Poems for the Speed of Life: Recent Episodes
Poems for the Speed of Life
Poems for the Speed of Life is a podcast to bring the power of poetry to your day.
Each episode includes a reading of a one poem, some thoughts and ideas, and an invitation to allow it to speak to you however it does.
Poetry is a vital exploration of the world, of ourselves, of ourselves in the world.
If you enjoy the podcast, please leave Poems for the Speed of Life a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts so other people can find it too.
Welcome to this episode of Poems for the Speed of Life with Shane Breslin, writer, business owner, poetry advocate and poet.
This is Episode 9 of this series of the show on the theme of "Fatherhood”.
Today's poem is "Because" by James McAuley.
You can read today’s poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", and Episode 200, "A New Era for Poems for the Speed of Life", in your podcast player.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Instagram here and Facebook here.
You can subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
- On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
- On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
- On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
Music Credit:
MANTRA by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/Creative Commons CC BY 3.0https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Welcome to this episode of Poems for the Speed of Life with Shane Breslin, writer, business owner, poetry advocate and poet.
This is the eighth episode of this series of the show on the theme of "Fatherhood”.
Today's episode is a different format, because the typical format - reading a poem twice straight through, and then offering some thoughts - couldn't work for a 500-line poem like "Michael", William Wordsworth's great pastoral.
Because of that, this is a much longer episode, so whether you enjoy it in full, or you dip in multiple times, I do hope you enjoy it.
And as always, if you do, please do tell one person about Poems for the Speed of Life.
You can read today’s poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", and Episode 200, "A New Era for Poems for the Speed of Life", in your podcast player.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Instagram here and Facebook here.
You can subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
- On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
- On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
- On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
Music Credit:
MANTRA by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/Creative Commons CC BY 3.0https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Welcome to this episode of Poems for the Speed of Life with Shane Breslin, writer, business owner, poetry advocate and poet.
This is the sixth episode of this series of the show on the theme of "Fatherhood”.
Today's poem is "Weakness" by Alden Nowlan.
You can read today’s poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", and Episode 200, "A New Era for Poems for the Speed of Life", in your podcast player.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Instagram here and Facebook here.
You can subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
- On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
- On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
- On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
Music Credit:
MANTRA by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/Creative Commons CC BY 3.0https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Welcome to this episode of Poems for the Speed of Life with Shane Breslin, writer, business owner, poetry advocate and poet.
This is the sixth episode of this series of the show on the theme of "Fatherhood”.
Today's poem is "On my First Son" by Ben Jonson.
You can read today’s poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", and Episode 200, "A New Era for Poems for the Speed of Life", in your podcast player.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Instagram here and Facebook here.
You can subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
- On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
- On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
- On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
Music Credit:
MANTRA by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/Creative Commons CC BY 3.0https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Welcome to this episode of Poems for the Speed of Life with Shane Breslin, writer, business owner, poetry advocate and poet.
This is the fourth episode of this series of the show on the theme of "Fatherhood”.
Today's poem is "The Gift" by Li-Young Lee.
You can read today’s poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", and Episode 200, "A New Era for Poems for the Speed of Life", in your podcast player.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Instagram here and Facebook here.
You can subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
- On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
- On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
- On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
Music Credit:
MANTRA by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/Creative Commons CC BY 3.0https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Welcome to this episode of Poems for the Speed of Life with Shane Breslin, writer, business owner, poetry advocate and poet.
This is the fourth episode of this series of the show on the theme of "Fatherhood”.
Today's poem is "My Father's Hats" by Mark Irwin
You can read today’s poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", and Episode 200, "A New Era for Poems for the Speed of Life", in your podcast player.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Instagram here and Facebook here.
You can subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
- On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
- On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
- On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
Music Credit:
MANTRA by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/Creative Commons CC BY 3.0https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Welcome to this episode of Poems for the Speed of Life with Shane Breslin, writer, business owner, poetry advocate and poet.
This is the third episode of this series of the show on the theme of "Fatherhood”.
Today's poem is "Father's Song" by Gregory Orr.
You can read today’s poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", and Episode 200, "A New Era for Poems for the Speed of Life", in your podcast player.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Instagram here and Facebook here.
You can subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
- On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
- On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
- On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
Music Credit:
MANTRA by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/Creative Commons CC BY 3.0https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
This is the second episode of this series on Fatherhood.
Today's poem is a song lyric: "The Living Years" by Mike Rutherford, of Mike and the Mechanics.
For full show notes please visit the podcast page on Substack.
**
All the poems in this series will be about fathers or by fathers.
They will have something vital to show us about the experience, either of fatherhood itself, or of being a son or daughter of a father.
One of the poems was written in 1603, another in 1800, but most will be from the last 50 years or so. There will be a poem by a star of social media, there will be a poem that is actually a song lyric, and I also — and this is a first for me — will be including one of my own poems in this series, a poem I wrote last year about and for my daughter.
This series will be for men who would like to be able to emulate their own fathers, and also for men who want to become the father they never had.
But it won’t just be for men. Around 60% of the listeners to this podcast over the past 18 months have been women, and all the episodes in this series will be for women too. Because men need women and women need men. We need each other to sustain life, and we need each other to enjoy to the full the life we sustain. At our best, we each bring something different and essential.
So there can be doubt that there are lots of women out there who would like their men — their husbands or partners or the men they would like to meet, the men who are the fathers of their children now or might be in the future — to fully embody the role of father, in all its complexities and challenges and glories.
We all need fathers and father figures in our lives, and maybe now more than ever, with so much immaturity, short-term thinking and lack of leadership in the world. This series of poems will try to bring some of that inspiration and wisdom straight to you.
So thank you for being here. Please enjoy this series of Poems for the Speed of Life, starting on Saturday, June 8th, and if you do, please share one episode with someone who might benefit from hearing it.
See you then.
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", and Episode 200, "A New Era for Poems for the Speed of Life", in your podcast player.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Instagram here and Facebook here.
You can subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
- On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
- On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
- On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
Music Credit:
MANTRA by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/Creative Commons CC BY 3.0https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Welcome to another series of Poems for the Speed of Life with Shane Breslin, writer, business owner helping organisations build digital empires, poetry advocate, poet and podcaster.
This is the first episode of this series on Fatherhood.
Today's poem is "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden.
For full show notes please visit the podcast page on Substack.
All the poems in this series will be about fathers or by fathers.
They will have something vital to show us about the experience, either of fatherhood itself, or of being a son or daughter of a father.
One of the poems was written in 1603, another in 1800, but most will be from the last 50 years or so. There will be a poem by a star of social media, there will be a poem that is actually a song lyric, and I also — and this is a first for me — will be including one of my own poems in this series, a poem I wrote last year about and for my daughter.
This series will be for men who would like to be able to emulate their own fathers, and also for men who want to become the father they never had.
But it won’t just be for men. Around 60% of the listeners to this podcast over the past 18 months have been women, and all the episodes in this series will be for women too. Because men need women and women need men. We need each other to sustain life, and we need each other to enjoy to the full the life we sustain. At our best, we each bring something different and essential.
So there can be doubt that there are lots of women out there who would like their men — their husbands or partners or the men they would like to meet, the men who are the fathers of their children now or might be in the future — to fully embody the role of father, in all its complexities and challenges and glories.
We all need fathers and father figures in our lives, and maybe now more than ever, with so much immaturity, short-term thinking and lack of leadership in the world. This series of poems will try to bring some of that inspiration and wisdom straight to you.
So thank you for being here. Please enjoy this series of Poems for the Speed of Life, starting on Saturday, June 8th, and if you do, please share one episode with someone who might benefit from hearing it.
See you then.
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", and Episode 200, "A New Era for Poems for the Speed of Life", in your podcast player.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Instagram here and Facebook here.
You can subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
- On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
- On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
- On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
Music Credit:
MANTRA by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/Creative Commons CC BY 3.0https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Welcome to another series of Poems for the Speed of Life with Shane Breslin, writer, business owner helping organisations build digital empires, poetry advocate, poet and podcaster.
The next series of Poems for the Speed of Life will begin on Saturday, June 8th, 2024.
The theme for the new series is Fatherhood.
Shane is a father of two school-age children and he sees it as the biggest responsibility in his life and the thing he grapples with as much as anything. Fatherhood never stays the same. It’s continually evolving. You’ve just learned how to be a good father to your 10-year-old boy and suddenly he’s 12 and starting puberty and you’re starting to learn all over again.
All the poems in this series will be about fathers or by fathers.
They will have something vital to show us about the experience, either of fatherhood itself, or of being a son or daughter of a father.
One of the poems was written in 1603, another in 1800, but most will be from the last 50 years or so. There will be a poem by a star of social media, there will be a poem that is actually a song lyric, and I also — and this is a first for me — will be including one of my own poems in this series, a poem I wrote last year about and for my daughter.
This series will be for men who would like to be able to emulate their own fathers, and also for men who want to become the father they never had.
But it won’t just be for men. Around 60% of the listeners to this podcast over the past 18 months have been women, and all the episodes in this series will be for women too. Because men need women and women need men. We need each other to sustain life, and we need each other to enjoy to the full the life we sustain. At our best, we each bring something different and essential.
So there can be doubt that there are lots of women out there who would like their men — their husbands or partners or the men they would like to meet, the men who are the fathers of their children now or might be in the future — to fully embody the role of father, in all its complexities and challenges and glories.
We all need fathers and father figures in our lives, and maybe now more than ever, with so much immaturity, short-term thinking and lack of leadership in the world. This series of poems will try to bring some of that inspiration and wisdom straight to you.
So thank you for being here. Please enjoy this series of Poems for the Speed of Life, starting on Saturday, June 8th, and if you do, please share one episode with someone who might benefit from hearing it.
See you then.
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", and Episode 200, "A New Era for Poems for the Speed of Life", in your podcast player.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Instagram here and Facebook here.
You can subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
- On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
- On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
- On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
Music Credit:
MANTRA by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/
Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/
Creative Commons CC BY 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Today’s poem is “Begin” by Brendan Kennelly, the much-loved Irish poet who died in 2021 at the age of 85.
It is a poem about the beauty in the awareness of the ordinary precious world around us, and also about the foreverness, the sense of the eternal that comes through all endings and finality and loss.
For full show notes for this episode, visit the episode page on Substack.
Thank you for joining me for this series.
Join me over on Substack to keep in touch with the show as we move forward.
You can read "Begin" by Brendan Kennelly here
Today's poem is "Dawn Revisited" by Rita Dove, the former US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winner.
You can read the full show notes and join the community over on Substack here.
You can read the poem here.
Today's episode brings you three of the Cantos from "In Memoriam AHH" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, written over 16 years and published in 1850.
You can read the full show notes and join the community over on Substack here.
The full text of the poem is available here.
You can find these three Cantos by scrolling down the page to the Roman numerals XXII (22), V (5) and VII (7).
Today’s poem is "The birthday of the world" by Marge Piercy, an American writer, poet and activist who has published more than 20 collections of poetry spanning more than 50 years.
This is Episode 9 of this series called "Beginnings", which started with "How Dark the Beginning" by Maggie Smith in Episode 201.
You can read today's poem here
Today’s poem is "The Fisherman", by WB Yeats, the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet who died in 1939.
This is Episode 8 of this series called "Beginnings", which started with "How Dark the Beginning" by Maggie Smith in Episode 201.
You can read today's poem here
Today’s poem is "This is not the end" by Tanner Olson, an American poet based in Tennessee.
This is Episode 7 of this series called "Beginnings", which started with "How Dark the Beginning" by Maggie Smith in Episode 201.
You can read today's poem here
Today’s poem is "Dawn at St Patrick's" by Derek Mahon, an Irish poet who died in 2020 at the age of 78.
This is Episode 6 of this series called "Beginnings", which started with "How Dark the Beginning" by Maggie Smith in Episode 201.
You can read the poem here
This is the fifth episode of this series of "Beginnings" from Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "Beginning" by Lia Purpura.
Lia Purpura is an American poet, writer and educator who has published four collections of poems, King Baby, Stone Sky Lifting, The Brighter the Veil and the collection from which today's poem is taken It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful.
You can read the poem here
***Join the Community!
If you join the community you will be supporting this podcast and you will also be able to take part in the discussion on every episode.
Join us on Substack here
Organizing an event?
Shane Breslin, Irish creative entrepreneur and the founder of Poems for the Speed of Life, is accepting bookings to speak at events around the world starting in summer 2024.
To express an interest in bringing Shane to speak at your event, please fill out your details here.
Finally, if this is your first time here, we encourage you to go back to listen two earlier episodes for more context on this project.
In Episode 200, "A New Era for Poems for the Speed of Life", you will hear of the new direction for this podcast as we moved into 2024.
One of the key pieces of that is a new series-based approach, and this series, "Beginnings", starting in February 2024, is the first of those.
And in Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", you will hear more about the mission of this podcast.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
- On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
- On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and leave a rating and review.
- On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
This is an episode of a special series of Poems for the Speed of Life titled "Beginnings".
Today's poem is "For a New Beginning" by John O'Donohue.
John O’Donohue was a great Irish spiritual leader, teacher, theologian and philosopher who continues to find new audiences all over the world more than 15 years after his passing at just 54 years of age.
Three earlier John O’Donohue poems have featured on this podcast. You can find "Beannacht" in Episode 17, "On the Death of the Beloved" in Episode 95 and "A Christmas Blessing" in Episode 199.
You can find those episodes by searching the archives of this show in your podcast player.
You can read the poem here
***Join the Community!
If you join the community you will be supporting this podcast and you will also be able to take part in the discussion on every episode.
Join us on Substack here
Organizing an event?
Shane Breslin, Irish creative entrepreneur and the founder of Poems for the Speed of Life, is accepting bookings to speak at events around the world starting in summer 2024.
To express an interest in bringing Shane to speak at your event, please fill out your details here.
Finally, if this is your first time here, we encourage you to go back to listen two earlier episodes for more context on this project.
In Episode 200, "A New Era for Poems for the Speed of Life", you will hear of the new direction for this podcast as we moved into 2024.
One of the key pieces of that is a new series-based approach, and this series, "Beginnings", starting in February 2024, is the first of those.
And in Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", you will hear more about the mission of this podcast.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
- On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
- On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and leave a rating and review.
- On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
This is the third episode in this series, "Beginnings", on Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "Center of the Universe" by Hannah Emerson.
Hannah Emerson is a nonspeaking autistic poet from Lafayette, New York whose work has been featured in The Paris Review, Poetry magazine, and the Poetry Society of America.
Hannah Emerson writes a regular Substack called "The Kissing Nothing We Become", which has the subtitle "I'm kissing you today helping you kiss your day yes yes"
Read Hannah Emerson on Substack here
And read the poem "Center of the Universe" on The Marginalian here
***Join the Community!
If you join the community you will be supporting this podcast and you will also be able to take part in the discussion on every episode.
Join us on Substack here
Organizing an event?
Shane Breslin, Irish creative entrepreneur and the founder of Poems for the Speed of Life, is accepting bookings to speak at events around the world starting in summer 2024.
To express an interest in bringing Shane to speak at your event, please fill out your details here.
Finally, if this is your first time here, we encourage you to go back to listen two earlier episodes for more context on this project.
In Episode 200, "A New Era for Poems for the Speed of Life", you will hear of the new direction for this podcast as we moved into 2024.
One of the key pieces of that is a new series-based approach, and this series, "Beginnings", starting in February 2024, is the first of those.
And in Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", you will hear more about the mission of this podcast.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
- On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
- On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and leave a rating and review.
- On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
This is the second episode of a new series of Poems for the Speed of Life titled "Beginnings".
Today's poem is "Aristotle" by Billy Collins, an American poet and former US poet laureate.
This is the first episode of a new series of Poems for the Speed of Life titled "Beginnings".
Today's poem is "How Dark the Beginning" by Maggie Smith.
Maggie Smith is an American poet, writer and editor, not to be confused with the older British film actor. Film does, however, feature in this poem about the nuances of light and dark, and how the dawn, and beginnings, are often not bathed in light.
You can read the poem here
***Join the Community!
If you join the community you will be supporting this podcast and you will also be able to take part in the discussion on every episode.
Join us on Substack here
Organizing an event?
Shane Breslin, Irish creative entrepreneur and the founder of Poems for the Speed of Life, is accepting bookings to speak at events around the world starting in summer 2024.
To express an interest in bringing Shane to speak at your event, please fill out your details here.
Finally, if this is your first time here, we encourage you to go back to listen two earlier episodes for more context on this project.
In Episode 200, "A New Era for Poems for the Speed of Life", you will hear of the new direction for this podcast as we moved into 2024.
One of the key pieces of that is a new series-based approach, and this series, "Beginnings", starting in February 2024, is the first of those.
