An episode from 4/26/22: Tonight, I begin a five-part series called Notes from the Grid. It might as well be subtitled: How We Live Now, and along the way I take up things like technology, education, privacy, creativity, what it means to be an adolescent and what it means to be middle-aged, and so much…
Category: 20th Century Poetry
Laurie Sheck: 13 Poems from “The Willow Grove”
An episode from 1/31/21: The American writer Laurie Sheck (born 1953) was the first poet that I read extensively from on Human Voices Wake Us. I’m unsure why her work is overlooked, but I’ve always been proud that I recorded a handful of poems from her 1996 book, The Willow Grove. The Willow Grove remains…
Van Gogh’s Early Years (new episode)
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-seven—and after years of personal and professional failures—that he hit bottom … and suddenly realized…
The Great Myths #4: The Pyramid Texts of Ancient Egypt
An episode from 1/28/21: Tonight, I read from perhaps the oldest surviving religious texts in the world, those spells and prayers that were inscribed into the walls of the tombs of the pharaohs as early as 2353 BC. Collectively referred to as the Pyramid Texts, they were the basis of the later Coffin Texts, and…
The Voice of Toni Morrison
An episode from 6/26/22: We are incredibly lucky that, in the novelist Toni Morrison (1931-2019), we had that rare thing: a great writer who also achieved great popularity with the general public. This meant that she was interviewed about her life, her books, and about creativity and the news of the day, hundreds of times….
“It is so hard to die” – A Story of Depression from 1809
An episode from 7/5/21: Tonight, I read from Stephen Ambrose’s book on the Lewis & Clark expedition, Undaunted Courage. I’ve chosen a scene from the end of the book, detailing the last night of Meriwether Lewis’s life, in October of 1809. Unlike his more famous companion, William Clark, Lewis suffered from what we today would…
Poem: “The Sun Sets Into the Sea”
An episode from 7/19/21: Tonight, I read a poem of mine called “The Sun Sets Into the Sea.” It comes from my book Bone Antler Stone, which imagines the lives of those living in prehistoric Europe. In this episode, I both read the poem and give the literary and archeological inspiration for it. In this…
John Keats: “The Poet Has No Identity”
An episode from 5/5/21: Tonight, I read part of John Keats’s famous letter of October 27, 1818, where he talks about the poet and the poetic character. Although, the kind of person he describes is alive and well in all walks of life, from high school to the board room to the celebrity who can’t…
Whitman’s Long Foreground
An episode from 3/4/21: Perhaps the episode that changed everything, where I decided that perhaps the best way to talk about poetry or creativity was to read from a biography of any given person, and make comments along the way. This, then is the first of six episodes I recorded, reading from Paul Zweig’s Walt…
Give Me Another Tarantula (new episode)
What happens when two comedians lose all their confidence when they meet in an elevator? What is the happiest story you can think of (hint: it almost always comes from childhood)? What are the unfinished or untouched obsessions you’ve collected material for, but never gotten around to? How lucky was Shakespeare to have been born…