Creativity

Advice from Walt Whitman & W. B. Yeats – Human Voices Wake Us

A reading of excerpts from the correspondence, notebooks, and interviews, with Walt Whitman; and a handful of excerpts from letters and memoirs of W. B. Yeats. For being such different poets, there's an awful lot of overlap, and it seems significant to include them in the same episode. The passage from Whitman can be found in the appendices of Gary Schmidgall's edition of Whitman's poems; the quotations from Yeats can be found in the first volume of R. F. Foster's biography of Yeats.  Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to humanvoiceswakus1@gmail.com. I assume that the small amount of work presented in each episode constitutes fair use. Publishers, authors, or other copyright holders who would prefer to not have their work presented here can also email me at humanvoiceswakus1@gmail.com, and I will remove the episode immediately. — Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/support

John Keats: "The poet has no identity" – Human Voices Wake Us

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 wait to leave the party.

The full text of the letter is here, and the actual letter can be viewed here.

He asks the questions: how much of a poet’s life is given up by their focus on poetry, by their people-watching and people-listening, by their lack of social skills? How much of their lives are left over when they become so consumed (whether attracted or repelled) with the lives and words of others?

Keats says, in part: “It is a wretched thing to confess; but is a very fact that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature–how can it, when I have no nature? When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins so to press upon me that I am in a very little time annihilated.”

Advice from Charles Dickens & Alice Munro – Human Voices Wake Us

Tonight we hear from two great writers of fiction, Charles Dickens and Alice Munro.

Through a handful of readings from Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens: A Life, we see how Dickens (1812-1870) was able to juggle, for almost a year, the writing of two novels simultaneously, both for serial publication. Thanks to a letter written by Fyodor Dostoevsky, who visited Dickens in London in 1862, we also hear Dickens speaking privately in a way that he rarely did publicly, admitting that his villains were better reflections of himself than his more lovable and generous characters. We also answer the question: what do David Copperfield and Jane Eyre have in common?

From the introduction to her Selected Stories, Alice Munro (born in 1931, and winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize) describes how, as a homemaker, she came to writing short stories very nearly by necessity. She also discusses how she set her first attempts at fiction in faraway, historical, or Brontë-inspired surroundings, and only later came to see the artistic potential of her own backyard, in the Lake Huron region of Canada.

The Voice of Toni Morrison – Human Voices Wake Us

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.

In this episode, I’ve gone through my favorite interviews with her and gathered the best parts into these segments:

  • (:35) On love (parental, romantic, religious)
  • (8:25) On childhood, family history, and being a parent and a writer
  • (43:32) On race, writing in difficult political and social moments, and being more interested in good than evil
  • (1:11:48) On writing in general, and specifically the writing of Beloved

The interviews I’ve drawn from are these:

Ezra Pound’s Advice to a Young Poet – Human Voices Wake Us

An episode from 10/25/20: A reading from the poet W. S. Merwin’s memoir, The Mays of Ventadorn, where he recalls meeting the poet Ezra Pound in 1949. Merwin, who died in 2019 at the age of ninety-one, was just starting out when he paid a visit to Pound.

For his part, by 1949 Ezra Pound (1885-1972) had already known and influenced every great Modernist poet since 1900, going to university in America with William Carlos Williams and H. D., living in London with W. B. Yeats for a time as his secretary, and famously editing T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

Pound was also consumed with his own political and economic theories, and it was his time in Italy, and later broadcasts made in support of Mussolini during World War II, that prompted his arrest when he returned to American in 1945. Found mentally unfit to stand trial for treason, he was placed in St. Elizabeths, a psychiatric hospital in Washington, DC.

It was in this setting that the elder poet was nevertheless able to give the younger poet some tremendous advice, the most important of which was to become a translator. Merwin writes: He told me he imagined I was serious, and that if I was I should learn languages, “so as not to be at the mercy of translators.” And then I should translate, myself. “If you’re going to be a poet,” he said, “you have to work at it every day. You should about seventy-five lines a day. But at your age you don’t have anything to write about. You may think you do, but you don’t. So get to work translating…. Get as close to the original as you can. It will make you use your English and find out what you can do with it.”

