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Anthology: Poems by Coleridge, Williams, Bronte, Pope & Fisher
An episode from 1/18/22: Our anthology series presents a handful of poems from the past five centuries. How much or how little has our language changed since Roy Fisher remembered the London Blitz, Coleridge drew the greatest lesson he ever did from nature, and Emily Brontë experienced a haunting evening? A reading of five poems:… →
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American Shaman
An episode from 7/7/23: Tonight, I talk about writing my long poem, To the House of the Sun, published in 2015. The poem follows an Irish immigrant making his way through the American South, North and West, during the Civil War. The book is part travelogue, battle epic, and spiritual biography, and after describing how the… →
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Walt Whitman’s Life #7: His Notebooks & the Publication of “Leaves of Grass” (new episode)
An episode from 6/18/24: This is the seventh in a series of readings from biographies of Walt Whitman. I continue with Paul Zweig’s Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet, which focuses on the years preceding the publication of Leaves of Grass. Previous readings from Whitman biographies are here. Tonight, Zweig discusses the nature of Whitman’s… →
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Pythagoras: The Life & Times
Tonight, I’m thrilled to read a poem that I began working on three years ago on the life, teachings, and mysticism of the Greek philosopher, Pythagoras (c. 570- c.495 BCE). I am also thrilled that the poem is being simultaneously published at The Basilisk Tree. Many thanks to its editor, Bryan Helton, for coordinating all of… →
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Stephen King’s Great Novel of Parenthood & Grief
An episode from 9/7/22: Tonight, I spend an hour talking about Stephen King’s 1983 novel, Pet Sematary. The anxieties attached to being a parent have rarely book put this memorably, cloaked as it is in the kind foreordained doom we expect from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Does the book also succeed so well because King’s usual strengths—gore… →
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The Most Brutal Scenes (new episode)
An episode from 06/06/2024: Tonight, I share two stories from the Shoah, or Holocaust. The first is about the Sonderkommando, those prisoners forced to do the most devastating work in the concentration camps. During a 2015 Fresh Air interview with László Nemes and Géza Röhrig about their 2015 film, Son of Saul, a brief story… →
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True Horror
An episode from 10/27/22: Tonight, I talk about our love horror and true crime, and ask: what makes a story truly frightening, instead of just entertaining? What kinds of movies or books, or ways of storytelling, take us beyond entertainment to true horror, to actual fear? For instance, how does the disturbing story of Ed… →
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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… →
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Raising a Musical Prodigy / God’s Response to Job
An episode from 9/1/23: 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… →
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Working
An episode from 10/11/21: Tonight, a small episode where I talk about working, and about empathy and sympathy for those who live doing work they do not love, and which they derive little meaning from. Perhaps it describes you, or someone you know. You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of… →
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First Person: Funeral Home Director // Telemarketer
An episode from 3/8/22: How would you talk about your job, if someone came around asking? Tonight, we hear from Beverly Valentine, a Funeral Home Director, and Jason Groth, a Telemarketer. They were interviewed more than twenty years ago for the 2000 book Gig: Americans Talking About Their Jobs , and I have yet to… →
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Walt Whitman’s Mystical Poems
An episode from 4/19/22: From the opening line of the Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman announced that his great theme was unity: “I celebrate myself,/And what I assume you shall assume,/For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” As the last two episodes show, his best poems on both love and death… →
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Caravaggio / Herodotus / Macbeth
An episode from 9/8/23: 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… →
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Four Columbine Poems
An episode from 4/19/21: While I was already out of high school for two years when Columbine happened on April 20, 1999, it still feels bound up with everything I went through from 1993-1997. I spend the first part of this episode talking about high school, and how much my writing from this time is… →
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Anthology: Poems on Modern Life (new episode)
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… →
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Two Bits of Kafka’s Trial
An episode from 11/01/20: Tonight, I read two passages from Franz Kafka’s The Trial: the fable known as “Before the Law,” and the concluding scene, where Josef K. is executed. Kafka’s ability to portray those who are powerless when faced with vast bureaucracy, or simply before the rituals of everyday interaction (which many also find… →
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Emily Dickinson
An episode from 7/11/22: How do we find our way past the image of Emily Dickinson as a distant, unapproachable, recluse? One way is to read a book like Brenda Wineapple’s White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and tonight I share my favorite passages from it. Dickinson and Higginson were both… →
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The Great Myths #6: The Egyptian Book of the Dead
An episode from 2/19/21: In this third episode on Egyptian mythology, I give a brief introduction to the famous Book of the Dead, and then read from the longest chapter in the book, Chapter 125. Both come from Miriam Lichtheim’s Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. 2: The New Kingdom. Other episodes on Egyptian mythology are here. You can support… →
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An Interview with Amit Majmudar (new episode)
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… →
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Poems from Columbine: “The Mother”
The Mother at the Salon She was at the salon hours after another mother sat in the same seat: a victim’s mother, she a perpetrator’s. Yet it wasn’t warmer or more desolate to sit where her seeming opposite had sat, both readying for a funeral or both seeking what only old habit could give. Both… →
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Poems from Columbine: “The Two of Them”
The Two of Them They grew up with Waco, weird religion rolled over by tanks and set on fire; they grew up with Oklahoma City, white guy rage and middle-American bombs and a scalloped building seen from overhead, some cross-section into safe offices safe no more and blown out to the street below. They may… →
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Poems from Columbine: “Infatuation”
Infatuation She’d be nearing middle age by now, the girl all over Dylan’s journal whose name the books all black out, the girl no girl wants to be, loved by him, the boy she would never write about herself unless she loved nervousness and decay or was taken in by weakness and doubt, her head… →
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Robert Oppenheimer (poem)
Robert Oppenheimer Now I come to write in light and firein a language of power we all know,beyond every letter and poetryand all the dithering of philosophy,all the prevarication of politics.The physicists have known sin, it’s true,but also the brilliance of a burden overcome in the ageless mountains,a foul display that was beyond awesome,beyond my… →
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Female Figurines and a Shipwreck: Two Poems from “Bone Antler Stone”
Here are two of my favorite poems from Bone Antler Stone: one on the famous ice age “Venus” figurines from 20-30,000 years ago, and another on a shipwreck from 1300 BC. You can order the entire collection here, or find more poems from the book here. Female Figurines for Evie Hum the words with me and… →
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Review of Hymns & Lamentations
Check out the poet Tom Laichas’s review, here, of my 2011 book Hymns and Lamentations, a collection poems on the unsolvable religious problems of suffering and joy. It’s an immensely generous and thorough look at the book, probably the best it’s gotten so far. You can still order the book here. →
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Tim Miller 