Human Voices Wake Us Human Voices Wake Us

An episode from 5/20/24: Tonight, after a long hiatus, we return to Norse myth with the story of Sigurd’s killing of the dragon, Fafnir. Couched in a much longer narrative that contains shape-shifting, war, revenge, brief appearances by Odin and Loki, and finally Sigurd’s ability to hear the language of birds and animals, it is a brilliant and vivid example of storytelling in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

I read from the two great sources of the story, the Volsung Saga (in the Jesse Byock translation) and Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda (in the Anthony Faulkes translation). I also discuss the history of the story, and its reworking in the Nibelungenlied, and Wagnerian opera.

Listen to the other Great Myths 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 humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.


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An episode from 5/8/24: Tonight, I read fourteen poems from Ted Hughes's 1970 collection, Crow. His books Crow, Moortown Diary, Remains of Elmet, and River contain his best poetry, and they are models for any artist in how handle nature, animal life, myth, and autobiography in their work. The poems that read are:


A Childish Prank (the audio of Hughes reading the poem comes from here)
Crow's First Lesson
Crow Tyrannosaurus
Crow & the Birds
Crowego
Crow Blacker than Ever
Crow's Last Stand
Crow & the Sea
Fragments of an Ancient Tablet
Notes for a Little Play
Lovesong
Littleblood
Crow's Courtship
Crow's Song about God

This is a revision and complete re-recording of an episode first posted in August of 2021, which included fewer poems. I've used the opportunity to also read from Jonathan Bate's biography of Hughes, Hughes's later notes to the book, as well as handful of letters he wrote about the collection.

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 humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.


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An episode from 4/17/24: Tonight, I read a handful of poems on modern life—whatever “modern” might mean in words spanning the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. In many of the poems we hear the complaint of every age, that “the world has never been so bad.” In others, descriptions of the suburbs are enough, or of car culture, or of how we get our news or even begin to live with stories of atrocity and war. Some poems ask us to pay attention to the work and details of everyday life, others wonder if we shouldn’t look to past poets for wisdom and guidance. If a “modern” mindset means anything, it seems to mean proliferation and flux, a sense of not being settled. The poems I read are:


Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021), “In Goya’s greatest scenes”
Kathleen Jamie (1962- ), “The Way We Live”
Laurie Sheck (1953- ), “Headlights”
Derek Mahon (1941-2020), “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford”
Ted Kooser (1939- ), “Late February”
Philip Larkin (1922-1985), “Here”
 Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), “New Mexican Mountain”
T. E. Hulme (1883-1917), “Image”
Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950), “Editor Whedon”
Walt Whitman (1819-1892), “The blab of the pave”
William Wordsworth (1770-1850), “London 1802”
Mary Robinson (1758-1800), “A London Summer Morning”
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), “A Description of the Morning”
 William Shakespeare (1564-1616), “The queen, my lord, is dead”
R. S. Thomas (1913-2000), “Suddenly”

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 humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.


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An episode from 4/3/24: Tonight, I interview the poet, novelist, and translator, Amit Majmudar. You can find a full list of his books ⁠here⁠, but we spend most of our time talking about his 2018 translation of the Bhagavad Gita, ⁠Godsong⁠. Along the way, we also get his take on many of the preoccupations of this podcast: how a life devoted to creativity, religion, family, and an awareness of history and tradition can still be maintained in this strange time of ours.

His book recommendations at the end are:


John D. Smith’s abridged translation of the ⁠Mahabharata⁠
S. Radhakrishnan's translation of the principal Upanishads
The Princeton edition of the ⁠Ramayana⁠   
Roberto Calasso’s ⁠Ardor⁠

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 ⁠humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com⁠.


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An episode from 3/15/24: Tonight, I read eleven poems from Ted Hughes's 1979 collection, Remains of Elmet. His books Crow, Moortown Diary, Remains of Elmet, and River contain his best poetry, and they are models for any artist in how handle nature, animal life, myth, and autobiography in their work. The poems that I read from Remains of Elmet are:


Light Falls through Itself
Crown Point Pensioners
"Six years into her posthumous life"
These Grasses of Light
Walls
Heather
Remains of Elmet
Where the Millstone of Sky
The Ancient Briton Lay under His Rock
Heptonstall
Cock Crows (the audio of Hughes reading the poem comes from here)

This is a revision and complete re-recording of an episode first posted in April of 2021, which included only seven poems. I've used the opportunity to also read from Jonathan Bate's biography of Hughes, Hughes's later notes to the book, as well as handful of letters he wrote about the collection.

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 humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.


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Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/humanvoiceswakeus/message
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An episode from 3/3/24: Tonight, I read from a handful of what I call “visionary” 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: “The Second Coming”
T. S. Eliot: sections from The Waste Land and “East Coker”
Walt Whitman: the first section of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
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 Euripides’s 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 humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.


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Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/humanvoiceswakeus/message
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/humanvoiceswakeus/support