Merwin, of course, became one of the great poets of his generation, in part because of his translations, beginning with The Poem of the Cid in 1959.

True Horror – Human Voices Wake Us

Tonight I talk about the nature of horror/true crime books and movies to 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? How does the disturbing story of Ed Gein end up, filtered through convention and expectation, as “standard” (even if classic) movies like Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs? Discussed along the way: Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, the new Netflix series on Jeffrey Dahmer, the movie The Exorcist, Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, the use of crime scene photos for advertising TV shows, and the unavoidable re-traumatization of victims and their families with each new show, book, movie (or, indeed, podcast). Please consider supporting Human Voices Wake us by clicking here. You can also support this podcast by going to wordandsilence.com and checking out any of my books. Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com. I assume that the small amount of work presented in each episode constitutes fair use. Publishers, authors, or other copyright holders who would prefer to not have their work presented here can also email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com, and I will remove the episode immediately. — Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/support

Stephen King's Great Novel of Parenthood & Grief – Human Voices Wake Us

Tonight I spent an hour talking about Stephen King’s 1983 novel, Pet Sematary, which seems to me one of the great expressions of the anxieties of being a parent. Please consider supporting Human Voices Wake us by clicking here. You can also support this podcast by going to wordandsilence.com and checking out any of my books. Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com. I assume that the small amount of work presented in each episode constitutes fair use. Publishers, authors, or other copyright holders who would prefer to not have their work presented here can also email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com, and I will remove the episode immediately. — Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/support

Van Gogh: Starry Nights & Sunflowers – Human Voices Wake Us

An episode from 7/27/22: Tonight, I read from Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith’s Van Gogh: The Life, sharing the sections covering Van Gogh’s two Starry Night paintings, and his many paintings of sunflowers.

Before these images became as ubiquitous as Michelangelo’s David, they were the product of a largely unknown artist who was working in the south of France in the late 1880s. Unable to support himself in any conventional way, unable to make or keep friends, and unable–it seems–to do much else than paint and paint, these pictures are only a few of his expressions of love for the world, and how he saw it.

It is significant, too, that his Starry Night Over the Rhone includes the two stock-figures that appear over and over again in his work: a couple, walking together; that his other Starry Night depicts a village beneath its swirl of stars. And his many sunflowers were, of course, painted ahead of Paul Gauguin’s arrival at Vincent’s Yellow House in Arles, and were spread around as a kind of welcoming gift. All of these works point to van Gogh’s fantasies of romantic companionship, sympathetic friendship among fellow artists, and his simple–and sometimes sentimental–desire to simply belong, all of which were doomed. Where van Gogh failed in human company, he succeeded, at great cost to himself, with his art.

Emily Dickinson – Human Voices Wake Us

Tonight I read from Brenda Wineapple’s wonderful book, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. If any listeners can recommend other books about Dickinson they have enjoyed, email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com. Consider supporting Human Voices Wake us by clicking here: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/support Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com. I assume that the small amount of work presented in each episode constitutes fair use. Publishers, authors, or other copyright holders who would prefer to not have their work presented here can also email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com, and I will remove the episode immediately. — Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/support

Advice from Seamus Heaney // James Joyce's "Araby" – Human Voices Wake Us

In tonight's episode, we hear from Seamus Heaney and James Joyce. In the first part, I read Heaney’s responses to general questions about writing poetry: his methods, his inspiration, his favorite time of day to write. These come from Dennis O’Driscoll’s Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney. In the second part (beginning at 35:15) I read James Joyce’s short story, “Araby.” The reading is prefaced by a few personal thoughts on Joyce, and includes an excerpt from Gabriel’s Yared’s score for the film The English Patient. I previously discussed Michael Ondaatje’s novel, Anthony Minghella’s movie, and Yared’s music for the film, in an early episode, Rereading the English Patient. Consider supporting Human Voices Wake us by clicking here. Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com. — Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/support

Advice from Beethoven, Joseph Campbell, W. S. Merwin, W. D. Snodgrass – Human Voices Wake Us