And in Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", you will hear more about the mission of this podcast.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
- On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
- On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and leave a rating and review.
- On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
Thank you for listening to Poems for the Speed of Life, with Shane Breslin.
Please enjoy this special episode about the future direction of the podcast, what you can expect and how you can get involved.
There are four announcements:
- This podcast will always be free and available wherever you listen to podcasts
- If you like you can support the show financially (more details to follow)
- The show from now on will take a series-based approach, with breaks between series
- I will be taking my message to event stages with a keynote talk that can be delivered at health, wealth, wellbeing, business or personal development conferences around the world.
If you are an events organizer, or know someone who is, please go to this link and fill out your expression of interest to have me speak at your event.
Welcome to another episode in this special Christmas and end of year series of this podcast. The work of John O’Donohue, the great Irish spiritual leader, teacher, theologian and philosopher, continues to find new audiences all over the world more than 15 years after his passing at just 54 years of age. Two John O’Donohue poems have been among the most sought after episodes of this podcast. You can find “Beannacht” in Episode 17 and “On the Death of the Beloved” in Episode 95 by searching the archives of this show in your podcast player.
Jan Richardson is an artist, writer, and ordained minister in the United Methodist Church in the USA. She travels widely as a retreat leader and conference speaker.
This poem is part of a special Christmas-themed short series for the end of the year.
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
- On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
- On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
- On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Dylan Thomas was a Welsh writer and poet.
This is one of his best-remembered pieces of writing, a long prose poem recounting his memories of the Christmases of his childhood.
This recording was originally made in 2019 as part of a different podcast project, but I thought it would be good to dust it off and re-edit it slightly to include here.
It's one of my favourite pieces of Christmas writing. I hope you enjoy.
You can read the piece here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
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Hi. Thank you for your patience and presence as I think through the next steps for this podcast. Poetry can be a transformational experience, and the last thing I ever want to do is reduce something that’s transformational into something that’s just transactional. Finally, if you would like to let me know what you think, I will gratefully receive your messages. You can email me at shane [at] shanebreslin [dot] com or leave me a voice message at this link: https://anchor.fm/poems-for-speed-of-life/message
Adelaide Crapsey was an American poet who died in 1914 at the age of just 36.
She often wrote in the format called the "cinquain", a tightly structured form of poetry that owes something to the old Japanese haiku.
The cinquain includes one stanza of five lines, with a per-line syllable structure of 2-4-6-8-2.
This poem, about the quiet of a November night, is included here because this month of the year (at least in the western Northern hemisphere) has recently found itself squeezed and lost between two festivals, Halloween and Christmas, which have become so heavily consumerist over recent decades.
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
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Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Wendell Berry has been writing and publishing poetry and prose for more than 60 years.
He has featured in this podcast before in Episode 70 ("The Peace of Wild Things").
It's interesting that the core idea of that earlier poem, peace, returns here.
What is it to be "at peace and in place"?
What is it for a man to be "at peace and in place"?
What is it for a man to give his hands and voice and mind to other men, especially those who are "thing-ridden" and bent on extraction and destruction?
If you're interested in more on the theme of men and the male experience, do check out Episode 145, three poems on masculinity and the male experience from Pat Boran, Seamus Heaney and Norman MacCaig.
You can read "To Think of the Life of a Man" here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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Chantal House is a poet whose recent chapbook is titled "Reaching for the Sun".
The mission behind her work is that everyone should be a poet, and everyone could have poetry as part of their daily cycle.
That mission aligns a lot with the mission of this podcast, to bring one poem, and some of its power, to every day.
You can read the definition of "Does every generation" here
You can follow Chantal via @bear_hunt_poems on Instagram
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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Annie Finch has been publishing and editing books of poetry and poetics for three decades.
Her most recent book is Earth Days: Poems, Chants, and Spellsin Five Directions (Nirala Publications, 2023).
Samhain is the ancient Irish and pagan festival of the autumn, the Celtic new year and the time when the spirits moved between worlds. It is the ancestor of the modern day Halloween.
There is great mystery in this poem. Enjoy.
You can read "Samhain" here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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Music Credit:
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John Koenig's decade-plus-long project, "The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows", earned a fitting celebration in 2021 when the book based upon it became a New York Times Bestseller.
Koenig set out to fill the gaps in our language of emotion, creating words such as kenopsia, dès vu and énouement.
One of the definitions that went viral in the early days of the project, and which continued to surface and resurface for years afterwards, was "sonder".
In just a single sentence, Koenig poetically and lyrically explores the lives of all the countless others and how they interact with us our own, if only fleetingly, or only in our minds.
You can read the definition of "Sonder" here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
David Gate is an English poet based in the United States.
Per his own website, his work centers around care for the individual (heart, mind, body & soul) and the nurture of community (culture, the earth & environment, the dignity of others and spiritual communities).
Those values vibe strongly with the ethos of this podcast.
You can read "Friendship is what will save us" here
You can follow David Gates on Instagram here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Raymond Carver was an American writer and poet who died in 1988.
You can find an earlier poem by Carver, "Happiness", in Episode 5 of this podcast.
This poem is the final poem in Carver's final collection, A New Path to the Waterfall.
Please share your thoughts by joining the Poems for the Speed of Life Substack community here.
You can read "Late Fragment" here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Vaclav Havel was a Czech writer, dissident and statesman, who was President of Czechoslovakia and later of the new Czech Republic.
This short piece is an essay on the meaning and importance of hope, especially in difficult times.
Please share your thoughts by joining the Poems for the Speed of Life Substack community here.
You can read "Hope" here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
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Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Gwen Harwood was an Australian poet.
In the male-dominated publishing world of the mid-20th century, she had a difficult time getting published, and resorted to submitting work under a range of male pseudonyms.
This poem is an insight into her complex and fraught relationship with womanhood, with motherhood.
Please share your thoughts by joining the Poems for the Speed of Life Substack community here.
You can read "In The Park" here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Some poems are straightforward to break down into paragraphs, sentences and clauses, to better extract their meaning.
This one is a little more difficult.
There are three sentences here, but the last of them, when you see the poem laid out on page or screen, spans six stanzas, and takes us to several places in both the physical world and the interior world.
Who is the true love?
Is it the love and acceptance of another?
Is it the love and acceptance of oneself?
Please share your thoughts by joining the Poems for the Speed of Life Substack community here.
You can read "The Truelove" here
You can also find the poem as part of David Whyte's series of 52 sessions on the Waking Up app here.
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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To leave the show a review:
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Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
A gorgeous little poem that takes Charles Darwin and his reputed love of stories as its starting point.
This symbol - one of the fathers of modern science, upholding the value of story as something vital, alongside the scientific fact of his work - presents questions about what truth is.
And asks us to consider whether truth is something more than just a collection of facts.
You can read "Consolation" here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
What is the role of England in this poem?
Is "The Soldier" a nationalist polemic, glorifying war?
Or can we read the ideal, idyllic England of Rupert Brooke as a symbol of something else?
You can read "The Soldier" here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Breda Wall Ryan is Irish writer and poet.
She has published two collections of poetry, In a Hare’s Eye and Raven Mothers. Her poems are full of powerful imagery, and she often brings the lives of women into sharp focus.
You can read "Tremolo" on her website here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
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Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Hugo Dewar was an English poet and communist of the 20th century.
You can read "Barcelona" here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
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Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Nanao Sakaki was a Japanese poet and wanderer, who has been an inspiration to poets, artists and musicians around the world for the past half century.
In his foreword to Sakaki's collection, How to Life on Planet Earth, his fellow poet Gary Snyder (whose work you can hear in Episode 24 and Episode 116 of this podcast) wrote that he was known as "a uniquely free and bold-spirited wanderer, occasional river or mountain activist, singer and chanter, and internationally published poet."
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
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Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Douglas Dunn is a Scottish poet, who has been publishing collections for more than 50 years.
This poem, "France", was part of a collection of poems written following the death of his wife, Lesley Balfour Wallace, in 1981.
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Bertolt Brecht was a Germany playwright and poet of the first half of the 20th century.
He was influenced by and part of the modernist movement which also included the writer James Joyce, the filmmaker Sergey Eisenstein and the artists Pablo Picasso, all of them trying to make sense of a world of rapidly encroaching technology, politics and violence.
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Many listeners will be familiar with Mary Oliver.
This is the fourth Mary Oliver poem to feature on this podcast.
You can find Snowy Night in Episode 2, The Journey in Ep. 34 and Wild Geese in Episode 143.
This one returns to some gorgeous familiar ground with Mary Oliver — the tension between the sweetness and slowness of the natural world, and the restlessness of human ambition.
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Sharon Olds is an American poet.
She has been publishing poetry for more than 40 years, most recently Balladz, published in 2023.
She has written a lot about men. One of her most famous poems is titled "Ode to the Penis", and in another, "My Son the Man", she write about how she must “get over my fear of men now my son is going to be one”.
This poem is about the terminal diagnosis of another man, her father, with whom she had a difficult relationship - he was an abusive alcoholic.
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Note: This episode is in a new format. I read the poem twice through and then talk a little about why it's on the podcast and what it might be saying. If you're listening on Spotify, please find the Interact question that reads "What did you think of this episode?" and let me know what you think of this experimental format!
This is a poem that's often attributed to Charlie Chaplin, but probably has a different provenance. It seems to be a product of the Internet age's connectivity, virality and collective spirit.
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Note: This episode is a slightly different format than usual. It's a small experiment to see how it goes down with listeners, where I read the poem twice through and then ad-lib a little about why it's on the podcast and what it might be saying. If you're listening on Spotify, please find the Interact question that reads "What did you think of this episode?" and let me know what you think of this experimental format!
This is a poem by William Wordsworth, leading poet of English Romanticism.
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
- On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
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Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Note: This episode is a slightly different format than usual. It's a small experiment to see how it goes down with listeners, where I read the poem twice through and then ad-lib a little about why it's on the podcast and what it might be saying. If you're listening on Spotify, please find the Interact question that reads "What did you think of this episode?" and let me know what you think of this experimental format!
This is a poem by the Belgian-American poet May Sarton.
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
- On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
- On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
- On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Note: This episode is a slightly different format than usual. It's a small experiment to see how it goes down with listeners, where I read the poem twice through and then ad-lib a little about why it's on the podcast and what it might be saying. If you're listening on Spotify, please find the Interact question that reads "What did you think of this episode?" and let me know what you think of this experimental format!
This is a poem by Langston Hughes, an American poet and activist of the 20th century and one of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance.
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Note: This episode is a slightly different format than usual. It's a small experiment to see how it goes down with listeners, where I read the poem twice through and then ad-lib a little about why it's on the podcast and what it might be saying. If you're listening on Spotify, please find the Interact question that reads "What did you think of this episode?" and let me know what you think of this experimental format!WH Auden was an esteemed English poet of the first half of the 20th century.He will be familiar to many film fans for the poem "Funeral Blues", which took a central role in the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral.This poem is about the night mail train to Scotland.It was written for a documentary film in 1936.You can read the poem here***For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.To leave the show a review:On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)Music Credit:Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an eminent American writer and philosopher of the 19th century. He is also heralded as the forefather of Transcendentalism, a literary, philosophical, religious, and political movement of that century.
Emerson and his fellow Transcendentalists criticised the society of which they were a part, calling to task its unthinking conformity. They urged that each person find, in Emerson’s words, “an original relation to the universe”. Emerson sought and found this relation through solitude and nature, or solitude in nature.
He is famous now for his many essays, including "Self-Reliance", a long discussion on the merits of standing on one’s own two feet.
This philosophy has found its supporters and critics alike in the 21st century: it appeals to those who value personal growth and the development of the self, while it rankles with others who see the preoccupation with the self and the neglect of community as one of modernity’s original sins.
I can see both sides of the argument, but if I fall anywhere, I fall absolutely on the side of Emerson.
The self, the individual, the genius of one person is, to me, a core ingredient in so much that is good in the world. It lies at the heart of art, of literature, of science and all other human progress.
The problem arises when that individual self become a Doctor Evil type, greedily amassing a fortune while living in a mansion at the top of a mountain. As long as the individual, the self, the person, interfaces with and brings value to the rest of society, helping other people along the road as they themselves were helped before, then that’s the best possible outcome.
This poem is, I think, a perfect representation of that nuanced ideal: the successful person who actualises himself or herself, while staying a true and essential part of the greater whole.
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Charles Bukowski was a German-born American poet who died in 1994 at the age of 73.
His poems are raw, written in the spoken language of ordinary people, and opening up their hearts and their nerves to the possibilities of pain that are ever-present in the everyday.
Lurking beneath that pain, though, there is always with Bukowski some slight sense of humour — the humour to be found in bleakness and blackness — and always, always, always, there is a love for the complexities and compromises that add up to being human.
This poem “The Laughing Heart” is a call to action. A call for readers and listeners to take some control, to carve out a life away from the misery of dank submission and before death ends it forever.
This is the second poem from Charles Bukowski to feature in this podcast. You can hear his gorgeous poem, "Bluebird", back in Episode 61.
Inspires pursuing one's passions and finding joy in life
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
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Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Yehuda Amichai was an Israeli poet who died in the year 2000 at the age of 76.
His lifetime showed him all sides of persecution and despair, war and violence.
Born in Germany in the 1920s, his Jewish family fled in the 1930s to Palestine and later Israel.
A teacher, he served in the Israeli forces in the Sinai War in 1956 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
With these experiences, and his own sensibilities, he turned his attention in his writing to war and to peace after war, trying to understand the world that could create the Holocaust and all the other endless hardships of the 20th century.
In 1994 he was invited by the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to read some poems at the ceremony of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.
This is an extract from a much longer poem, titled Anniversaries of War, which was set to music by the composter Elizabeth Alexander.
In its few short lines it paints a picture of the beauty of the world amidst all its battles.
Excerpt from Anniversaries of War, by Yehuda Amichai:
Remember: even the departure to terrible battlespasses by gardens and windowsand children playing, a dog barking.
Remind the fallen fruitof its leaves and branches,remind the sharp thornshow soft and green they were in springtime,and do not forget,even a fistwas once an open palm and fingers.
English translation by Barbara and Benjamin Harshav
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Dale Wimbrow was an American music composer, radio artist and songwriter, but who among us really knows for what we’ll be remembered for?
(A quick aside to point you for a moment to Episode 81, "In a Restaurant" by Stephen Santus, which has a playful little take on the tiny things we might be remembered for.)
Wimbrow, who died in 1954 at the age of 58, wrote this piece for The American Magazine in 1934.
For much of the next 50 years its authorship was mostly unknown and attributed to various people when it was shared in magazine cuttings, newspaper clippings and letters.
Now, almost a century on, and thanks to the Internet, the words of Dale Wimbrow are a popular poetic encouragement for all of us to live in accordance with the most important thing of all: our innermost values.
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
WB Yeats asked in his poem "Among School Children", how can we know the dancer from the dance?
This fusion — the artist with the art — presents us with fascinating and troubling questions.
Is the artist an artist solely?
Where does humanity enter and exit?
In what way is the art itself more important than love and kindness, even if the love and kindness might in some way threaten the art?
And those questions come to mind when we consider the life and work of Pablo Neruda.
Neruda — born Ricardo Reyes Basoalto — was a Chilean poet and socialist diplomat, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.
Neruda died at the age of 69 in 1973: he had been hospitalized with cancer but new evidence in recent years suggests that he was poisoned on the orders of Augusto Pinochet, who had recently staged a successful coup and ruled the country as a dictator for the next 17 years.
Fellow South American Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a native of Colombia, once called Neruda "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language".
But he is not without his demons: while stationed in Spain as a diplomat, he abandoned his first wife and only daughter: the child spent most of her short life sick and in care and died at the age of eight, while refusing to help his Dutch wife flee Nazi-occupied Netherlands to Chile.
Maybe there are echoes of those complex questions — of the role of the poet in the world — in this poem, "Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market", translated here by Robin Robertson.
Generally, it is often interpreted as a musing on nature’s unknowable depths, the darkness that exists in this world that we cannot really know.
As I read it, I thought of the dark depths within the poet and the artist: how the poet does not just capture or describe the world, but is also fully part of it, and how none of us are ever all good or all evil, but as the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, "the line through good and evil goes through the heart of every man".
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Today’s poem is not dissimilar in tone or content to the piece included in Episode 159 recently.
That piece, by Mary Schmich, and now popularly known as “Wear Sunscreen”, was a sort of commencement address, a speech delivered to college graduates as they prepare to enter the “real world” and find their way.
This poem by Max Ehrmann also has that air.
Max Ehrmann was an American writer and poet who died in 1945. Despite producing a number of works he was not well known during his life, which he was all too aware, once noting:
"Perhaps when I am dead, some browser in libraries will come upon me, and, seeing that I was not altogether unworthy, will resurrect me from the dust of things forgotten."
