Poetry Friday: The Great Year, Shakespeare, Eliot, Blake, Poems on Work & Poems on Mythology (new episode)

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…

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…