Here, with the help of a few quotations, I ask: should poets and writers be able to cook themselves a decent meal, or is a life of the mind (with a side of fast food) the best we can expect? Is it a relief to hear Beethoven admit that everything he did, outside of music, was wrong and stupid? And is it useful to tell younger poets that they should find anything to do other than poetry, since it will never be as fulfilling as they want it to be. Sometimes these are the best episodes, where quotations on creativity from a handful of people can be tossed around and thought about in real time. The main quotations discussed here come from Joseph Campbell (interviewed by Michael Toms), Beethoven (from Jan Swafford's biography), and the Paris Review interviews with W. S. Merwin and W. D. Snodgrass. You can join Human Voices Wake Us on Patreon, or sign up for our newsletter, by clicking here. I assume that the small amount of work presented in each episode constitutes fair use. Publishers, authors, or other copyright holders who would prefer to not have their work presented here can also email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com, and I will remove the episode immediately. — Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/support

Loneliness, pt2 // Shakespeare, Sex & Sonnets – Human Voices Wake Us

Another two part episode: The first is a brief sequel to an episode from last September, called Loneliness. (You can listen to that episode here) The second part (beginning at 19:19) is a reading from Peter Ackroyd’s biography of William Shakespeare—buy the book here. Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com. I assume that the small amount of work presented in each episode constitutes fair use. Publishers, authors, or other copyright holders who would prefer to not have their work presented here can also email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com, and I will remove the episode immediately. — Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/support

The Earliest Bookstores I Remember // Picasso's "Guernica" – Human Voices Wake Us

Tonight’s episode is split into two parts: In the first, I take up a listener’s request to talk about my memories of bookstores; In the second, I read from two recent books about Pablo Picasso’s Guernica. The books I read from are Simon Schama's The Power of Art and John Richardson's Life of Picasso, Volume 4: The Minotaur Years. The second part of the episode begins at 45:08. Depending on the response, this might become a regular format for episodes going forward, putting two different episodes into one, simply for ease of listening. Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com. I assume that the small amount of work presented in each episode constitutes fair use. Publishers, authors, or other copyright holders who would prefer to not have their work presented here can also email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com, and I will remove the episode immediately. — Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/support

Advice from Joan Didion, Stanley Kunitz, Billy Collins & Alice Munro – Human Voices Wake Us

A return to a series of podcasts that I haven't done since last year, where I take a quotation from another writer/artist/etc. on creativity, and just talk about it. Today's quotes come from essayist/novelist, Joan Didion, the poets Stanley Kunitz and Billy Collins, and the short story writer, Alice Munro. Preceding this is a few minutes of talking about how important it seems to be for an artist to be associated with a certain place–Dickens with London, Robert Frost with New England, etc. Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com. I assume that the small amount of work presented in each episode constitutes fair use. Publishers, authors, or other copyright holders who would prefer to not have their work presented here can also email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com, and I will remove the episode immediately. — Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/support

Seamus Heaney's Origin Story – Human Voices Wake Us

A reading of interviews with Seamus Heaney, on his discovery and growth into poetry from boyhood through university. As usual, these remarks come from Dennis O’Driscoll’s book-length collection of interviews with Heaney, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney. Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com. I assume that the small amount of work presented in each episode constitutes fair use. Publishers, authors, or other copyright holders who would prefer to not have their work presented here can also email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com, and I will remove the episode immediately. — Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/support

How Did Picasso Do It? – Human Voices Wake Us

Readings from a few books about Pablo Picasso, where he talks about how the power behind his own paintings, and his huge output, remained a mystery for him as much as anyone else. The first few quotations come from the huge Taschen book about Picasso that covers his entire life; the rest come from the multi-volume biography of Picasso by John Richardson: A Life of Picasso 1: The Prodigy: 1881-1906 A Life of Picasso 2: The Cubist Rebel: 1907-1916 A Life of Picasso 3: The Triumphant Years: 1917-1932 You can join Human Voices Wake Us on Patreon, or sign up for our newsletter, by clicking here Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to humanvoiceswakus1@gmail.com. I assume that the small amount of work presented in each episode constitutes fair use. Publishers, authors, or other copyright holders who would prefer to not have their work presented here can also email me at humanvoiceswakus1@gmail.com, and I will remove the episode immediately. — Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/support