That’s exactly what has happened with Desiderata (from the Latin, “Things desired”), a prose poem he wrote at the age of 55 in the 1920s and only became widely known long after his death and is now commonly seen in framed wallprints.
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Poetry, says Wendy Morton, is the shortest distance between two hearts.
The first time I read that quote, I read it as the shortest dance between two hearts, and I like that too.
Wendy Morton is a Canadian writer and poet.
The blurb of her memoir, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: Taking Poetry Public Across Canada, says that she has “probably done more to bring poetry and publicity together than any other living Canadian. Since 2001, she has relentlessly taken poetry out of bookstores and coffeeshops, out onto the street--"even into the air "--bringing corporate sponsors, poets and audiences together in new and exciting ways.”
This poem, "Compost Piles", is a gorgeous little riff about a simple daily ritual, bringing the bucket to the compost pile, spread over the expanse of a year, and all the little recollections it prompts.
Mindfulness has become big business in recent years. This poem is the essence of mindfulness: the worm, the grass from the year’s first cut, the half-eaten slice of bread all bringing memories of their moments back to the surface.
And it brings to mind also that old teaching from Newton’s science: that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but only changed from one form into another.
The compost bin is the daily evidence of that transformation, as this year’s cuttings and throw-aways and deadness give way to next year’s life.
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
As I record this, in September, the year has swayed totally from summer to autumn. A week ago we had a heatwave, the mercury rose past 30 degrees Celsius and everyone went to work in shorts. Today, the branches are swaying in the wind, the rain is heavy, the temperatures have dropped and the evenings are closing in.
This poem by Seamus Heaney is set in late August, at that moment between the passage of time from summer to autumn.
There is a much bigger passage of time here too, though, from youth to whatever comes next … maturity? Experience? Maybe, more than anything, a fading away as our bodies and our lives, like the fruit in the bowl, turn sour?
Where Dylan Thomas raged, raged against the dying of the light, Seamus Heaney is altogether more measured in tone at time’s travel, at summer giving way to autumn, at the fruit turning rotted in the bowl.
As I record this podcast, in September 2023, it is 10 years and 1 month since Heaney passed away.
We still have his words, immortal as they are. More than anything, I miss his voice.
There is no-one better at reading his own work than Seamus Heaney.
I will try to do it justice here, but if you check the description, I will also place a link to Heaney performing it.
You can read the poem here
Listen to Seamus Heaney read “Blackberry Picking”
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Patricia Williams is an American poet and retired former professor in design at the University of Wisconsin.
She started to write poetry in 2013, believing that (in the words on her LinkedIn page):
“Art, design, music and the literary arts are natural partners. All creatively examine life and living.”
“A creative examination of life and living” could be the tagline for this podcast.
Williams has published a number of chapbooks and collections, including Midwest Medley: Places & People, Wild Things & Weather” in 2018. Her newest book is "Rejection to Acceptance — 57 poems that finally made it”, a collection of poems and stories about being a poet and the life-cycle of poems, from their artistic inception all the way to publication, through all the uncertainty in the middle.
Some of her poems, rhythmic and often laced with undertones or overtones of humour, call to mind the work of the brilliant English poet Pam Ayres. You can hear a poem by Pam Ayres, “Woodland Burial” in Episode 43 of this podcast.
“Age as Measure” is a lovely little observation on the ups and downs of age.
In general, I think, we consider young as good and old as bad, but Williams here alerts us that age itself is a pointless metric, one that we should leave aside and look instead at the true nature of the thing itself, whether that thing is an iconic architect or a piece of cheese.
You can read the poem here
You can find more about Patricia Williams's work here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Emily Dickinson was an American poet, who lived in Amherst, Massachusetts between 1830 and 1886.
She wrote more than 1800 poems in her lifetime but just 10 of those were published while she was still alive. She was reclusive and considered eccentric, but in many ways she was far from withdrawn — she maintained regular written correspondence with at least a hundred people during her life.
Her poems are often dark in tone and mood, often dense in their construction. and don’t have typical rhythms or rhyme or even titles. But despite all that, her work has become a go-to for readers everywhere over the past century.
This short poem does have rhyme and rhythm, as well as a soulfulness and generosity and an awareness of pain that is almost, itself, painful in the depth of its feeling.
You can read the poem here
This is the second Emily Dickinson poem to feature on this podcast. You can go all the way back to Episode 13 to find “Hope is the thing with feathers”
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
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Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
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Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
I have memories of my grandparents, who seemed to give everything. They didn’t have money to give, but giving was not about money. Giving was everything else. It was the open door, kettle on and a packet of biscuits always stowed away, ready and waiting for a visitor.
That way of being seems to be rare nowadays. As people went from having nothing to having something, they suddenly had something to protect, something to conserve, and the feeling of lack and scarcity that characterises life for so many of us means we are careful to protect and conserve, fearful of a tomorrow where we find ourselves in need, and perhaps driven to that fear by a culture of advertising that pervades everything and always seems to tell us exactly what we’re missing.
Giving is not just for charity or community.
More and more, giving can also have a central role to play in a successful business, but only if it takes place without any expectation of a return. Because giving with expectation of receiving is not giving at all.
I remember Gary Vaynerchuk, a poster-child of Internet marketing and entrepreneurship and hustle, talking about this, about the importance of giving in his businesses.
“When you put others in front of yourself, whether intended or unintended, things just happen,” he said.
He went on, “It’s magical. Be it in life or business, I implore you to always seek to be the giver first. If you can give without expectation, you’ve got everything to gain. It’s not an easy trait to acquire but it’s certainly something I advise everyone to work towards. Not only will it make you feel good, but it’ll provide you the leverage that you can utilize if the opportunity comes knocking.”
This piece is one section of Gibran's great prose poem book, The Prophet, which was published in 1923.
During his lifetime, Gibran was considered and considered himself a painter, but a hundred years after the publication of The Prophet, his words continue to travel through time and space and deliver meaning and impact on many who come upon them.
It is the second piece from The Prophet to feature on this podcase. You can find “On Friendship” in Episode 93.
You can read "Giving" here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Mary Schmich (”Schmeek”) is a retired American journalist and columnist, who wrote for the Chicago Tribune for most of her career. She won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2012, for, the Pulitzer prize ran, “her wide range of down-to-earth columns that reflect the character and capture the culture of her famed city.”
This is her most famous piece, a column that appeared on the first of June 1997 as a mock-graduation speech. Graduation or commencement addresses are commonplace environment for wise elders to dispense knowing life advice to young people setting out on life’s road.
In those pre-social media days it still went viral, through word of mouth and early email, but it was really made famous by the Australian film director Baz Luhrmann, who set it to music and released it on an album in 1999.
You can read the piece here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
I found this poem in a little anthology called Poetry for a Lifetime, selected and annotated by Samuel Norfleet Etheredge in 1999.
Poetry for a Lifetime is available on that treasure trove of the Internet, archive.org, where you can borrow a PDF for an hour.
I dipped in and I found this poem.
Samuel Norfleet Etheredge was a World War II veteran, and heart surgeon, and lifelong advocate for poetry and the power of poems.
He died in 2011.
Priscilla Leonard was the pen-name of Emily Bissell, a social worker and social advocate who lived at the turn of the 20th century.
The poem is a little allegory of what happiness amounts to. It suggests that happiness is a crystal that's smashed in a million pieces, and all we can ever do is hope to gather up some of them and strive to avoid looking into the distance at the pieces of the crystal that can't be ours.
It is a gentle reminder to accept, to be grateful, to look at what we have and not what we don't.
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a 19th century American poet and educator. Wikipedia tells me he was the first American to complete a full translation of Dante's Divine Comedy and he was one of the so-called Fireside Poets of New England, a hugely popular set of 19th century poets who became the first Americans to really rival English poets in popularity.
That status — the poet of the common man or woman — owes much to poems like this one. “The Day is Done” is not only not grand, it actively campaigns against grand poetry.
It says, please don’t give me grand poetry that’s all energy and endeavour, when all I want is something to chase away the stresses of the day.
This is poetry that’s much closer to an everyday prayer, or a song to singalong to.
A century and a half after it was written, it can still play that role.
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
I am a great believer in personal development. In fact, this podcast, this project, is a marriage of two things that interest me greatly — the yearning that seems to be innate in the human mind and human heart to improve ourselves, to develop our skills and knowledge, to broaden our mind and our horizons, and the power of literature to move us and transcend us.
Great literature — novels, poetry, plays, films and film scripts — can be as powerful an agent of change and personal development as any other.
I first came across this poem in a classic of personal development, the grandfather of so-called “self-help books”, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.
It reminds me of a quote often attributed to Henry Ford, the inventor of the Ford motor-car: “Whether you think you can, or you think you can't – you're right!”
The author of this poem, Walter Wintle, is a complete ephemera. There is almost no detail anywhere on the Internet about his life, and there is a strong argument to be made that he did not even exist, and that the name was a pseudonym of somebody else.
First published in the Unity journal in 1905 and was included in Think and Grow Rich in 1937, it is a potent reminder to us all that the greatest thing we can do in our everyday challenges is change the way we think about them.
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
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Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This "poem" is a monologue from the end of one of the most astonishing songs I have ever heard.
I first heard of Ren when a friend Whatsapp’ed me eight or nine months ago encouraging me to check him out.
Of course, in our attention-deficit age, I said I would and then forgot.
Alan messaged me again two or three months later: "Did you check out Ren?"
I remembered that I had not and, now reminded, I clicked the link.
The word masterpiece is overused. The word great has been devalued.
“Hi Ren” is pure, unadulterated greatness, an absolute masterpiece.
It is one of several that Ren, a young Welsh songwriter, singer, guitarist, storyteller, rapper, poet, has released on YouTube and Spotify over the past year. At the time I release this podcast he is in Canada, receiving treatment for the illnesses and conditions that have had such a profound effect on his life. He is, as I say these words, without a music label. He is an artist of the future, doing things his way, embracing the freedom and possibility of the Internet, and finding a community that loves and cherishes him dearly.
Sinead O’Connor, the vastly talented and tormented Irish singer-songwriter who died earlier in 2023, praised Ren in some of her last posts on Twitter, when she wrote:
“Every song and or artist in history even Willie Dixon, Chuck Berry, The Beatles, NWA, Ice Cube, and even Bob Dylan, is officially relegated to class B. As are every actor in history or legend: living or dead, male or female. We all are now defunct.”
Ren might be the voice of his generation, but in our weirdly disconnected and distressed times, his generation might well span people of all every age, every faith, every nationality.
If you’re listening to this and you have yet to hear Ren, please, please, please, go seek him out. Start with “Hi Ren”, a 9-minute performance that is so phenomenal that it feels weird to describe it as a song. From there, check out the full 13-minute version of The Tale of Jenny and Screech.
These words come at the end of Hi Ren, a spoken word poem that I’m calling “Eternal Dance”. And Ren, thank you for what you’re putting into the world.
"Eternal Dance" by Ren
When I was 17 years old I shouted out into an empty room, into a blank canvas, that I would defeat the forces of evil, and for the next 10 years of my life I suffered the consequences... With Illness, autoimmunity and psychosis
As I got older I realised that there were no real winners or no real losers in physiological warfare But there were victims and there were students
It wasn’t David verses Goliath, it's was a pendulum eternally swaying between the dark and the light, and the brighter the light shone, the darker the shadow it cast
It was never a battle for me to win, it was an eternal dance, and like a dance, the more rigid I became the harder it got The more I cursed my clumsy footsteps the more i suffered And so I got older and I learned to relax, and I learned to soften, and that dance got easier
It is this eternal waltz that separates human beings from angels, from demons, from gods
And I must not forget, we must not forget, that we are human beings.
Experience "Hi Ren" here
Experience "The Tale of Jenny and Screech" here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.co
Bipolar disorder, formerly known as manic depression, has been a recognised mental health disorder since the publication of the DSM-3 (The Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders) in 1980.
In no way to diminish the reality of those who suffer from bipolar, human beings have always found themselves beset by extremes of emotion and experience. Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī most commonly known now simply as Rumi, was an Islamic teacher, scholar, philosopher and poet who lived in the 13th century.
This poem, translated by Coleman Barker, outlines these experiences, and not just the reality of them, but the importance of them, that they are essential, vital to a human lifetime.
There is a stern challenge, of course, in “welcoming in” the bad times, the negative experiences, the things we would give everything to avoid.
But equally, these shadows, these darknesses, offer us eternal truths.
As Ren, the epic singer-songwriter-vocal-wizward says in one of his monologues (which will be featured in this podcast soon…)
“the brighter the light shines, the darker the shadow it casts”
And that is what Rumi provides us with in The Guest House. An encouragement to welcome everything, because in every failure there is a direct dotted line to success, and because your shadows are inextricably linked to your light.
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
There’s a famous book by David Graeber called Bullshit Jobs. It outlines the way the corporate world has evolved in recent decades, with the growth of massive companies of tens of thousands of staff, most of them fulfilling roles that are painfully detached from meaning.
Work is a strange thing.
There’s a great short story by the writer Denis Johnson, called “Work”.
It’s about two guys who have been down on their luck for some time, who one day get a “job”: stripping copper wire from an abandoned house, and selling it for a handful of dollars that fills their pockets for today at least. There’s a short passage towards the end of that story that reads:
“We had money. We were grimy and tired. Usually we felt guilty and frightened, because there was something wrong with us and we didn’t know what it was, but today we had the feeling of men who had worked.”
This is a common feeling for all of us.
The feeling of a good day’s work.
Where does this feeling come from?
Is it somehow internal to us, an innate sense through hundreds of thousands of years of evolution that by working we get our just rewards? Or is it rather handed down by culture, a learned behaviour manipulated by those who have more to get those who have less to put in the hard labour?
I don’t know.
The complexity of this relationship between human beings and work found its most tragic expression in the sign that greeted arrivals to the Auschwitz concentration camp: “Arbeit macht frei”, or “Work sets you free”.
What I do know — and what Marge Piercy declares in this poem — is that to give us the warm feeling that we recognise, work must have some greater utility and value.
Work that serves others, work that makes a tangible contribution, that is work worth doing.
Work for the sake of work is not worth anything good at all.
Celebrates the fulfillment found in meaningful work and service
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Zhuangzhu was a Chinese philosopher who lived in or around the 4th Century BC.
Virtually nothing is known about his life, but he is held to have written the text that bears his name, the Zhuangzi, which is one of the primary foundational texts of the Chinese set of philosophies, traditions and religions known as Taoism.
Taoism emphasizes living in harmony with the "Tao", the way or path to which we are called.
This piece, one of the stories included in the Zhuangzi, is a tiny little thought experiment.
If I might dream to be something else, how might I know that I am not now dreaming of my present reality?
It asks the question: how do we know what’s real? This question has taxed the minds of philosophers for thousands of years.
We can see in modern technological philosophy too, like the simulation theory, which suggests that technology is progressing so rapidly, and technolgy produces life-life simulations, and simulations are increasingly more and more life-like, that there must be a strong likelihood that were are currently living in some simulation created by some technology that exists outside of what we consider as real.
Anyway, enough of that crazy talk, if it is crazy talk.
For me, the one thing that jumps out here is the encouragement to really look around, to touch, to feel, to see, to taste, everything that’s around us, because if anything is truly real and vital, what is around us must be as close as it gets.
The Butterfly Dream, by Zhuangzhu
“Once upon a time, I, Zhuangzhu, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly.
I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Zhuangzi. Soon I awakened, and there I was, veritably myself again.
Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.
You can read the poem here
For a related poem, you might find "The Mayo Tao" by Derek Mahon of interest.
You can find that in Episode 88 (on Spotify here).
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This poem has been on my to-read list for this podcast for a while.
I kept passing it over.
Why?
Eventually I realised that for some reason it scared me. What right did I, a white Irishman, have to read this poem by a flag-bearer of black American feminism?
Then I realised, that’s no reason not to read it here.
In fact, isn’t it all the more reason to read it here?
Yes, it seems like cultural appropriation is a thing, where some people take on the mantle of cultures and histories that are not theirs.
But equally, if we’re to learn from each other, share with each other, we have to be able to step into one another’s places and cultures and histories.
In this podcast I’ve read poems written by men and women from all over the world.
Most of them are about the individual — the poet, the narrator, the narrative voice. Maya Angelou’s Still I Rise is also that, but it’s more than that too. Because it’s about a whole race and a whole sex — black women in an America that is still coming to terms with its past.
So maybe I have no right, as a white Irishman, to read this poem.
But that might mean nobody but white Irishmen have a right to read Samuel Beckett or James Joyce, and I know that to be completely wrong.
So let’s read other, listen to each other, learn from each other.
Keep an open mind, because that’s where all progress comes from.
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
You can read the text here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Hello and welcome back. Welcome to September!
