The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914â .
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 12/7/22: Tonight, we enter into the early years of Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), from his birth in the village of Zundert in the Netherlands, to his time in the Borinage mining region of Belgium. It was there, at the age of twenty-sevenâand after years of personal and professional failuresâthat he hit bottom ⊠and suddenly realized he was an artist.
In the first half of the episode, I read from Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smithâs biography, â â Van Gogh: The Lifeâ â . The second half is devoted to a handful of letters Van Gogh wrote to his brother in 1879 and 1880, where he admits the humiliation of his failures, and then revels in his newfound passion for drawing and painting. The letters can be â â found online hereâ â .
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 12/9/24: Tonight's episode gathers together all of the readings I've done on this podcast from the poet William Blake (1757-1827). All of these poems can be found online at The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake:
Blake & His Animals: One passage from Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and two from Milton. I hope that plucking these three excerpts from his longer work can suggest how variedânot just how prophetic and opaque, but simply beautifulâso much of his poetry can be. (From the episode Poetry Friday) An excerpt from his long poem Milton. (From the episode Visionary Poems) Another excerpt from Milton, where Blake's personal mythology is given free reign over the city of London. (From the episode Cities Under Siege)Listeners will forgive me for providing an episode that isn't quite brand new. But in the two months since I tentatively ended this podcast, I've seen that a way forward could be to bring out new episodes every few months. My thanks to those listeners who have responded positively to this idea.
Please continue to keep your subscription to the podcast, to share it with others, and leave reviews wherever you listen.
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 5/5/21: Tonight, I read part of John Keats's â famousâ â letterâ of October 27, 1818, where he talks about the poet and the poetic character. He asks the questions: how much of a poet's life is given up by their focus on poetry, by their people-watching and -listening, by their lack of social skills? How much of their lives are left over when they become so consumed (whether attracted or repelled) with the lives and words of others?
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 12/30/20: In this second episode on Mesopotamian myth, we return to the story of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh and Enkidu's destructive adventures lead directly to the latter's death, and here I read Enkiduâs deathbed speech, and the dream he has of the Underworld. The translations I read from are by â Andrew Georgeâ and N. K. Sandars.
Other episodes on Mesopotamian myth can be found here.
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 1/1/24: Tonight, a cold has forced me to hand over the episode almost entirely to some of the greatest music ever written. Here are excerpts of my favorite pieces from Ludwig van Beethoven (1750-1827). Itâs hard to think of music that is more passionate, introspective, uplifting, brooding, mournful, and joyous. The sources for the music I use are:
Excerpts from the Ninth Symphony/Op. 125 is conducted by Eugen Duvier. Excerpts from the Piano Sonatas (#1 and #2/Op. 2, #8/Op. 13, #13 and #14/Op. 27 #15/Op. 28, #17/Op. 31, #21/Op. 53, #22/Op. 54, #27/Op. 90), and the Fifth Piano Concerto/Op. 73 come from the complete recordings by Claudio Arrau. The excerpt from the Op. 70 âGhostâ Trio, from the Trio BellâArte. Excerpts from String Quartet 13/Op. 130 and String Quartet 15/Op. 132 come from the recordings by the Quartteto Italiano. Excerpts from Missa Solemnis, Op. 123, is conducted by John Eliot Gardiner. The excerpt from Robert Greenberg lecture comes from his Great Courses set on the Piano Sonatas.You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 7/28/23: Tonight's episode looks in on history, creativity, and mourning from three different angles:
In the first part, we hear scattered remarks from Bruce Springsteen over the years, about his low-fi and haunting 1982 album, â Nebraskaâ . It is remarkable how the album was made by Springsteen, alone in his bedroom, with a cheap recorder. For someone who bridges and so seamlessly combines music of the fifties, sixties and seventies, Nebraska sounds nearly timeless.
In the second part, I read a small section from Simon Schama's 1995 book, â Landscape and Memoryâ . Here, he talks about not just his own Jewish ancestry, who hailed from the woods and forests of Ruthenia (on the border between today's Poland and Lithuania), but also about the fate of one Polish village's Jewish population, during and following World War Two.
In the third part, I read from book 24 of â Homer's Iliadâ , translated by Richmond Lattimore. In one of the most moving scenes anywhere in Homer's epics, Priam, the king of Troy, pays a visit to Achilles, the greatest warrior on the Greek side. Achilles has only recently killed Priam's son, Hector, in battle, and the old man comes to Achilles for beg for his son's body back, so that he can be given a proper funeral and burial.
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 5/9/22: Tonight, I continue my five-part series called Notes from the Grid. (A print version of NFTG has since been published.) I suggest that we donât need to be missionaries for the culture and politics and even religion we love, and nor should we assume that anybody else needs the very things that we depend uponââAll things can console.â Alongside this, I talk about the virtue of uncertainty, and the difficulties of living with ambiguity of all kinds.
Other episodes from Notes from the Grid are here.
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 10/20/21: Tonight, we hear anecdotes from the lives of two very different poets, Walt Whitman and W. B. Yeats. The remarks from Whitman come from the journals he kept while working out the poems that went into the first edition of Leaves of Grass, while the comments from Yeats span the first half of his life. Should we be surprised that both poets experienced extreme doubts not just at the beginning of their writing lives, but all through them?