Ted Hughes Responds to Fame – Human Voices Wake Us

A reading of a letter written by the poet Ted Hughes, to friend and critic Al Alvarez, in November of 1971. At this time, Alvarez was publishing an intimate (and to Hughes's mind, exploitative) account of the 1963 suicide of the poet Sylvia Plath. The letter can be found in The Letters of Ted Hughes, pages 321-326.  I use this letter as a starting point to wonder why we treat the famous, or just the infamous, the way we do. The anecdotal knowledge of Ted Hughes's and Sylvia Plath's marriage and private life either turns the two of them into entertainment and anecdote, or it places the two of them onto the exaggerated plinths of Monster and Victim. This intrusion into private lives and private griefs, and the ease with which we, fifty years later, continue to lap up the gossip surrounding well-known people, and our own desire to turn people into symbols, should be an obvious parallel to Twitter and cable news. What if all of it just isn't any of our business? Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to humanvoiceswakus1@gmail.com. I assume that the small amount of work presented in each episode constitutes fair use. Publishers, authors, or other copyright holders who would prefer to not have their work presented here can also email me at humanvoiceswakus1@gmail.com, and I will remove the episode immediately. — Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/support

Ted Hughes's Origin Story – Human Voices Wake Us

A reading from the letters of Ted Hughes, on how he came to discover a love for poetry, the natural world, as well as folklore and mythology, and how all three became intertwined and essential to his life. The poet in question, whose name I don't reveal until the end, is Ted Hughes. The letters I read from here can be found in Letters of Ted Hughes. If you can recommend a similar story about how anyone discovered their passion, and would like me to read from, email me at humanvoiceswakus1@gmail.com. Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to humanvoiceswakus1@gmail.com. I assume that the small amount of work presented in each episode constitutes fair use. Publishers, authors, or other copyright holders who would prefer to not have their work presented here can also email me at humanvoiceswakus1@gmail.com, and I will remove the episode immediately. — Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/support

Beethoven on His Deathbed – Human Voices Wake Us

A reading from Jan Swafford's Beethoven: Anguish & Triumph, narrating the last months of Beethoven's life. Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to humanvoiceswakus1@gmail.com. I assume that the small amount of work presented in each episode constitutes fair use. Publishers, authors, or other copyright holders who would prefer to not have their work presented here can also email me at humanvoiceswakus1@gmail.com, and I will remove the episode immediately. — Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/support

Poetry & Education in Eighth Century England – Human Voices Wake Us

A reading of two chapters from Peter Ackroyd's book, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination.  Chapter 5, "A Rare & Singular Bede," covers the life of the Venerable Bede, as well as education and culture in England in the eighth century. Chapter 14, "Anglo-Saxon Attitudes," is a brief look into Anglo-Saxon (aka Old English) poetry, and its continued life and reverberations in English poetry, through the present day. Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to humanvoiceswakus1@gmail.com. I assume that the small amount of work presented in each episode constitutes fair use. Publishers, authors, or other copyright holders who would prefer to not have their work presented here can also email me at humanvoiceswakus1@gmail.com, and I will remove the episode immediately. — Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/support

Artlessness – Human Voices Wake Us

Artlessness is a thing.  Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.  I assume that the small amount of work presented in each episode constitutes fair use. Publishers, authors, or other copyright holders who would prefer to not have their work presented here can also email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com, and I will remove the episode immediately. — Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/support

Advice from Beethoven, Joseph Campbell, W. S. Merwin, W. D. Snodgrass – Human Voices Wake Us

Here, with the help of a few quotations, I ask: should poets and writers be able to cook themselves a decent meal, or is a life of the mind (with a side of fast food) the best we can expect? Is it a relief to hear Beethoven admit that everything he did, outside of music, was wrong and stupid? And is it useful to tell younger poets that they should find anything to do other than poetry, since it will never be as fulfilling as they want it to be. Sometimes these are the best episodes, where quotations on creativity from a handful of people can be tossed around and thought about in real time. The main quotations discussed here come from Joseph Campbell (interviewed by Michael Toms), Beethoven (from Jan Swafford's biography), and the Paris Review interviews with W. S. Merwin and W. D. Snodgrass. You can join Human Voices Wake Us on Patreon, or sign up for our newsletter, by clicking here. I assume that the small amount of work presented in each episode constitutes fair use. Publishers, authors, or other copyright holders who would prefer to not have their work presented here can also email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com, and I will remove the episode immediately. — Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/support

