9/23/22: Tonight I read ten essential poems from the American poet Robinson Jeffers (1187-1962). Selections of Jeffers’s poetry are legion: many of them can be found here. The five-volume Collected Poems of Robinson Jeffers, edited by Tim Hunt and published by Stanford University Press, can be found here. You can read more about his life at the Poetry Foundation and Wikipedia. A larger selection of his poetry, which I recorded in 2020-2021, can be found here.
The poems I read are:
- The Excesses of God
- Point Joe
- Hooded Night
- New Mexican Mountain
- Nova
- from Hungerfield
- De Rerum Virtute
- Vulture
- “I am seventy-four years old and suddenly all my strength”
- Inscription for a Gravestone
The episode ends with a 1941 Library of Congress recording of Jeffers reading his poem, “Natural Music.”