The every-weekday podcast has been on a break for the summer months, when I’ve been publishing an occasional series of three poems on a theme. But it’s September now, and here we go!
If this is your first time here, you’re very welcome. My name is Shane Breslin and words matter to me. I’m a writer, and my day to day work is with businesses who want to craft words for their brands. In the age of ChatGPT and words written by humans are under some form of threat, or at least evolution. For me the most important thing about words, though, is not that how they communicate information. It’s how they can carry what lies in the human heart. Call me a Luddite, but I’m not sure a machine — no matter how well trained — will ever be able to write words that carry the deep meaning of the human heart. This podcast, Poems for the Speed of Life, is my personal commitment to keeping words of the human heart alive in the world.
If this is your first time here, I recommend finding and listening to Episode 100. In that episode, I outline some of the reasons this podcast exists.
Okay, on with today’s show. The poem is “I wanted” by Roque Dalton, translated from the Spanish by American poet and essayist Anne Boyer. Roque Dalton was a poet, essayist, bohemian, romantic and Communist revolutionary from El Salvador.
In the words of Claribel Alegria, Dalton had “a profound conviction that the poet can and must, in his life as well as in his work, serve as the finely-honed scalpel of change, both in word and deed, when he lives in a profoundly unjust, stagnant society.”
Imprisoned and sentenced to death in his homeland, and then exiled all before the age of 26 for inciting revolt, he spent most of his time thereafter in the Cuba of Fidel Castra and Che Guevara, but also maintained links with his homeland, including joining El Salvador’s Communist guerrila army the ERP, or People’s Revolutionary Army, in 1973.
Never one to hold back, he fell out with the leader of the ERP, Alejandro Rivas Mira, and was executed in 1975, a few days short of his 40th birthday.
This poem, I wanted, takes the form of a litany, an incomplete, unordered, even disordered list of things the poet wanted to do with his life, including a foreshadowing of his death.
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Welcome to another episode in the summer series of Poems for the Speed of Life. My name is Shane Breslin and if this is your first time here, two quick things. First, you’re welcome. In the first eight months of this podcast, since Episode 1 back in December 2022, this podcast has had listeners in 85 countries around the world. This is staggering to me. It’s clear that people all over the world find enjoyment, and maybe nourishment, in poetry. Second, if you’d like an introduction for the goal of what this podcast is or tries to be, please find Episode 100 in your podcast player. It’s titled “Why Poems for the Speed of Life?”
While the Monday through Friday regular shows are on a break for July and August, I’ve been putting together a short weekly series of “Three poems on…” from the archives.
This episode is “Three poems on prayer”.
Prayer is a strange thing. Maybe even stranger than poetry.
People all over the world, from all faiths and creeds, have prayed.
These three poems give some insights, I think, into why we do this.
None of the three poems are explicitly religious. The one that comes closest is the poem by Kaveh Akbar, “How Prayer Works”.
There’s a big difference, I believe, between organised religion and what we might call religious experiences. Transcendence is possible for everyone, no matter what religion you were born into, no matter whether you consider yourself devout, or atheist, or agnostic.
These three pieces — one by a Muslim immigrant to the United States, one by a former Catholic Scottish poet who became atheist when she was 15, one by a Hollywood star who has spoken openly about his Christian faith — walk us through the experience and the power of prayer in three completely different ways.
All of these poems were included in previous episodes of this podcast. If you would like to go back you can listen to them, and their own introductions, in Episodes 36, 46 and 141.
Some other links that might of interest:
- Matthew McConaughey discusses his faith on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast
- Comedian and broadcaster Frank Skinner breaks down two of Carol Ann Duffy’s poems, including "Prayer"
- Ask Me Anything interview with Kaveh Akbar from Indianapolis Monthly
- Padraig O Tuama, Irish poet, spiritual guide and member of the On Being Project, reads Kaveh Akbar’s "How Prayer Works"
Hello and welcome to another episode in the summer series of Poems for the Speed of Life.
If this is your first time listening to the show, welcome. My name is Shane Breslin and I really hope this podcast meets and exceeds your expectations.
Poems for the Speed of Life is, for most of the year, a Monday to Friday podcast, where I introduce and read one poem that, I think, contains some meaning and value in our journey through life, in our quest to live it to the very best of our abilities.
The weekday shows are on a break for July and August, and in place of them, I’m bringing occasional episodes which bring together three poems on a theme.
In today’s episode, the poetic triply is on the theme of grief and loss.
None of us escape grief or loss in our lifetimes. In fact, it may be said that grief and loss are essential elements of a full, contented and happy life.
That doesn’t make it any easier to bear when we experience it, and these three poems — or two poems and a song lyric — do an amazing job of describing that experience, and maybe holding us by the hand and accompanying through those experiences.
Of course, grief and loss can come at the end of a loved one’s life, but it comes in other forms too, such as the pain we feel at the end of a relationship.
The poems are:
- "Touching the Bones" by Tom French
- "On the Death of the Beloved" by John O’Donohue
- "The West Coast of Clare" by Andy Irvine (which is a gorgeous song lyric. You can hear Andy and the famous Irish folk band Planxty play the song here)
All these poems were included in earlier episodes of the podcast. You can scroll through the archive in your podcast player to find Tom French in Episode 111, John O’Donohue in Episode 95 and Andy Irvine in Episode 47.
The regular five times a week poems will return in September.
Thank you for listening.
Welcome to this episode of the summer series. Today’s episode includes three poems about nature, and more specifically, about how our engagement with the natural world can make the world of people maybe more bearable, certainly more beautiful.
The three poems are:
- The Peace of Wild Things, by Wendell Berry
- Hideout, by Desmond Egan
- Blessings, by Francis Harvey.
Each of them, in their own unique way, shows the poet as he contemplates nature and what it provides for us, either as an antidote to despair, as an escape from the tumult of the built world, as a blessing received from the bark of a beech tree.
The three poems here were all included in earlier episodes of the podcast, where they got their own introduction.
You can listen back to those by finding "The Peace of Wild Things" in Episode 70, "Hideout" in Episode 50, and "Blessings" in Episode 104.
Welcome to the second episode of the Summer 2023 series of Poems for the Speed of Life, where each episode brings you three poems connected by some thread or theme.
The theme for this episode is male experiences.
The poems are:
- Tent, by Pat Boran
- Digging, by Seamus Heaney
- Praise of a Man, by Norman MacCaig
Please search in the archives to listen to the original episodes, each of which contains an introduction to each poem and each poet.
You will find Pat Boran in Episode 99, Seamus Heaney in Episode 54 and Norman MacCaig in Episode 42.
Welcome to the first episode of the Summer 2023 series of Poems for the Speed of Life, where each episode brings you three poems connected by some thread or theme.
The theme for this episode is ageing.
The poems are:
- Japanese Maple, by Clive James
- Driving Dad to the Dog Museum, by Gailmarie Pahmeier
- Forgetfulness, by Billy Collins
Please search in the archives to listen to the original episodes, each of which contains an introduction to each poem and each poet.
You will find Billy Collins in Episode 28, Gailmarie Pahmeier in Episode 92 and Clive James in Episode 110.
Welcome to the final episode of the current series of Poems for the Speed of Life.
My name is Shane Breslin, and I live in the Irish countryside, where I’ve spent most of my life.
When I stepped out on this podcast journey December 2022, I had no real idea what I was doing, or why. I just felt compelled to read more poetry, to read it aloud and to share it with whoever might seek it out or stumble across it in the great intangible expanse of the Internet.
After several dozen short episodes I learned a bit more about why I was doing this. In Episode 100, I explained some of those reasons, to try to outline why poetry is so essential, why it can be so transformative in our lives, and why poetry is much, much more than just lines on a page.
For July and August 2023, the podcast will be a weekly show, with each episode containing a selection of three poems from the archives of the show linked by some magical thread. That will start next week, and if you already follow or subscribe to this podcast in your favourite podcast player those episodes will show up in your feed.
Today’s poem, and the final one of the current five-times-a-week series, is "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver.
It’s a fitting way to end this series.
For one, Mary Oliver is truly extraordinary. She died in 2019, but her work, mostly in poetry but in other forms of writing too, will is timeless and will live on for as long as humans go seeking words to read.
For another, this is a poem that grabs and bottles life itself. It’s a poem about the desperation that every now and then overcomes us. A poem about how we need one another, even when we’re separated by endless time and depthless space. Maybe more than anything else, it’s a poem about how we might go about rediscovering the true speed of life, and live accordingly.
Thank you for listening to the show. I hope you enjoy the summer series going out weekly, and all going well I aim to be back for more Monday to Friday shows from September.
You can read “Wild Geese” here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Roger Robinson is a writer and educator who has taught and performed worldwide and is an experienced workshop leader and lecturer on poetry.
He has received commissions from The National Trust, London Open House, the BBC, The National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Theatre Royal Stratford East.
He won the 2020 TS Eliot Prize for poetry for his collection A Portable Paradise, from which today’s piece is the title poem. Robinson is a black British writer, and much of his work addresses the experiences of being black in Britain.
"A Portable Paradise" reminds me a little of the Matt Goodfellow poem "A Thought", which was featured in Episode 140 of this podcast.
That poem was about a mother’s struggles with dealing with the stresses of life. This one features timeless advice from a grandmother which might be priceless in processing those stresses.
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Kaveh Akbar is an Iranian-American poet.
He teaches at a number of colleges and universities, including the University of Iowa, Randolph College Virginia and Warren Wilson College North Carolina. In 2020 he was appointed Poetry Editor of The Nation magazine, a position held in the past by WB Yeats, Anne Sexton and Langston Hughes.
He has written and spoken about his challenges with addiction, and has said that writing poetry has often been instrumental in helping him stay alive.
This is the second poem by Kaveh Akbar to feature on this podcast. You can listen to Neither Now Nor Never in Episode 91.
That poem explored heaven, and our relationship with it. This one covers similar ground: prayer. It is a poem of great beauty and power, outlining in fine detail the love between two brothers.
It’s also a poem about laughter. About the seriousness of laughter. About how laughter is the result of us paying attention to what is directly in front of us, and finding joy within it, a joy so unbridled that it overcomes us completely, no matter how much solemnity tries to beat it down.
You can read the poem on the website of the On Being Project here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Matt Goodfellow is an English poet, workshop leader and former primary school teacher.
With fellow poets Liz Brownlee and Laura Mucha, he published Being Me: Poems about Feelings, Thoughts and Worries, a 2021 collection of poems illustrated by Victoria Jane Wheeler which aims to offer support and guidance for children, families and teachers specifically in relation to children’s mental health.
“A Thought” is a poem about Goodfellow’s mother, who died at the age of just 48.
Writing about her, he said: "She was a complicated person who carried an awful lot of baggage from her own childhood – she was extremely loud and brash yet was heart-breakingly vulnerable. I was aware of this and remember feeling so helpless when she was sad."
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
"Questions of Travel" is the title poem of Elizabeth Bishop’s 1965 collection about her travels to Brazil with her partner Lota de Macedo Soares. Soares, with whom Bishop had been in a relationship for 16 years, died just two years after the publication of the book, having been hospitalized for mental health problems In New York, where she took an overdose of tranquillizers the day she arrived and never recovered.
Against the backdrop of that tragic love story this poem takes on a deeper meaning. Bishop was a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winner in 1956 and won many other literary awards during her career. She lived in France in the 1930s and in South America in the 50s and 60s. The poem outlines how essential travel seems to be for human beings. How we cannot just stay home. How we must always strive "to see the sun the other way around".
Over the past 50 years travel has been commoditized in package tours and well-trodden paths and, more recently, the rise of the Instagram location. That is, of course, not travel. The economic and financial theorist and commentatory Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes about the theory of touristification, where everything is managed to remove discomfort. Discomfort, of course, is an essential part of true travel. Because it is only through discomfort that we see the world, and ourselves, in new and different and essential ways.
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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Pale Blue Dot is a photo of Earth taken in 1990, from a distance of approximately 6 billion kilometers away, by the Voyager 1 space probe as it was leaving our solar system.
Carl Sagan was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, science communicator, author, and professor.
He died in 1996 at the age of 62, just two years after he wrote these words.
Some might say that this is not, technically, a poem.
I disagree.
Poetry is not words on a page, carefully laid out line by line and sent into the world in printed collections by book publishers. Poetry, to me, is both a transcendent experience and the attempt to capture that transcendent experience in words. So Carl Sagan’s words are poetry, maybe as pure as any poem written by any of the great poets.
You can listen to the man himself read these words, set to the background music of Hans Zimmer, the composer of the Interstellar soundtrack, here.
You can read the transcript here.
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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I heard the mathematician and intellectual Eric Weinstein talk about this poem recently, saying it is one of the most often misinterpreted pieces in the history of literature. The simple interpretation, and to Weinstein the wrong one, is that the road taken — “I took the one less travelled by” — is the unconventional path, and that the poem is an encouragement to take unconventional paths, to avoid following the crowd. To choose your path wisely.
A deeper interpretation, and to Weinstein, I think, the correct one, is that there is no conventional path. That your choice of path does not actually matter. In the poem, the two paths are “worn about the same”.
The background of the poem is a friendship Robert Frost had with Edward Thomas, a British poet. The pair took many walks together and in Frost’s words, his friend was “a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn’t go the other”.
So the message of the poem is much less about choosing unconventional paths in life, and much more about the fact that way will lead on to way. That your choice of road will lead you ever forward, and the idea of yearning to have a second chance at a decision you’ve already made is utterly pointless.
So the message might be to keep moving forward, to understand that any rumination about the past is truly ridiculous, because the thing you imagine you might have had if things were different is both impossible now, and would in all likelihood never have happened anyway. In short, to hell with regrets.
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Friendship is a strange thing.
Isn’t it sometimes true that friendship is something that we only appreciate when it is over with? When something breaks down, or the death of one party brings it to a close. Michel De Montaigne, the 16th century French essayist, and David Whyte, the present-day poet and spiritual teacher, have written powerful short pieces about what friendship is, what friendship means. Countless others have done likewise.
This poem by Irish poet Michael Longley charts the contours of a friendship from a sort of grief.
It’s a type of grief that might be unique to friendships between men, which so often pass with an understanding that never takes shape in words. Or maybe more accurately, does not take place in spoken words. Because either the spoken word has a rank incompleteness, or we are painfully inarticulate in how to speak and painfully untrained in how to listen.
Death is everywhere here. The cancer that took Joe O’Toole. The funeral the poet missed. The burial mound at Templedoomore. The badger tugged by the feet into the ditch. A dying otter. And yet death here is not ugly. It is, in a way, beautiful. Beautiful, at least, in a way that all essential things are beautiful, a beauty that goes way beyond aesthetic pleasure, that goes maybe to the soul, whatever that is.
As a postscript, while reading up about this poem, which was included in Longley’s 1998 collection “Selected Poems”, I found a sequel of sorts, “The Otter’s Funeral”, published on the Facebook page of the poet’s daughter, the artist Sarah Longley, in 2022.
You can read “Between Hovers” here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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If you’ve ever baked bread, or even just walked through city streets in the early morning, you will absolutely appreciate the overload of sensory pleasure that comes with the preparation of bread.
Decades ago, my grandmother, who lived on a hillside in County Donegal in Ireland and the greatest woman I’ve ever known, treated us often to a bread made from treacle that was, and will forever be, as close to the taste of love as anything I will ever experience in this lifetime.
When you really think about it, isn’t there something strange, mystical, maybe even miraculous about bread?
One of the first stories I ever remember was the story of Jesus feeding the multitude with five loaves and two fish. “And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.” Apart from the resurrection, it is the only miracle recounted in all four books of the gospel. In the lord’s prayer, we pray to be given this day our daily bread.
In our industrialised, chemicalised, global-processing era, when food systems are so often aided by unnatural substances, when we find ourselves removed from the soil and the sun, those essential sources of all our nutrients, when food intolerances are seemingly on an inexorable rise, I find I yearn for the simplicity and yes the miraculousness of homemade bread.
This poem, “All Bread”, from Margaret Atwood, the iconic Canadian poet, novelist, teacher, inventory, activist and inventor, is from her 1980 collection “Two-Headed Poems”. It speaks of this sense of miraculousness. Like every human endeavour, it is beset by complexity, a two-headed-ness. That complexity is summed up, I think, in its five-word final line which can be interpreted as both a powerful celebration of humanity and a stern warning of what we are capable of.
You can read All Bread on the website of the On Being Project here, where you’ll also find an analysis by the poet and teacher Padraig O Tuama.
You can find another Margaret Atwood poem, “Up”, in Episode 40 of this podcast.
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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Rewatching some scenes from the film Dead Poets Society recently, I remembered the time of my life when I first came across this poem by Walt Whitman, and a time when I was first introduced to the meaning of poetry itself.
