Human Voices Wake Us Human Voices Wake Us

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 Bates'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 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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An episode from 2/19/24: Tonight, I read eleven essential poems by the American poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). All of them can be found in his Collected Poems. I also read from his letters, and the essay about Stevens at The Poetry Foundation. The poems are:


Anecdote of the Jar
The Snow Man
Six Significant Landscapes
Anecdote of Men by the Thousand
How to Live. What to Do
Gallant Château
Bouquet of Belle Scavoir
The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain
The Planet on the Table
Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour
The Idea of Order at Key West (read by Stevens)

The biographies of Stevens that I mention are the two-volumes by Joan Richardson, and The Whole of Harmonium, by Paul Mariani. The 1988 documentary on Stevens, part of the Voices and Visions series, is also a great introduction.

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 2/7/24: Tonight, I read six poems from Ted Hughes's 1983 collection, River. 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 River are:


October Salmon (the audio of Hughes reading the poem comes from here)
Four March Watercolours
Salmon Eggs
An August Salmon
The River
In the Dark Violin of the Valley

This is a revision and complete re-recording of an episode first posted in September of 2021, which included only three poems. I've used the opportunity to also read from Jonathan Bates'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
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/humanvoiceswakeus/support