Basement Poetry Podcast Wayne Benson

Robin Becker Bio: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robin-becker




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To spice things up with the start of the 4th season of the Basement Poetry Podcast, we will look at John Kenney's poem, "Hold the Elevator?"

Link to John Kenney's website: Books — John Kenney (byjohnkenney.com)

Amazon.com: Love Poems for the Office: 9780593190708: Kenney, John: Books



If you would like a poem read on the podcast, send an email to basementpoetrypod@gmail.com


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Today we will take a look at the poem, "15" from The Feeling Sonnets published in Volume 51 of The American Poetry Review.

American Poetry Review – Home (aprweb.org)
Eugene Ostashevsky
Eugene Ostashevsky was born in Leningrad in 1968 and immigrated with his family to New York in 1979. He is the author of the poetry collections Iterature and The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza, both of which are published by Ugly Duckling Presse, and a scholar and translator of Russian avant-garde and contemporary poetry, especially by the 1930s underground writers Alexander Vvedensky and Daniil Kharms. He currently lives in Berlin and New York and teaches literature in the Liberal Studies program at New York University. His contributions to New York Review Books include translating Vvedensky's An Invitation for Me to Think and The Fire Horse: Children's Poems by Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, and Kharms. 

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Link to poem: American Poetry Review – Poems (aprweb.org)



If you stayed to listen to the end, or if you did not, please submit your work to American Writers Review (San Fedele Press Submission Manager (submittable.com)






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https://allpoetry.com/Tonight-I-Can-Write-(The-Saddest-Lines)

Happy Valentine's Day. 

Today we talk about Pablo Neruda's poem, "Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines) 





Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines)
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

Translation by W. S. Merwin




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Today we will be looking at the poem "Words for Worry" by Li-Young Lee.



Bio: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/li-young-lee



The Poem:

Words for Worry
by Li-Young Lee

Another word for father is worry.



Worry boils the water

for tea in the middle of the night.



Worry trimmed the child’s nails before

singing him to sleep.



Another word for son is delight,

another word, hidden.



And another is One-Who-Goes-Away.

Yet another, One-Who-Returns.



So many words for son:

He-Dreams-for-All-Our-Sakes.

His-Play-Vouchsafes-Our-Winter-Share.

His-Dispersal-Wins-the-Birds.



But only one word for father.

And sometimes a man is both.

Which is to say sometimes a man

manifests mysteries beyond

his own understanding.



For instance, being the one and the many,

and the loneliness of either. Or



the living light we see by, we never see. Or



the sole word weighs

heavy as a various name.



And sleepless worry folds the laundry for tomorrow.

Tired worry wakes the child for school.



Orphan worry writes the note he hides

in the child’s lunch bag.

It begins, Dear Firefly….


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