That film came out in 1989 and I probably saw it for the first time in the early 1990s, at exactly the same time—give or take a few months—as I was being initiated into the world of poetry and literature by my great English teacher, and I’m happy to say, still my great friend, Richie Ball in St Patrick’s Classical School in a small town called Navan in County Meath in Ireland.
John Keating, the English teacher played by Robin Williams in that film, was a different type of teacher than Richie Ball, but both shared a deep essence of what it is to teach. Because teaching is about so much more than transferring information. In fact, to me, the information might be the least important ingredient in teaching. Great teaching is a holistic experience. A great teacher creates and cultivates a space in which teaching can happen. This, to me, is why so much online education fails. Because so much online education is just information, and online courses in most cases fail to create the space in which great teaching can really take place.
To get back to the poem by Walt Whitman, this too is relevant, I think. Because what is great teaching only an example of great leadership? Whitman’s poem is a tribute to the great American president Abraham Lincoln after his assassination, but in many ways it is a tribute to great leadership, and to great leaders, who must know that a large part of what they give to the world through their teaching and through their leadership will only be really felt after their time on earth has passed.
You can read the poem here.
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Depending on where in the world you’re listening from, there’s a good chance you’ll have come across this poem during your schooldays. Certainly, for people in Ireland where I am, and in the UK and America, Walter De La Mare’s The Listeners seems to have found a place on a lot of school curriculums.
It’s easy to see why. Much of the poetry that is stuffed down children’s throats is the equivalent of broccoli. We believe this is good for you, but we know it doesn’t feel good.
The Listeners is different. From the very first words of the very first time you read it—especially, I think, if the reader is a child—there’s something that gets under the skin.
If we need stories to make sense of the world, then mystery is one of the most cherished forms of story.
The Listeners is a total mystery, and like the best mysteries, it’s one that can never be solved, because to solve a mystery immediately takes all the mystery away.
Who are the listeners? Why do they stay silent? Who is the traveller? Why is he knocking? What promise is he keeping?
The poem takes us there, to that house in the forest. It gives us what we need through all our senses: the sights, the shadows, the sounds, the echoes, the silence.
If this is your first time with this poem, enjoy. I believe it will stay with you long after the plunging hoofs have gone quiet.
You can read the poem here. And I also recommend this reading on YouTube, which is set to the gorgeous music “The Lark Ascending” by the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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Ada Limón is the 24th US poet laureate. “Wonder Woman” is a poem included in her 2018 collection The Carrying, published by Milkweed Editions.
There is so much in this poem. A verdict from an urgent care doctor, delivered abruptly. The pain and medication that may be directly or indirectly related to that verdict. The perceptions of others. And then, the moment the poem arrives, the poetic moment that is the birthing place of all great poems. She sees a young woman on the bank of the Mississippi river and the world and everything in it seems to shift and change forever.
And the last line, six words to be read and savoured. Are they about the woman she sees? Or about the poet seeing herself in a new light? Or, maybe, about every woman in the world who happens to read them and finds in them the power and strength necessary to keep on going.
You can read the poem here, and you can hear me introduce and read another poem by Ada Limón, “Instructions on Not Giving Up”, in Episode 69 of this podcast.
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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I remember spending time with my grandparents. The world of the 1980s seems so long ago now. People seemed to come and go much more often then. People lingered. People were interested, really interested, in each other. Before we became cogs in a grand machine, we were living and breathing nodes of a universal whole. I could of course be guilty of inflicting nostalgia on you here, but I really feel that time was valuable for its slowness then. Later, time became intrinsically linked to money and everything speeded up and we lost things that had no economic value but which were somehow much more valuable.
That was what I felt when I read this poem, anyway. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
JRR Tolkien is of course best known for creating Middle Earth, the universe of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
This is a short poem about life, about the human experience of life, about the lives that came before, the lives that will come after, and all the other life—the life of the world out there, the life that creates meadow flowers and butterflies, and a different green in every wood.
It is also, in its gorgeous final stanza, a poem about perhaps the most essential part of life: togetherness. Friendship. Family. The visitor come to say hello.
It first appeared in The Fellowship of the Ring, the first part of The Lord of the Rings epic, sung bythe hobbit Bilbo Baggins.
You can find the social media links in the show notes, so please follow along there and let me know if you had a different experience with this poem by Tolkien, or any of the poems in this podcast.
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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To leave the show a review:
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This is a poem about friends—and all their maddening changeability, about the weird experience of watching them find themselves or lose their minds.
Even more, though, it’s a poem about friendship itself.
In his gorgeous little essay titled “Friendship”, the poet David Whyte writes that “friendship is a moving frontier of understanding, not only of the self and the other but also of a possible and as yet unlived future” and that “a diminishing circle of friends is the first terrible diagnostic of a life in deep trouble”.
There is a lot of that in this poem by Christian Wiman, an American poet, translator, editor, and essayist, who was editor of Poetry magazine for 10 years until 2013.
Wiman is, in a way, a poet for the masses. He is the opposite of the style of complex symbolism that we might find in WB Yeats or John Keats. He writes for regular modern people living in regular modern circumstances with all the regular modern problems that brings. In an interview in 2009, he said, “I have no illusions about adding to sophisticated theological thinking. But I think there are a ton of people out there who are what you might call unbelieving believers, people whose consciousness is completely modern and yet who have this strong spiritual hunger in them. I would like to say something helpful to those people.”
Beliefs are at the centre of this poem. What is it that cultivates our beliefs? Why are some of us born-again Christians? Why do some of us leave religion and become fervent atheists? Why do we follow health fads and strict exercise regimens? Who really knows, except maybe there is an emptiness in the heart of every human soul that yearns to be filled. And maybe, as much as anything else, it is friendship itself that can fill it.
You can read the poem here
You can find three poems by David Whyte in the archives of this podcast. “Sometimes” is in Episode 7, “The Bell and the Blackbird” can be found in Episode 38 and “A Seeming Stillness” is in Episode 94.
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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When Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, there was a bit of an outcry among the high art set. A folksy American singer-songwriter winning the world’s grandest literary award? I loved it. What is the point of literature but to write things that change the world, or at least change the perception of the world, for people who read it, listen to it, experience it. Literature is not a grand and weighty book. It is an experience. The words are just the bridge from here to there.
In their decision, the Nobel committee said that Dylan had "created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.
This piece is one that came a few years after the Nobel, showing that Bob Dylan’s capacity for new poetic expressions remains alive even as he moves into his 80s. “I've Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” is a song on his 2020 album Rough and Rowdy Ways.
I encourage you to listen to the song. It’s set to a lovely backing track that’s closely based on a piece of music by Jacques Offenbach Belle nuit, ô nuit d'amour, which was composed in 1881, and which is plays a key role in the Oscar-winning 1997 Italian film about the holocaust, Life Is Beautiful.
Great art does that. It crosses time and space and finds new listeners, new disciples, who will take it and shape it and carry on its lifeforce for generations to come.
That’s the song. The lyric, well, I just really like it too.
I’m not sure who the “you” is in the refrain, the “you” that Bob Dylan, or the narrator, has decided to give himself to. A lover? A god? The earth, or the universe?
I’m not sure, but that act of “giving myself” — of giving ourselves — isn’t that what all art and all creativity ultimately is? An act that is at once about the giver and the receiver. A giving of oneself to somebody or something else, even if the giver never gets to see who the receiver is.
You can read the lyrics of the song here
You can listen to the song on YouTube here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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This is a poem about the imperfections, the challenge, the despair but still the hope and beauty of being human. It could be read as a paean to life for the unborn, as a map for everything a human life contains—all its challenges to overcome and temptations to avert—but I think of the unborn in this case as a metaphor. It feels to me like the “before birth” here is in some sense about the life we live before we realise the life we are meant to live.
There’s a line that’s usually attributed to the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius, “Every man has two lives, and the second begins the moment he realises he has just one.”
That’s how I feel about Prayer Before Birth. It is about that moment when we are born into our one true life, or about the time before that moment. “Let them not make me a stone” hints at the outside forces that apply to all our lives. Outside forces—work, society, culture, whatever arbitrary set of behaviours and things that are somehow seen as accepted or normal—push us in different directions, and the big task, maybe the biggest task of all our lives, is to find a way to push back against whatever norms are holding us back and find a way of realising our true place in the world at the moment of our birth, or rebirth.
Louis MacNeice was an Irish poet of the 20th century. This is the second MacNeice poem to feature here. You can listen to “Entirely” in Episode 49.
You can read Prayer Before Birth here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
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There is no real pattern to the selection of these poems. Or at least, none that is intended.
But if you’ve listened to the most recent episode, My Mother’s Body by Marie Howe, you might see the overlapping sensibilities between that one and today’s, "Warming-Down" by the Irish poet (and university lecturer and medical doctor) Aideen Henry.
I read this poem in a collection called Slow Bruise, which was published in 2010 and came to me by way of a second hand bookshop recently and however many unknown hands who carried it to me from wherever it came.
The Marie Howe poem is a daughter’s reflections on a mother after her passing. Aideen Henry’s poem is a reflection by a daughter about a father, not after he has died, but after his essence—his energy, his masculinity, his life in multiple meanings of that word—has gone forever. It is, to me, intensely sad and beautiful too, and should, I think, encourage us to embrace with all our hearts and our limbs too, every precious moment we get with those we love.
A note on the text.
In the middle of this poem there are three lines in the Irish language. In the poem those three lines are translated immediately into English in the lines that follow. One of the effects of this is, to me, is a dualism, a togetherness but a separateness too, between the father and daughter, between the man and the woman they are, between their generations, maybe even between the past and the future.
If this poem speaks to you in a different way, please follow it and listen closely. I’d love to hear your thoughts. You can follow on Twitter and Instagram. The links are in the description.
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Whether this is your first time listening to this show, or your 100th time, allow me to take this opportunity to remind you that all my introductions here, every episode of this podcast, my thoughts are only one perspective.
The thing about poetry—and from doing this podcast I’ve started to think about poetry not as a piece of writing on a page or screen, but as a transcendent moment of being, a fleeting glimpse of the oneness of the universe, an experience of divine wisdom, whatever divinity might mean, and that the great poem, or great song, or great work of art, is nothing more than an attempt to capture that experience—so the thing about poetry is that speaks to all of us in different ways.
You know that feeling when you look upon a portrait hanging in a gallery, and the eyes follow you round. As if the artwork is seeking you, or seeing you. That’s how I feel about poems too. All this to say that whatever I might say about these poems, in every episode, is just one very incomplete perspective, and that if this poem, or any poem here, speaks to you in a different way or shows you a different direction, please allow yourself to follow it, even if it disregards completely anything I might say here.
Why I chose My Mother’s Body by Marie Howe.
I read another poem by Marie Howe back in Episode 77. That was What The Living Do, and some of the things I felt there—things that relate to this passing miracle of being alive—I felt here too. In both poems there is a close relative who is no longer here, and the poems jump backwards and forwards in a sort of fabric of life. Where being itself, and all our memories, hopes, dreams, regrets, fears, are all interwoven. Where there is, almost, no past or future, just a single and strange neverending present.
The way time works in My Mother’s Body is mesmerising. We are with Marie Howe in the womb, we are with her after her mother’s death. In nine sentences we experience two lives, a mother and a daughter.
You can read the poem here
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
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This is Episode 125 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's piece is by Anaximander.
One of the things I’ve realised from the first 100 or more episodes of this podcast is that poetry is not always a written poem.
Poetry is a feeling, an experience, a dazzling transcendent moment, a transformation of sorts, and the written poem is an attempt to capture this. Seamus Heaney recounted this essence in "Postscript", which you can hear in Episode 14.
For this reason, this podcast has sometimes included song lyrics, or lines of prose that can be plucked out as a poem in and of themselves.
Today’s "poem" is the only fragment of the writing of the ancient Greek philosopher Anaximander, who lived in around 600 BC. We only know of Anaximander’s thoughts and teaching through the writing of others in ancient Greece, including Aristotle. For his explanations and theories of the universe, he is called "The Father of Cosmology".
I first came across these words in the book The Order of Time, by the physicist Carlo Rovelli, and it was immediately clear to me that even though it’s a short fragment, just 21 words long, it was a poem.
It can be read and read and read.
What is necessity? What is justice, and how is it rendered? What is transformation? What is the order of time? What, indeed, is time?
It’s impossible really to get to the root of it. I realised that getting to the root of it is not the point.
It’s a mystery. A universal mystery, and like all the best mysteries, it shows us some universal truth that our frail human minds find virtually impossible to grasp, but which make some sense deep to our bodies, to our hearts, to our souls.
Passge from The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli:
I have an enduring passion for Anaximander, the Greek philosopher who lived twenty-six centuries ago and understood that the Earth floats in space, supported by nothing. We know of Anaximander’s thought from other writers. Only one small original fragment of his writings has survived—just one:
Things are transformed,One into another,According to necessity,And render justiceTo one anotherAccording to the order of time.
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
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Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This is Episode 124 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "Wildflowers", by Mark Roper.
Mark Roper is an Irish poet whose work often touches on the vitality of nature, and the connection between the lives we live and the world around us, the world we live them in.
There’s a line in the first part of this poem that gets close to the heart of things. How teaching can take place without words. How love is more and less than knowledge.
It’s a love poem set against the backdrop of connection with nature and also the diminishment of a loved one, who is on the journey to return to that place of nothingness, of everything-ness, from where all of us came and to where all of us will one day return.
This poem was published in the Irish journey The Stinging Fly in 2006.
You can read the poem here.
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Mark Roper is an Irish poet whose work often touches on the vitality of nature, and the connection between the lives we live and the world around us, the world we live them in.
There’s a line in the first part of this poem that gets close to the heart of things. How teaching can take place without words. How love is more and less than knowledge.
It’s a love poem set against the backdrop of connection with nature and also the diminishment of the loved one, who is on the journey to returning to that place of nothingness, of everything-ness, from where all of us came and to where all of us will one day return.
This poem was published in the Irish journey The Stinging Fly in 2006.
https://stingingfly.org/2006/02/01/wildflowers/
This is Episode 123 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "Prayer" by Faisal Mohyuddin.
Faisal Mohyuddin is a writer, artist, and educator. The child of immigrants from Pakistan, he is the author of the acclaimed collection, The Displaced Children of Displaced Children.
He is an educator adviser and master practitioner for Narrative 4, a global not-for-profit which aims to create a global community where young people learn and lead in the classroom and the community with curiosity, deep listening, and imagination. He also teaches high school English and creative writing at Northwestern University in Illinois.
The first thing to say about this poem is its shape on the page. I encourage you to open this link to see how "Prayer" is laid out.
There is no punctuation, just space between the words and between the lines, and in some ways this space is just as important as the words themselves.
Those words outline the tradition and the lived experience of Muslim prayer, but prayer, I’ve come to believe, is not restricted within the boundaries of whatever religion you practise. Prayer is a universal connection to oneness and universality, and comes in many forms. For example, check out Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, also called "Prayer" but which comes at this experience from a complete different angle, in Episode 36 of this podcast.
You can read "Prayer" by Faisal Mohyuddin here.
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This is Episode 122 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "Gypsy", by Bo Burnham.
Bo Burnham is an American comedian, songwriter, musician, film-maker and actor. He was one of the first YouTube stars in the late 2000s and has released a series of comedy specials, including Inside, his take on the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns, which was released by Netflix in 2021.
This poem is from his 2013 book Egghead, or You Can’t Survive on Ideas Alone. His poetry has been compared to that of Spike Milligan and John Lennon.
Burnham says his poems owe a lot to the Internet, being a product of the Twitter generation of fragmented attention spans, constant overstimulation, distractedness and disconnection.
You can read the poem here.
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This is Episode 121 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "Bani Adam", by Saadi Shirazi.
When we see news reports of Asia, of the Middle East, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, all that we see comes to us through a geopolitical prism. Over many decades, technology and globalism has made us hyper-aware of the geopolitical, but humans, up close, are not geopolitical beings. When we see the news from Asia, what we don’t see is the reality on the ground. The real lived lives of the people there.
This poem, by Saadi Shirazi, was written in the 13th century in Farsi, the language of Persia and modern day Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan.
It is about us, as a whole. Not as global geopolitics, but as oneness, as one human body, joined together in our small miracle in our unique part of the universe. The poem currently adorns a large handmade carpet on the wall of a meeting room of the United Nations building in New York.
This podcast includes a reading in the original language first, before an English translation.
You can find out more about the poem, and read various translations, on Wikipedia here.
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This is Episode 120 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "Everything is Going to be All Right" by Derek Mahon.
Derek Mahon was an Irish poet who died in 2020 at the age of 78.
He was—and is—a much-loved poet and this poem is one of his best loved.
It is a poem of hope, even in difficult times. It is a poem of hope, maybe especially in difficult times.