The passage from Whitman can be found in the appendices of Gary Schmidgall's edition of Whitman's poems; the quotations from Yeats can be found in the first volume of R. F. Foster's biography of Yeats.
Listen to other episodes on creativity here.
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 12/19/20: Tonight, I begin perhaps the most important series of episodes on this podcast, a deep-dive into my favorite stories from mythology and religion. All episodes of The Great Myths are here.
I begin with the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh. Reading from the translation by Andrew George (and an earlier one, by N. K. Sandars), I enter the story of Gilgamesh through his friendship with the typical "man of nature," Enkidu, and the "civilizing" process he undergoes.
Other episodes on Mesopotamian myth can be found here.
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 10/8/24: Tonight, four years to the day after starting this podcast, I end it with a reading of Theodore Roethkeâs (1908-1963) long poem, âThe Rose.â I also reread the poem I shared in the very first episode, Louise GlĂŒckâs (1943-2023) âMessengers.â
Many thanks to my listeners over the past four years. You can continue find my books, notices about new publications, and daily poems from Old English till now, over at wordandsilence.com. You can always reach me at [email protected].
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An episode from 9/23/24: Tonight, I read seven poems by the American poet, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961). Over the course of fifty years her work â which includes fiction, memoir and translation â provides an incredible example of how a writer can handle mythology, mysticism, sexuality and autobiography. The poems can be found in Collected Poems 1912-1944:
Sea Iris (1916) The Helmsman (1916) Adonis (1913-1917) Lethe (1924) Wine Bowl (1931) Eros (Uncollected/Unpublished poems, 1912-1944) Tribute to the Angels #29 (1945)You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 9/11/24: Tonight, I read six poems by the Welsh poet, R. S. Thomas (1913-2000). A priest in the Anglican church from 1936 until 1978, Thomas wrote some of the most moving poems we have about religious belief, rural life, and the simple feeling some of us have of belonging nowhere. It is said that he barely lost out on the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995. They can all be found in Collected Poems 1945-1990:
Affinity (1946) The Country Clergy (1958) Ap Huwâs Testament (1958) The Face (1966) Suddenly (1983) The Moor (1966)Audio of Thomas reading âThe Moorâ comes from the incredible collection R. S. Thomas Reading the Poems. Sections from his biography come from his page at the Poetry Archive and his obituary at the Guardian.
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 8/30/24: Tonight, I read four poems by the American poet Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982). A few years ago, when I began digging through anthologies of American poetry, Rexroth stood out immediately among the usual names from the twentieth century. I can't think of many American poets who have written so beautifully about nature, about being a parent, or about love:
Halleyâs Comet (1956) When We with Sappho (1944) The Wheel Revolves (1965) Hapax (1974)They can all be found in The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth.
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.
Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 8/14/24: Tonight, I read excerpts from the poet Robert Pinskyâs 1995 interview with The Paris Review. It is fascinating to see how much of what he says seems timeless and wise (everything on creativity, writing habits, high and low speech, etc.), and those things that seem stuck in the amber of 1995 (the phenomenon of poets teaching at universities).
I end the episode with a reading of his incredible visionary poem, âThe Figured Wheel.â (The poem is available in many books, but as I say in the beginning of this episode, it was an early collected volume with that name where I first discovered him.)
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. Iâve also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.
Email me at [email protected]
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An episode from 8/1/24: Tonight, I read seven poems from Seamus Heaneyâs 1974 collection, North. Few poets from the last century took on the reality of violence in the ancient and modern world the way Heaney does in his poems about Iron Age bog bodies, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and ruminations through mythology and Viking history. I also read four poems from Heaneyâs previous books, that can serve as a prologue to North:
Personal Helicon (from Death of a Naturalist) Dream (from Door into the Dark) Bogland (from Door into the Dark) The Tollund Man (from Wintering Out)Poems from North:
Belderg Funeral Rites Bone Dreams pt. II Bog Queen The Grauballe Man Punishment KinshipAudio of Heaney reading âPersonal Heliconâ comes from his 1971 appearance at the 92nd Street Y. The episode also includes excerpts from Dennis O'Driscoll's â Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaneyâ , and The Letters of Seamus Heaney. This episode is revision and complete re-recording of an episode first released in June, 2021.
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.
Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 7/19/24: Tonight, I read the small biographies of nearly two dozen poets, the kind of colorful summaries usually found in poetry anthologies. In many cases, reading a paragraph or two about twenty people is enough to get the sense of a life, and of just how varied the lives of poets (or anybody) can really be. The biographies come from Volume One and Volume Two of the Poem a Day series.
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone.
Email me at [email protected].
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An episode from 7/5/24: Tonight, I devote an hour to wondering how we talk about childhood and memory, how we live with memory and meaning, how we perceive time and recollect the most vivid events of our lives.
For me, music is inseparable from all of this, and I play a few songs in this episode: Mother Natureâs Son (The Beatles), High Hopes (Pink Floyd), T. S. Eliot reading from East Coker, the Molto Adagio from String Quartet #15/Op. 132 (Beethoven), Mishima (Closing) (Philip Glass), American Beauty (Thomas Newman), the Andante Adagio from String Quartet #3: Reflections on my childhood/Childhood Fantasia in New England (Alan Hovhaness).
This episode grew out of a conversation with Tom Hart at Sequential Artists Workshop, and I dedicate to him.
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.
Email me at [email protected].
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