Earlier this year, I thought it was possible to supplement this podcast with one weekly (and shorter) additional reading over at Substack; for many reasons, that ambition proved impossible to maintain. Since an illness has kept me from recording a new episode this week, I thought it worthwhile collecting those six weeks of shorter readings…
Category: Human Voices Wake Us
Caravaggio’s Severed Heads / Herodotus Among the Scythians / Ian McKellen on Macbeth (new episode)
In the first part of tonight’s episode, I read from Peter Robb’s M, a biography of the painter Caravaggio (1571-1610). Through a discussion of two of his paintings which depict decapitation, we can understand how, in Caravaggio’s early career, he was able to paint directly from life; but when he went on the run to…
The Great Myths #22: The Story of Ragnarok in the Norse Eddas
An episode from 12/23/22: How did the Viking Norse tell a story as important as Ragnarok (the end of the world) in poetry, and then in prose? What does prose require that poetry does not, and vice-versa, especially when the accounts we have are separated by centuries of historical change, and religious conversion? In this…
Walt Whitman in 1849
An episode from 3/23/21: This is the fourth in a series of readings from biographies of Walt Whitman. Tonight, I continue with Paul Zweig’s Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet, which focuses on the years preceding the 1855 publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Here, Zweig talks about Whitman in the…
Raising a Musical Prodigy / God’s Response to Job (new episode)
In the first part of tonight’s episode, I read from Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, & the Search for Identity, where Solomon talks about musical prodigies and the difficulties they face as children and adults. In the second part, I read one of the most powerful pieces of poetry to come out…
William Carlos Williams: 11 Essential Poems
An episode from 12/15/22: Tonight, I read eleven essential poems from the American poet William Carlos Williams (1883-1963). In the same generation as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Williams is perhaps best known for never becoming an expatriate, and instead living most of his life as a family doctor in Rutherford, New Jersey. His…
So Long, Lawrence Ferlinghetti
An episode from 2/23/21: Tonight, I read a few poems from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind. He died yesterday at the age of 101, and you can read his obituary here. A friend introduced me to Ferlinghetti’s book in high school, and I’ve always associated him with my earliest reading, and my…
Van Gogh’s Early Years
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-seven—and after years of personal and professional failures—that he hit bottom…
Give Me Another Tarantula
An episode from 11/29/22: “Give Me a Tarantula” is shorthand for a scattering of thoughts on a handful of things that can’t fill their own episode. The first Tarantula collection is here, but tonight I talk about: Don’t forget to support Human Voices Wake Us on Substack, where you can also get our newsletter and…
Seamus Heaney: 10 Essential Poems (new episode)
Tonight, I read ten essential poems from one of the great and most public poets of the last seventy years, Seamus Heaney (1939-2013). It isn’t hard to come by details of Heaney’s life, but Stepping Stones (where Heaney is interviewed at length in what amounts to an autobiography), is a good place to start. His…