The sun always rises. The watchful heart is always here. Days break. Clouds fly.
Other things will come to an end but these will go on, and in that there is some measure of consolation.
(If you’re looking for more from Derek Mahon, you can find another of his poems, "The Mayo Tao", in Episode 88.)
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)
Music Credit:
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This is Episode 119 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "Everything Falls Away" by Parker J. Palmer.
Parker J. Palmer is a teacher, author, and founder and senior partner emeritus of the Center for Courage & Renewal.
His books include Healing the Heart of Democracy, Let Your Life Speak, and On the Brink of Everything. He has also been a contributor to the widely known On Being Project run by Krista Tippett.
Palmer’s tone and sense of calm, of slow timelessness, have captured the hearts of readers and listeners who seem to hunger for those qualities in our present moments of anxiousness and franticness.
This is the second Parker Palmer poem to feature on this podcast. You can find "Harrowing" in the very first episode.
You can read "Everything Falls Away" by Parker J. Palmer here.
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This is Episode _ of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is a section of a longer poem called "Ghetto" by Michael Longley. It has also appeared on its own under the title "Belongings".
Michael Longley is an Irish poet who was born in 1939.
He has published more than 30 collections in his lifetime, most recently collections of his poems based on the Classics of Homer and Ovid, and illustrated by his daughter Sarah Longley.
You can read the poem here.
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This is Episode 117 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "The Whitsun Weddings" by Philip Larkin.
Philip Larkin was an English poet, writer and librarian who died in 1985 at the age of 63.
The Poetry Foundation describes him as “a great poet of middle age” with a vision that is “elegiac, one of gradual diminishment”.
For all that his work is well known as raw, often rude, sometimes lewd, Larkin occupies an emotional centre that so many of us will recognise even if we don’t have the words for it.
(This is the second Larkin poem to feature in this podcast. If you’d like to hear “Money” you can find that in Episode 87.)
This poem, "The Whitsun Weddings", is one of his best-known and best-loved.
Whitsun is a British name for the old Christian holy day of the Pentecost, which falls each year in May or June (on the seventh Sunday after Easter) commemorating the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Christ's disciples.
Yes, the poem can be viewed in downbeat terms … if all the wedding parties are the same, is anything ever really special? But I love it as a celebration of the observation of the specialness of ordinary life.
The poet is the recorder of these events, the painter of these scenes, the creator of this artwork that celebrates an ordinary special day in ordinary unknown lives. The line “How their lives would all contain this hour” does something to me that I can’t fully explain right now.
You can read the poem here.
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This is Episode _ of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "December at Yase" by Gary Snyder.
Gary Snyder is an American poet, essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist who turned 93 earlier this month in May 2023.
This is the second Gary Snyder poem to feature on this podcast. You can find "I Went Into the Maverick Bar" back in Episode 24.
"December at Yase" is a poem about love lost. It is one of a sequence of poems, titled "Four Poems for Robin", about an early love that burned bright and passed.
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)
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Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This is Episode 115 of Poems for the Speed of Life.Today's poem is "Poem on a Line by Anne Sexton, 'We Are All Writing God's Poem'", by Barbara Crooker.Barbara Crooker is an American poet who has published eight collcetions, most recently Some Glad Morning in 2019.One of the things that jumps out for me in this poem is the invisible threads that connect writers to writers to writers, all those documenters of the small moments of the world around us. The title references a line spoken by the poet Anne Sexton, "We are all writing God’s poem", which Sexton told to Erica Jong, herself a poet, who mentioned it in a Guardian newspaper article in the year 2000.And Crooker’s poem also mentions reading Li Po, a Chinese poet of the 8th century, while at the same time drawing resonance from driving, listening to the radio, passing tractors along the road.Writing about this poem, Parker Palmer said that Crooker “helps us see that, amid the seemingly random events of life, paying attention allows us to create patterns of meaning — making a strange kind of sense out of our experience while honoring its complexity.”You can read the poem here.For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.To leave the show a review:On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)Music Credit:Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This is Episode 114 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "On the Move" by Thom Gunn.
Thom Gunn was an English-born American poet who died in 2004 at the age of 74. He published almost 20 collections of poems and essays in his lifetime.
After moving to the US in his early 20s he taught writing at Stanford University, and in the California of the 60s and 70s, the scene of acid trips and exploratory experiences, he was a willing participant. He was in a lifelong relationship with his partner Mike Kitay. THe pair met at college in the 50s and were together until Gunn’s death more than half a century later.
This poem On the Move is I think, as much as anything, a poem about “maleness”. About the masculine urge for doing, for ambition, for motion, for movement, for pressing our on what surrounds us. There are hints of male fragility too: at how we men tend to cover up our weaknesses. We “strap in doubt by hiding it, robust”.
You can read "On the Move" by Thom Gunn here.
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This is Episode 113 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "The Habit of Laughter" by Sara Berkeley.
Sara Berkeley is an Irish poet and writer who has published seven collections of poetry and one collection of fiction. In recent years she has trained to be a nurse and now works in a hospice in upstate New York.
This poem "The Habit of Laughter" is from her 2010 collection The View From Here.
Habits—both forming good ones and breaking bad ones—have become big business in recent years. James Clear’s self-help book Atomic Habits sold more than 10 million copies worldwide and spent more than a year on the NY Times bestsellers list.
Separate to productivity or mindfulness, can laughter be a habit? For Sara Berkeley it is the vital thing, especially in the face of the inevitable despair that will present itself in every life.
You can buy The View From Here from The Gallery Press here.
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This is Episode 112 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "Pied Beauty" by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Gerard Manley Hopkins was an English poet and Jesuit priest of the 19th century. He is well known now in literature studies for the innovation in his work, which can sometimes make his poems difficult to parse at first reading.
As a student of theology, he explored themes of divinity in nature, but also experienced darkness and depression which informed his work.
This poem is one of his brighter pieces, a short prayer to a God that’s everywhere and in all things, not just the beautiful.
You can read the poem here.
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This is Episode 111 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "Touching the Bones" by Tom French.
Tom French is an Irish poet, born in 1966.
He is the author of seven collections of poetry, all published by Gallery Press, including Company in 2022 and his first collection Touching the Bones, of which today’s piece is the title poem, in 2001.
This is the second Tom French poem to feature on this podcast. You can find “Night Drive” back in Episode 3.
Touching the Bones takes as its premise a wildlife documentary on TV, and draws a deep emotional connection between the movements of the elephants witnessed there and the experience of loss and grief in the poet’s own life too, after his brother, older by a year, took his own life in the Netherlands at the age of 21.
You can buy Touching the Bones via The Gallery Press here.
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This is Episode 110 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "Japanese Maple", by Clive James.
Clive James was an Australian broadcaster, journalist and writer who died at the age of 80 in 2019. He will be familiar to many for his UK television appears in the 1980s and 90s on popular shows such as Clive James on Television and Saturday Night Clive and several “Postcard From” travel shows.
He published nine collections of poetry in his lifetime, and experienced a new esteem for his poetry in his last years — two acclaimed collections Sentenced to Life and Injury Time were published in the last four years of his life.
"Japanese Maple" is one of those poems, a deeply poignant piece about a gift of a tree from his daughter and his own experience of life slipping away.
You can read the poem here.
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This is Episode 109 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "Love’s Philosophy" by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Percy Bysshe Shelley was an English Romantic poet who died in 1822 at the age of 29. He was a friend of John Keats and George Gordon Lord Byron, who died at 25 and 36 respectively. (Shelley died in a shipping accident, Keats of tuberculosis, and Byron while fighting with the Greeks against the Ottomans.)
Shelley’s output during his short life was huge, but he received no fame for his work until long after his death.
This short poem on love does a fine job of outlining both the wondrous interconnectedness of everything in the world, and how none of that seems to matter if the object of your desire does not love you back.
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This is Episode 108 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now" by AE Housman.
Alfred Edward or AE Housman was an English academic and poet of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His day-to-day work was in the study and translation of classical writers, including the Roman poets Juvenal and Lucan. Many of his poems in his two collections, A Shropshire Lad published when he was 27, and Last Poems, published when he was in his mid-60s, have been set to music by composers, and are still performed, especially in Britain, by soloists and choirs.
In the poem, written when he was 20, he predicts that his life would be "three score and ten" or 70 years long. In the end, he died at the age of 77 in 1936.
One of the things I took from this is how short a human life is in the context of the long centuries of the natural world, and how we should take the time and care to notice anything beautiful around us because our time to do so is fleeting.
You can read the poem here.
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This is Episode 107 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "Thanks, Robert Frost" by David Ray.
David Ray is an American poet and author of fiction, essays, and memoir, born in 1932.
He has taught around the world, in Australia, New Zealand, India and in teh United States, including the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he is professor emeritus.
This poem reflects on the thoughts of an earlier poet, Robert Frost, an influence to generations of poets who died in 1963.
It may help us, perhaps, to make peace with the errors we’ve made in the past, which all of us, one expects, have a list too long to remember and too difficult to ever fully forget.
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This is Episode 106 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "Mysticism for Beginners" by Adam Zagajewsky.
Adam Zagajewski was a Polish poet, novelist, translator, and essayist who died in 2021 at the age of 75.
His life and death are notable in the current moment, for a couple of reasons. First, he was born in 1945 in Lviv, a city then in Poland, and now in Ukraine. As a baby his family was expelled from the city as part of the Soviet Union’s post-war Polish population transfers policy, which had been ratified with the support of the Soviets’ war allies, including the United States and Britain.
Second, as a young poet he was a member of the Polish Nowa Fala, or New Wave, a movement which aimed to “stand against the falsifications of reality and the appropriation of language by communist ideology and propaganda”. In our present age of propaganda, misinformation and disinformation, of war in Europe, Zagajewski’s work provides
Irish writer Colm Tóibín said Zagajewski “makes the space of the imagination connect with experience; things seen and heard and remembered in all their limits and sorrow and relished joy have the same power for him as things conjured.”
This poem is a good representation of that. Sitting at an Italian cafe, observing those around him, he is moved into a discussion of life itself: its many mysteries, and how we are always just beginning.
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
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This is Episode 105 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "Vanity" by Kathryn Stripling Byer.
Kathryn Stripling Byer or Kay Byer, was an American poet, essayist and teacher who died in 2017 at the age of 72. She was State poet of North Carolina for five years until 2009 and published six collections of poetry, including 2002’s Catching Light, in which this poem appeared.
"Vanity" is just 69 words, but its brevity contains great depths. At first reading, for example, I missed the complexity of those first two words, Without hands. I’m still not sure what those words mean.
Overall the poem is, I think, a nuanced reflection on how we see ourselves as much as how we really are. Of course, I’m a man, and it is almost certain that this poem will connect in a much different way with a female reader. But still, the fruit of self-knowledge is available to all of us, if we dare.
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
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This is Episode 104 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "Blessings" by Francis Harvey.
Francis Harvey was an Irish poet who died at the age of 89 in 2014.
Born on the UK side of the Irish border in County Fermanagh, he lived most of his life in the Republic of Ireland, in County Donegal, just a handful of miles away. He was a member of Aosdána, an Irish association which includes and honours artists who have produced a distinguished body of work of genuine originality.
Referenced in this poem is Lough Eske — from the Irish Loch Iascaigh, or “Lake of the Fish” — a designated special area of conservation in Donegal. In its two lines, spanning 17 lines, “Blessings” contains a multitude about loneliness, togetherness, the infinity of the past and the future, and life in all its forms.
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This is Episode 103 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "The Singers" by Eavan Boland.
Eavan Boland was an Irish poet who died in 2020 at the age of 75. She taught at Stanford University professor for the last 25 years of her life. "The Singers" came to some prominence when Mary Robinson, the first female President of Ireland, quoted the last line in her historic inaugural address in December 1990.
The poem takes as its starting point the female singers on Ireland’s "unforgiving" west coast.
Widening the lens, though, could Ireland itself be revealed as "the West" and the singers all women who found themselves silenced and could now, together, find their voice?
Widening further, the poem stands as a form of prayer, perhaps, for anyone—sex, faith, race or minority—who might need a hand up to a greater height. (This is the second time an Eavan Boland poem has featured on this show. You can search for Episode 68 for "The Lost Land" which also looks to Ireland as a sort of symbol.)
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This is Episode 102 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "Each Moment a White Bull Steps Shining into the World", by Jane Hirshfield.
Jane Hirshfield an American poet, essayist, and translator. She has published 12 collections since 1982 and served as Chanceller of the Academy of American Poets between 2012 and 2017. She is in many ways a poet of science—her works touch on physics and biology and she was visiting artist in the neuroscience department of the University of California San Francisco, where the objective was to bridge the gap between science, logic and left brain thinking, and creativity, randomness and the right hemisphere.
This poem bridges that divide in its own way.
It is, I think, about the unknown and limitless possibilities of each moment—and not just the unknown, but the unknowingness of those moments, into which at any time a shining white bull might step.
And it’s about what we might do with that then, knowing that each door that opens to us forces us to close another.
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This is Episode 101 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "Anger" by Yusef Komunyakaa.
Yusef Komunyakaa is an American poet and at the time of this podcast, in his 82nd year, is still teaching at New York University, where he is Professor of English.
He has published more than 15 collections of poetry and two collections of essays and won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1994.
Born James William Brown, he reclaimed the African name of his grandfather Komunyakaa.
This poem charts the role of anger, an emotion often seen as destructive, but here presented as something much more complex, as an essential creative force.
It encourages us, perhaps, not to quell our own anger, or to dismiss it in others, but to seek within it the seed of action and creativity.
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This is Episode 100 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
For this milestone, a break from the regular day-to-day.
This podcast tries to give you an answer to the most important question we can ask about anything: Why?
Why Poems for the Speed of Life?
Why poetry in the first place?
This show, referencing the work of Dr Iain McGilchrist, esteemed psychiatrist and the author of books The Master and his Emissary and The Matter with Things, tries to explain.
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This is Episode 99 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "Tent" by Pat Boran.
Pat Boran is an Irish poet. He has published 10 collections since 1990, including two in 2022, plus two editions of Selected Poems.
He is former Editor of Poetry Ireland Review and has been Director and Editor of the poetry publisher Dedalus Press since 2006.
This poem, "Tent", speaks about rites of passage, about the journey from boys to men, about those moments when everything changes and make us see the world differently forever. It also, when we look and listen closely, encourages us to question what is claimed or what’s suggested, because that might not always give us truth.
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This is Episode 98 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's piece is "Color" by Tina Chang.
Tina Chang is an American poet with a Taiwanese heritage. She has published three collections of poetry and co-edited the anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond.
The poet laureate of Brooklyn, on taking up that role she described her mission as trying "to break down the wall between people and poetry. Somewhere along the way, we have felt intimidated by it, or we have felt we have to be well-educated in order to be able to access it or walk into that world."
That mission tallies with what I’m attempting to do in this podcast. To introduce a single poem each day that might help you, as listener, see yourself, see the world, see yourself in the world in a new light. "Color" is easy to read but it contains depths of unknowing, focusing on maybe the biggest unknowing of all: our own complex identity, our own idea of who we are, who we were, who we are becoming.
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This is Episode 97 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's piece is "Lift Every Voice and Sing" by James Weldon Johnson.
James Weldon Johnson American writer, civil rights leader and activist born in 1871.
The son of an immigrant mother from the Caribbean, he devoted his work to helping the advancement of black people and became a prominent early member of Phi Beta Sigma fraternity, an organization with aims that included extending brotherhood, scholarship and service and devoting itself to fostering the "inclusive we", to be a part rather than apart from of the wider community. Today, Phi Beta Sigma mentors thousands of young men and extends more than $1 million in scholarships every year.
"Lift Every Voice and Sing" could be interpreted now as a powerful and inspiring anthem for Black people, or, more broadly, for all of us, everywhere in the world, as a call to action to continue the labours of our lives with energy and faith despite everything that might go against us.
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This is Episode 96 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's piece is "This afternoon, burn down the house" by Ray Bradbury.
Ray Bradbury was a celebrated American novelist and screenwriter who died in 2012 at the age of 91. He wrote fantasy, science fiction, horror and mystery. Perhaps he is best known now for Fahrenheit 451, a dystopian novel where books have been made into people and are tortured and burned by the firemen appointed to that task.
This piece was not, actually, intended as a poem, but having seen it laid out as one on a social media post, it does fit the bill. It is a short segment from his book Zen in the Art of Writing, Bradbury’s collection of essays on creativity, which was published in 1990.
As an introduction to this segment, the line before it in the book reads: "The history of each story, then, should read almost like a weather report: Hot today, cool tomorrow."
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This is Episode 95 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "On the Death of the Beloved" by John O'Donohue.
John O’Donohue was an Irish poet and Celtic spiritual teacher and leader whose death at the age of just 52 in 2008 is still much mourned by his legions of admirers and students.