The Poet Speaks: Flannery O'Connor, Jacques Barzun, Jean Guéhenno – Human Voices Wake Us

The Poet Speaks will be a series of episodes where I share my favorite comments on creativity from other artists, poets, and writers.  The quotations from this episode come from: Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence, 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life Jean Guéhenno, The Diary of the Dark Years: 1940-1944 Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com. I assume that the small amount of work presented in each episode constitutes fair use. Publishers, authors, or other copyright holders who would prefer to not have their work presented here can also email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com, and I will remove the episode immediately. — Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/support

Hart Crane to His Father – Human Voices Wake Us

A reading of a letter Hart Crane sent to his father in January of 1924. I don't know of a better attempt by a poet to explain his vocation to someone who will never understand it, than this.  The letter is found on O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane, edited by Langdon Hammer & Brom Weber. Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com. I assume that the small amount of work presented in each episode constitutes fair use. Publishers, authors, or other copyright holders who would prefer to not have their work presented here can also email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com, and I will remove the episode immediately. — Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/support

The Poet Speaks: Da Vinci, Aiken, Meredith – Human Voices Wake Us

The Poet Speaks will be a series of episodes where I share my favorite comments on creativity from other artists, poets, and writers. The quotations from this episode come from Serge Bramly's Leonardo: The Artist & the Man, and the Paris Review interviews with Conrad Aiken and William Meredith. Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com. I assume that the small amount of work presented in each episode constitutes fair use. Publishers, authors, or other copyright holders who would prefer to not have their work presented here can also email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com, and I will remove the episode immediately. — Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/support

The Poet Speaks: Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, Lowell, Larkin, Paz – Human Voices Wake Us

The Poet Speaks will be a series of episodes where I share my favorite comments on writing and creativity from other artists, poets, and writers. The quotations from this episode come from James Shapiro's 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear, and the Paris Review interviews with Robert Fitzgerald, Philip Larkin, Octavio Paz, and Robert Lowell. Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com. I assume that the small amount of work presented in each episode constitutes fair use. Publishers, authors, or other copyright holders who would prefer to not have their work presented here can also email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com, and I will remove the episode immediately. — Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/support

Vermeer in Bosnia – Human Voices Wake Us

A reading from Lawrence Weschler’s collection of essays, “Vermeer in Bosnia,” where a war-crimes trial judge finds some solace from his daily work by visiting Vermeer’s paintings at the Mauritshuis museum. Buy the book here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0679777407 Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com. I assume that the small amount of work presented in each episode constitutes fair use. Publishers, authors, or other copyright holders who would prefer to not have their work presented here can also email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com, and I will remove the episode immediately. — Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/support

Poems for the Lonely & Creative Night – Human Voices Wake Us

A reading of five poems from my (as yet unpublished) book, "School of Night." Each circle around the strange feeling of being awake and alone at night, and the creativity and paranoia that can result. Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com. — Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/support

Jung’s Great Dream – Human Voices Wake Us

An episode from 10/15/20: Only the third episode in this podcast (and you can hear it in my voice, where I still sound a little uncomfortable), tonight I read Carl Jung's description of his famous "Dream of the House." In the dream, Jung walks from the top floor and down through the rest of the house, into the basement, and beyond. As each lower level in the house appeared to represent an earlier moment in history, Jung considered the house to be a kind of map of the psyche, where the lower levels represented the unconsciousness itself. Jung said that it was this dream, which seemed to contain information both personal/autobiographical and impersonal/historical, which gave him his first inkling of what he would later call the “collective unconscious.” In September of 1909, Jung traveled to America with Sigmund Freud and others, and it was on the return journey that he had his dream. The account of the dream that I read from comes from Jung's memoirs late in life, Memories, Dreams, Reflections; I then read from Ronald Hayman's A Life of Jung, who notes some differences between this and earlier accounts of the dream. You can join Human Voices Wake Us on Patreon, or sign up for our newsletter here. I assume that the small amount of work presented in each episode constitutes fair use. Publishers, authors, or other copyright holders who would prefer to not have their work presented here can also email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com, and I will remove the episode immediately. — Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/support