His brother Pat, reflecting on his life, said:
"He was not a finite act that existed and is now lost for evermore. He is just a story that is written, spoken and lives amongst us. Just as we are and continue to be."
As he is mourned, O’Donohue in this poem gives all who will ever mourn—which is, of course, all of us—a passport to a way through that mourning, embracing it for what it is and what it means, telling us in a way that death is life as much as life is life, and our mature reflection on that, our bonded relationship with it, deepens the meaning both of the time we’re here and the time after.
You can find another poem by John O’Donohue, "Beannacht", in Episode 17 of this podcast here.
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This is Episode 94 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "A Seeming Stillness" by David Whyte.
David Whyte is an English poet whose work has drawn a phenomenal following in recent years. His work seems to have tapped into something vital in the world right now, something all of us hunger after, some deep and profound connection with the land beneath us, the air around us and — importantly — to each other, across uncrossable time and unbridgeable space.
This is the third time works by David Whyte have featured in this podcast. You can search in your podcast player for Episode 7, "Sometimes" and Episode 38 "The Bell and the Blackbird". And as I mentioned in those episodes too, as always with poetry by David Whyte, please do seek out and find recordings or videos of the poet reading his own work. He has a truly unique delivery that elevates the works to something much more than words on a page.
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This is Episode 93 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "On Friendship" by Kahlil Gibran.
Kahlil Gibran was a Lebanon-born American poet of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was educated in Beirut, Boston and Paris and during his lifetime considered himself to be mainly a painter.
This piece, "On Friendship", is one of the most popular pieces in his most popular book, The Prophet, which was published in 1923.
The Prophet — a collection of 26 prose poetry fables touching on everything from self-knowledge to crime, marriage to joy, talking to teaching — has been published in more than 100 languages and is one of the best-selling books of all time. In the 100 years since its publication it has never been out of print.
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This is Episode 92 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "Driving Dad to The Dog Museum" by Gailmarie Pahmeier.
Gailmarie Pahmeier is the Poet Laureate of the state of Nevada in the US. She taught creative writing and contemporary literature at the University of Nevada, Reno, for thirty-seven years. She has published three collections of poetry and a number of chapbooks. This poem was included in her 2014 collection, The Rural Lives of Nice Girls.
"Driving Dad to the Dog Museum" is a poem about aging, and what aging does to us and the people close to us, and what it does to that most precious and intangible thing of all: our memories of who we, and they, used to be, and no longer are.
As with every poem in every episode of this podcast, these introductions are intended as a first jumping off point, not a final judgment. If a poem says something to you — something more or something different than I mention here — allow it to speak.
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This is Episode 91 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "Neither Now Nor Never" by Kaveh Akbar.
Kaveh Akbar is an Iranian-American poet. Born in Tehran, he has lived in the US since he was two years old.
Still just 34, he teaches at a number of colleges and universities, including the University of Iowa, Randolph College Virginia and Warren Wilson College North Carolina. Since 2020 he has been Poetry Editor of The Nation magazine, a position held in the past by poets such as WB Yeats, Anne Sexton and Langston Hughes.
He has written and spoken about his challenges with addiction, and has said that writing poetry has often been instrumental in helping him stay alive.
This poem is about heaven and our relationship with it. Is it a place? A concept? Who is heaven for? And what exactly is to be found there?
And as always on this podcast, these introductions are intended as a first jumping off point, not a final judgment. If this poem or any poem here says something more or something different to you, allow it to speak.
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This is Episode 90 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "I love the dark hours of my being" by Rainer Maria Rilke.
Rainer Maria Rilke was a poet who came from the old Austro-Hungarian empire which existed until the end of World War I. This is the second piece by Rilke to feature in this podcast. You can find "Go to the Limits of Your Longing" in Episode 41.
One of the interesting things about Rilke’s work — and, very likely, in the work of all writers who write primarily in a different language to English — is the way translations contrast with each other so vividly. It is not a case, I think, that the translator tries to capture the original word for word. Instead, the translation is itself a standalone piece. This translation is by Mark S Burrows. Burrows is a writer, teacher and historian of medieval Christianity based in Maine in the US. He has taught at universities in Europe and America, and facilitates poetry retreats and workshops on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
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This is Episode 89 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "Something wonderful has happened it is called you" by Emily Critchley.
Emily Critchley is a Greek-born English poet, writer, editor and academic. She is the author of Ten Thousand Things and editor of Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK and co-editor of #MeToo, A Poetry Collective.
Critchley is Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of Greenwich, London.
This poem "Something wonderful has happened it is called you" — about motherhood and the future — was a "Highly Commended Poem" in the Forward Book of Poetry 2019.
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This is Episode 88 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "The Mayo Tao" by Derek Mahon
Derek Mahon was an Irish poet who died in the autumn of 2020 at the age of 78.
One of the things I noticed when I picked up the New Selected Poems published by Faber and Faber was how lovely the poems look on the page. They are neat, tidy, structured, but they’re not afraid to go to places, and bring you with them.
This poem is, to me, a reflection on ambition, on work, on striving for perfection, and on the appeal of the quiet orderliness of the natural world.
A quick note on the title: The Tao is a concept from Chinese philosophy which points to universal principles, the balance of yin and yang and the harmonious way or path to follow. Mayo is a county in the west of Ireland, on the Atlantic coast.
(For more poems and lyrics relating to the Atlantic coast of Ireland, check out early episodes of this podcast, Number 14 is "Postscript" by Seamus Heaney and 45, "The West Coast of Clare", a lyric by songwriter Andy Irvine.)
Read "The Mayo Tao" by Derek Mahon here
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This is Episode 87 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
It is the first time Philip Larkin has featured on this podcast but it's unlikely to be the last.
Larkin was a 20th century English poet, writer and career librarian. He is raw, rambunctious, rude, sometimes lewd.
This poem, "Money", is Larkin’s reflection on the role of cash and consumerism in life. It was first published in 1973 and half a century on, as all of us — at least in the so-called West — try to make a living amid rising inflation, interest rate hikes, pension fund problems and next-day Amazon Prime delivery of a billion items, it is probably even more relevant today than it was back then.
Read "Money" by Philip Larkin here
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This is Episode 86 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem "Funeral Prayer" by Don Paterson.
Don Paterson is a Scottish poet, writer and jazz guitarist. He was the poetry editor for London publishers Picador for over 25 years and teaches in the school of English at the University of St Andrews. He was written or edited more than 15 collections and anthologies, including 40 Sonnets, from which today’s poem comes.
“Funeral Prayer” reminds me of a poem by another Scottish poet, Norman McCaig, “Praise of a Man”, which you can find and listen to in Episode 42 of this podcast. Like McCaig’s poem, “Funeral Prayer” takes the form of a short eulogy on the death of an admired friend.
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This is Episode 85 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is a passage from "An Essay on Criticism" by Alexander Pope.
Alexander Pope was an English poet of the 18th century. When he was 12 he contracted an illness — most probably a form of tuberculosis — which left him in poor health for the rest of his life. He was a lifelong Catholic at a time when that meant being barred from university and public life, and he made a living through popular translations of Homer’s classics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, and through his own poetry, including "The Rape of the Lock", a mock-epic which satirized the London upper-classes.
"An Essay on Criticism" is a long poem that contains such well known lines as "To err is human; to forgive, divine" and "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."
The poem offers wisdom and guidance for what poets — and the rest of us too — should strive for in work. This episode includes just a few lines, from the beginning of Part 2, which talks about the dangers of pride, especially when it comes to what we think we know.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 84 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "Detail" by Eamon Grennan.
Eamon Grennan is an Irish poet who has lived and worked in the USA for more than half a century. He taught English at Vassar University in Poughkeepsie, New York and has published 25 collections of poetry over the past 40 years.
Billy Collins, the former US Poet Laureate — whose poem "Forgetfulness" you can hear in Episode 28 of this podcast — once said of Grennan: "To read him is to be led on a walk through the natural world of clover and cricket and, most of all, light, and to face with an open heart the complexity of being human."
"Detail" is a poem about poetry itself, about the deep momentous truth that can arrive in a single all-powerful instant of beauty or horror or some other thing that transports us to another plane.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 83 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "Houston, 1965" by Loren Broaddus.
Loren Broaddus is an American teacher, poet and lifelong baseball fan. His debut collection Joe DiMaggio Moves Like Liquid Light was published in 2019.
If you celebrate Easter, this weekend will be a time of rebirth, redemption, change. This poem is not an Easter poem, but it is a poem about change. About how the change we seek and the change we celebrate may not truly be the change we really need. It marks the moment in 1965 when the Astrodome, a brand new gleaming stadium in Houston, Texas, was opened to an eagerly awaiting public.
Half a century on, the new stadium was described in a news media headline as “the global wonder now a decaying shell”.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 82 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "The East-West Border" by Jaan Kaplinski.
Jaan Kaplinski was a linguist, anthropologist, researcher of languages and one of Estonia’s leading poets who died in 2021 at the age of 80.
Born to a Polish teacher and an Estonian dancer, he witnessed throughout his life the fragility of boundaries and identities — Estonia was invaded by the Soviet Union a year before his birth and was part of that entity until the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, and later, a decade after its new independence, the country became a member of both the European Union and NATO.
This poem was included in his 1987 collection The Wandering Border. It was translated from the Estonian by the author with Sam Hamill and Riina Tamm.
A few months after Kaplinski’s death in 2021, those fragile borders came into sharp focus once more with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 81 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "In a Restaurant" by Stephen Santus.
Stephen Santus is an English teacher and poet. His influences include the Japanese forms of haiku and tanka — the tanka is typically 31 syllables over five lines, the haiku even shorter at 17 over three, each form aiming to capture something tiny and vast — and his late, great, raw compatriot Philip Larkin, who had "the ability to sneak deep truths past you when you think you are just having a pint and a chat at the bar".
This poem carries something of those influences — short in form but deep in truth.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 80 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "Home-Thoughts, from Abroad" by Robert Browning.
Robert Browning was an English poet of the 19th century, seen as a giant of Victorian literature. (His body is interred at Poets Corner in Westminster Abbey in London.)
Many of Browning’s poems are long (some are book-length) and are often seen as difficult — he was as much a philosopher and psychologist who expressed his philosophical theories and psychological observations in poetic form. But this poem, probably now his best known, is short and easily accessible.
Critics have pointed out the political tension behind this poem — Browning was writing about the natural and pastoral beauty of England at a time when the British Empire’s colonization efforts were in full flow. That’s a valid observation, but revisionist history is fraught with problems. Who knows how we might have behaved in a past we can scarcely imagine?
Instead I think about this poem in the context not of the political but of the individual. Browning had left England to live in Italy for many years (he died in Venice).
In the poem we witness one man’s powerful yearning for home. We also see how, when distance comes between us and where we believe we belong, we always somehow manage to romanticize the things we think we love, even if our decisions have taken us away from them.
There may be something for us to consider here as we look at our own lives, at who or what we love or where we might feel we belong, and ask whether our decisions are bringing us closer or moving us further away.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 79 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "Hosing Down" by Hubert Moore.
Hubert Moore is a British poet. A retired teacher, he has published nine collections of poetry, including Beautifully Kept Things and The Feeding Station. This poem, Hosing Down, was a highly commended poem in the Forward Book of Poetry 2015.
It tells of a single fleeting moment witnessed from a rush hour train, and how such moments of tiny beauty or vitality might routinely pass us by if we are unaware or just unlucky.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 78 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is ""Hay", by Paul Muldoon.
Paul Muldoon is a Pulitzer Prize winning Irish poet. He has published 14 collections over half a century (indeed, 2023 is the 50th anniversary of his debut collection New Weather).
Like his near contemporary Seamus Heaney, Muldoon was born and raised in rural Northern Ireland, has been published by London publisher Faber & Faber throughout his career and has taught at both Oxford and the Ivy League (Heaney at Harvard, Muldoon at Princeton University, where he is, at the time of recording this episode, a Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Creative Writing).
This poem, "Hay", is from his 1998 collection of the same name. It speaks, to me at least, of the connection — ephemeral, atomic, undeniable — between us and the ground beneath us, between us and what the ground beneath us so routinely gives us in life, before it accepts us back in death.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 77 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "What the Living Do", by Marie Howe.
Marie Howe is an American poet. She has published four collections of poetry. Interestingly, to me at least, she has published just one collection every nine or ten years, towards the end of each decade since the 1980s. This poem, "What The Living Do", is from her 1997 collection of the same name.
The starting point and the end point of Poems of the Speed of Life is poems and life. Maybe more than any other poem I’ve read here, this is exactly that: a poem about what life is, a poem about what living is. Life might be often tedious or hard, occasionally unbearably so, but it is life, and sometimes, if we’re lucky, we might be presented with our own reflection in glass and discover that we cherish the imperfect vision we see.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 76 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "Call" by Doireann Ní Ghríofa.
Doireann Ní Ghríofa is an Irish writer and poet who writes in both English and Irish. Her first prose book, A Ghost in the Throat — which draws a line between her life and the life of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, or Eileen O’Connell, a long-dead and mostly forgotten Irish noblewoman who wrote Caoineadh Art Ui Laoghaire, or The Lament for Art O Laoghaire, praised as the greatest poem written in Britain or Ireland in the 18th century — won widespread praise and was named the Irish Book of the Year.
Ní Ghríofa has published eight collections of poetry, including Lies, a collection of poems in Irish translated into English, from which this poem comes. "Call" is a short poem about love and connection and disconnection.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 75 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "It Aint What You Do It’s What It Does to You", by Simon Armitage
Simon Armitage is the British Poet Laureate. He has published more than 20 collections of poetry, starting with Zoom! in 1989.
The poem in this episode is one of his “Marsden Poems”, which were gathered together in his 2020 book Magnetic Field, a collection which centres around his home village of Marsden in West Yorkshire. (A note on the text: he mentions Black Moss, which is a reservoir high in the Pennines near Marsden.)
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 74 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "What You Mean to Me" by Penny Boxall.
Penny Boxall is a Scottish poet. She has published three collections of poetry, including Ship of the Line, which won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Prize, Scotland’s most prestigious poetry award. She is currently Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Lucy Cavenish College, Cambridge.
As with all the introductions to poems on this podcast, my perspective is necessarily incomplete. If this or any of the poems in this podcast speak to you in other ways, please allow that to happen. This poem, to me, is a poem about place and identity, and about where place and identity come fully together: home. And it’s also about what happens when our home is no longer home, when we choose or are forced to move and our home becomes — finally, almost grotesquely — home to someone else.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 73 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "It's Our Dance", by Brendan Cleary.
Brendan Cleary is an Irish-born poet who has lived in England for more than 40 years. He has published a number of collections and was also the publisher and editor of The Echo Room, a poetry magazine which ran in the 1980s and 90s.
One of the most powerful capacities of poetry, one of the most important jobs a poem can do, is to capture a single moment in life that in turn captures a broad expanse of a lifetime.
This poem, a poem about a song by Nina Simone, and a dance, and the love of life, and maybe even the love of love, does just that.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 72 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "Great Plain" by Kevin Powers.
Kevin Powers is an American fiction writer and poet. He is also an Iraq War veteran and he rose to prominence in 2012 when his debut novel, The Yellow Birds, which drew on his experiences of that conflict.
That book drew comparisons with a classic of war writing, The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, about the Vietnam War and this poem “Great Plains” also reminded me of O’Brien.
There’s a line in O’Brien’s work that goes, “Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to” and that haunting line came back to me as I read and experienced this poem, a powerful piece about man’s inhumanity to man, yes, but also about the things we’re sometimes forced to do, or choose to do, or end up doing by the terrible joined forces of momentum and circumstance.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 71 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "Because" by James McAuley.
James McAuley was a 20th century Australian poet, essayist and academic. He took poetry’s art and craft so seriously that he was behind one of history’s most elaborate (and successful) literary hoaxes, ridiculing modernist verse by creating a fictional modernist poet and manufacturing his entire body of work in one day. The creation, Ern Malley, was heralded as a genius by the Australian modernist poets whose work he despised as lacking depth and meaning and artfulness.
This poem, “Because”, is less about art and more about life. It's about parenting and being parented and the deep and lasting impact that relationship has on the full spectrum of one’s life.
There is a depth of feeling here, and a perceptiveness about truly complex matters, that is profound.
As a man, one of the things I’m most interested in is the relationships between fathers and sons, and this poem has so much to say on that that it would be unfair to say any more. I’ll let the poem speak.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 70 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "The Peace of Wild Things" by Wendell Berry.
Wendell Berry is a farmer, novelist and activist, has been producing poetry for more than half a century.
It might just be the increased availability of news and events and emotions from across the world through the unprecedented and fundamentally life-changing technology of the Internet, but there does seem to be a lot of despair—and its even more dangerous children, apathy and meaninglessness—around right now.
Consider this poem an antidote. It starts with the line “When despair for the world grows in me” and what follows is a treatment protocol for the despair we all sometimes feel.
You can read the poem here.
This is the second Wendell Berry poem to feature on this podcast. Scroll in your podcast player to find Episode 32, "Do Not Be Ashamed".
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This is Episode 69 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "Instructions on Not Giving Up" by Ada Limón.
Ada Limon is an American poet and, since 2022, the US Poet Laureate, the first Latina-American woman to hold that position. She has published five collections of poetry.
This poem is a sonnet, 14 lines, but it defies the structure that often seems to come with the sonnet form. It is defiant in more than structure too. It looks beyond the colour of spring—nature’s “baubles and trinkets”—to look at what lies beneath that colour: the “strange idea of continuous living, the thing that runs through us all, carrying us through the endless seasons, and that carries on through life and death itself.
It tells us of the permanence of the world, in both brightness and dullness, and acts, I think, as a sort of life-raft to hold onto on those darker days.
You can read the poem here.
This is the second Wendell Berry poem to feature on this podcast. Scroll in your podcast player to find Episode 32, "Do Not Be Ashamed".
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This is Episode 68 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "The Lost Land" by Eavan Boland.
Eavan Boland was an Irish poet who died in 2020 at the age of 75. She taught at Stanford University professor for the last 25 years of her life.
This poem was written, I believe, soon after she left Ireland for the west coast of America.
Posted here for the first time on March 17th, 2023, St Patrick’s Day, it is an exploration of two types of grief: the bittersweet grief of seeing children grow up and move on to their own lives, and the grief of saying farewell—of leaving home, or being left behind.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 66 of Poems for the Speed of Life.Today's poem is "Antidotes to Fear of Death" by Rebecca Elson.Rebecca Elson died in 1999 at the age of just 39, ten years after she was first diagnosed with non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. As well as writing poetry, she was a scientist, studying astronomy at Cambridge University and being among the first researchers to view images of space from the Hubble Space Telescope in the 1990s. This poem was included in her only collection, A Responsibility to Awe, which was published posthumously. Death is at once a great inevitability and still terrifying. This poem might offer some small, but timeless and eternal solace to anyone afflicted by anxious thoughts about the end of our time on earth.You can read the poem here.***Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.To leave the show a review: On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here) On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here) On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. (Details here)Music Credit:Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This is Episode 65 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "The Resemblance Between Your Life and a Dog" by Robert Bly.
Robert Bly was an American writer, poet, essayist and men’s groups leader who died in 2021 at the age of 94. He is perhaps best known now for his bestselling prose book Iron John, a study of the male experience and role through old myths and stories.
This poem, written towards the end of his career, is a humble and at times bleak reflection on how life goes.
Whatever our hopes or dreams or plans, life will inevitably have something else in store for us. If we can accept that, whatever it is, all the better.
You can read the poem here.
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Poetry can make us see things differently: ourselves, the world, ourselves in the world.
This is Episode 64 of Poems for the Speed of Life. I hope that this podcast each weekday morning helps to give you some slight, subtle, but powerful shift of perspective, wherever you are in the world.
Today's poem is "Failing and Flying" by Jack Gilbert.
Jack Gilbert was an American poet who died in 2012. He lived much of his life in Europe and a lot of his work focused squarely on the small details and challenges of that life: ambition, his desire, relationships.
He described himself as a serious romantic. In an essay about his work, he wrote, "One of the special pleasures in poetry for me is accomplishing a lot with the least means possible."
One of the things that most appeals about this poem, "Failing and Flying", is how it invites us to question convention. To see something more in what we’re told to see. And to ask us, if we must offer judgment, to make that judgement through a wider lens than just how something ends.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 63 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is "The Way It Is" by William Stafford.
Steve Jobs, the legendary founder of Apple Computers, once said, “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
Today’s poem by William Stafford, an American poet who died in 1993 at the age of 79, reminded me of that. Stafford once said, “I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don't have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.” This poem, The Way It Is, is another way of looking at those dots or that hidden river. Maybe the two main tasks in our life are as simply put as they are difficult to accomplish: first to find our thread, and then to commit to following it wherever it leads.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 62 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
As with every poem on this podcast, feel free to disregard or forget entirely about my introduction. If the poem says something specific or different to you, go with it wherever it leads.
Today's poem is "Bread" by Moya Cannon.
Moya Cannon is an Irish poet. She was born and grew up in Donegal and lived for almost 30 years in Galway, she is grounded in the unique experience of Ireland’s west — its remoteness, its wildness, the place of people within a history that goes back a million times longer than the history of humanity. Her collected poems was published by Carcanet Press in 2021.
This poem, "Bread", is about the small details that add up to the intangible but essential feeling of home.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 61 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "Bluebird" by Charles Bukowski.
Welcome to today’s short episode of Poems for the Speed of Life, a daily podcast that brings you one poem each weekday morning, and tries to bring you some of its power too. As with today’s poem and all the others, you are free to ignore introduction. If the poem says something specific or different to you, go with that, wherever it goes.
Wherever you are in the world, hopefully this podcast each weekday morning helps to give you some slight, subtle, but powerful shift of perspective.
Charles Bukowski was a German-born American poet who died in 1994 at the age of 73. His work is notable for its rawness, even crudeness. In his portrayal of the suffering of ordinary working class people — and as much as anything the need to console suffering through pleasures of the senses, through alcohol or drugs or sex — he leaves nothing out. This poem “Bluebird” is a sensitive portrayal of how sensitivity itself — feeling, emotion, tears — is so routinely, and maybe so damagingly, covered up.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 60 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "Clearing" by Martha Postlethwaite.
Welcome to today’s short episode of Poems for the Speed of Life, a daily podcast that brings you one poem each weekday morning, and tries to bring you some of its power too. As with today’s poem and all the others, you are free to ignore introduction. If the poem says something specific or different to you, go with that, wherever it goes.
Martha Postlethwaite is theologian, educator, counselling psychologist and spiritual teacher based in St Paul, Minnesota. She is the author of “Addiction and Recovery: A Spiritual Journey” and is a lead pastor with the Recovery Church, a Christian organization which describes itself as a healing ground for those who want to get well.
“Making the world a better place” is a stated ambition for so many people. There’s something in this desire that often strikes me as laden with guilt and shame. That in some way the world is suffering and struggling and the onus is on us to fix it. This forces us to look outwards first. And so introspection is perhaps rarer and more precious than it might be.
This poem invites us instead to look inwards first as we go through life.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 59 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "Integrity", by Adrienne Rich.
Adrienne Rich was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She published more than 20 collections in her lifetime: her first in her early 20s in 1951 and her last, well over half a century later, in 2010, just two years before her death at the age of 82.
TS Eliot said that genuine poetry can communicate before it’s understood, and that was the way this poem, "Integrity", worked for me.
I’ve read it a number of times now, and I’m still peeling back the layers of its meaning. At its heart, it says something about all the different parts of ourselves, our idiosyncrasies and hypocrisies, the values and desires that compete within us and which, together, add up to who we are and make us whole.
This is the second an Adrienne Rich poem has featured on this podcast. You can find Episode 20, "Toward the Solstice" here, or by scrolling through the archive in your podcast player.
You can read "Integrity" here
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This is Episode 58 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "The Art of Disappearing", by Naomi Shihab Nye.
Naomi Shihab Nye is an American poet and songwriter who was born in 1952. Born in the US, she moved with her Palestinian father to the West Bank as a teenager but the family had to flee after the Six-Day War in 1967.
A four-time Pushcart Prize winner, Nye has published more than 20 collections of poetry, including several collections specifically for children.
This poem, "The Art of Disappearing", is a gorgeous reflection on the importance of solitude, the fragility of peace, and the need to separate ourselves from the endless noise of society so that we can try to remember the things that are too important to forget.
You can read the poem here
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This is Episode 57 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "If—", by Rudyard Kipling.
Rudyard Kipling was an Indian-born British poet. Maybe best known now for “The Jungle Book”, his novel that became a classic Disney film, he is the youngest ever winner of the Nobel prize in literature, which he was awarded in 1907 at the age of 42.
More than a century later, his legacy has often been questioned. He is sometimes seen as the outdated voice of the old British empire, and has variously been criticised as old-fashioned, jingoistic, even racist, although others would argue that those criticisms, coming through a modern lens that fails to appreciate the reality of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, are unfair.
Even this poem has been seen by some as exclusionary or even sexist, as it ends with the words "you'll be a man, my son".
For one thing, the poem was first published in 1910 as an address to Kipling’s only son, John, who was then 12. (Tragically, John was killed in action in France during WW1, a few weeks after his 18th birthday.)
For another thing, it’s my belief that there’s nothing wrong if a man writes for a male reader. The poem outlines many of the Stoic values that have appealed to countless men over thousands of years, at least as far back as the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose Meditations were in the same Stoic tradition.
You can read the poem here
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This is Episode 56 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "Begin" by Brendan Kennelly.
Brendan Kennelly was an Irish poet who died in 2021 at the age of 85. A contemporary of Seamus Heaney, he was for many years in Ireland perhaps better loved than his countryman, owing as much as anything to his regular popular appearances on the television programme The Late Late Show, where he regaled a captive national audience with his energy and wit and eyes that seemed to attract everyone who looked into them.
He published more than 50 collections between 1959 and 2013. This poem, “Begin”, was the title poem of his 1999 collection. Perhaps written in part to mark the attitude of stepping into the new millennium, it can equally be viewed as a daily encouragement to look around us at where we are, and no matter where we find ourselves, to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and just start again anew.
You can read the poem here
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This is Episode 55 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "Things to live for when the world seems hopeless", by Nikita Gill.
Nikita Gill is a British-Indian poet who has won a large and loyal audience in recent years through her use of social media.
At the time of this recording (in February 2023) she has more 650,000 followers on Instagram, more than 130,000 on Twitter, and her work receives millions of views on these and other web platforms.
As well as publishing her own work, she also uses her reach to promote the work of other poets she admires also. (You can find her @nktgill on Twitter and nikita_gill on Instagram.)
This poem is a brand new work. It was published in February 2023 on Instagram and Twitter and was introduced by the poet as follows:
"My anxiety and depression have absolutely had me in a chokehold these last few weeks so I’m just going to leave this up for anyone else struggling. Being present is incredibly hard when depression is keeping you in the past while anxiety stresses about the future. I hope you find the small thing that anchors you to now. And if you can’t, that’s okay too. Be kind and easy on yourself."
You can read the poem on Instagram here
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This is Episode 54 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's episode is a first for this show, as it includes two poems: "Digging" and "Follower", both by Seamus Heaney.
I felt like these two poems deserved to be read and heard and experienced together. Both “Digging” and “Follower” were included in Heaney’s first collection, Death of a Naturalist, in 1966.
The central thrust of both poems is the poet’s relationship with his father.
While Heaney’s farmer father Patrick would not die until 20 years later, each poem almost reads like an elegy: a tribute to, a farewell to, their relationship.
In each poem, there is some tension between the awe the poet feels towards his father, and the paths the poet takes in his own life, and the effects of these decisions, and of time, on both men and on their relationship.
You can read "Digging" here
And "Follower" is available here
This is the second time poems by Seamus Heaney feature on Poems for the Speed of Life. Check out Episode 14 for "Postscript".
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This is Episode 53 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "When I set out for Lyonnesse" by Thomas Hardy.
Thomas Hardy was an English writer who lived and worked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
He was an exceptional novelist, with enduring classics such as Far From The Madding Crowd and Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Less well known as a poet during his lifetime, he nevertheless produced a vast amount of poetry.
His work was seen as a bridge between the 19th century of Dickens, Jane Austen and the Brontes, and the modernism of the likes of TS Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
This short song-like poem offers a tiny glimpse into the life of the artist: the transformation from the person you are into the person you become.
Lyonnesse serves as a double-meaning here: it was a mythical place off the coast of England, associated with King Arthur and his wizard Merlin, and also the name of the home of his first wife, Emma Gifford.
You can read the poem here
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This is Episode 52 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "A Blessing" by James Wright.
James Wright was an American poet, who was so sensitive to the world around him that his mental health suffered for much of his life.
His Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972, and his work has influenced a generation of writers, including Mary Oliver, and you might be able to hear some echoes of her work in this gorgeous little poem of a man’s interaction with two ponies in a field, and how that experience opens up some of the deepest truths of the earth, the universe and what some might call divinity itself.
You can read the poem here
(If you’re new to this podcast, you can find two poems by Mary Oliver in earlier episodes: "Snowy Night" is in Episode 2, and "The Journey" is in Episode 34.)
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This is Episode 51 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "Munich, Winter 1973 (for Y.S.)" by James Baldwin
James Baldwin was an American essayist, novelist, playwright and poet who died in 1987.
His writing often captured the dual complexity of African-American experience and homosexuality: Baldwin was a gay black man, who left the US in his early 20s to live and work in France, in large part because of the daily indignities of racism in America.
Despite being friendly with some of the leaders of the Black Civil Rights movement, including Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Baldwin nevertheless resisted the straightforward narratives of race that were drawn in some protest literature of the time.
In the words of one of his biographers, he resented the "categorization of human beings" because categorizations "deny life".
In this poem we can see something of Baldwin’s awe and wonder for all life’s complexity—its beauty, its love, its desire and its uncertainty.
You can read the poem here
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This is Episode 50 of the podcast. Sincere thank you to everyone who has listened over these past two months, and thanks also to you this is your first time listening to the podcast.
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Today’s poem is “Hideout” by Desmond Egan.
Desmond Egan is a prolific Irish poet who has published almost 30 collections during his career.
This poem is from one of his most recent collections, "Epic", which was published in 2015.
I chose it because it captures something that feels resonant right now.
Our world seems to crowd in around us — either physically in towns or cities, or psychologically, in how we spend so much of our time now lost in the overwhelming noise of the online world.
It is, I think, for most of us, an increasingly rare opportunity to escape that noise, to find the silence that the poet found beside this little stream.
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This is Episode 49 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today’s poem is "Entirely", by Louis MacNeice.
Louis MacNeice was a British-Irish poet who was born in Belfast in the early 1900s, was educated from the age of 10 in England, attended Oxford Univeristy and died in London in the 1960s at the age of 55.
In his life he is said to have felt always as an outsider — he was an Irishman in England, but never felt at home back in Ireland either. The general political upheaval, both in Ireland — which went through rebellion, independence and partition into the Republic and Northern Ireland in his lifetime — and globally, with two World Wars, the rise of Nazism and Communism, seemed to cause in MacNeice a great doubt and skepticism.
A little of that feeling is captured in this poem, "Entirely", with its subtle encouragement for us to step forward even though we can never really be sure of ourselves, of where we are, or where we're going.
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This is Episode 48 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today’s poem is "Mirrors", by IN-Q.
In-Q is the stage name of Adam Schmalholz, an American spoken word performer, songwriter and poet.
He has delivered powerful talks from the TED stage and is a co-creator of Da Poetry Lounge, one of the world’s largest open mic poetry events held weekly at the Greenway Court Theatre in Los Angeles. As a songwriter he has written hit songs for the likes of Selena Gomez and Miley Cyrus.
There’s no way I will do full justice to this piece of work, so please go to YouTube to hear In-Q himself perform it.
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This is Episode 47 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today’s poem is "Shadow and Light Source Both" by Rumi.
Jalal ad-Din Muhummad Rumi, commonly known in English simply as Rumi, was a 13th century teacher, philosopher, mystic, Islamic scholar, and poet.
At such a remove of time, language and place — how much resemblance, really, does modern day America or Australia or Ireland bear to Arabic Asia in the 1200s? — it can be hard to get to the heart of the real Rumi, or his work, such as the Maznavi, a six-volume mystical poem that spans somewhere close to 30,000 lines of poetry.
Nevertheless, several recent translations — and, as in the popular work of the poet Coleman Barks, re-interpretations of existing English translations — added to the suitability of Rumi’s lines and couplets for the social media generation, has found new audiences for his work in the 21st century.
This poem "Shadow and Light Source Both" is a poem about the shadows we carry with us, and what they might teach us about ourselves.
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This is Episode 46 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today’s poem is "Why Pray" by Matthew McConaughey.
Matthew McConaughey is an actor, star of blockbuster movies such as Magic Mike, Interstellar and Dallas Buyers Club, for which he won an Oscar for Best Actor in 2014.
This poem, "Why Pray?", is an entry in Greenlights, his widely acclaimed and bestselling autobiography, or memoir, or waking dream, or — as McConaughey himself describes it — his "love letter to life", which was published in 2020.
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This is Episode 45 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today’s poem, "The West Coast of Clare" by Andy Irvine, is actually a song.
It’s the second song lyric to feature on this podcast—you can find "The Best Day of My Life" by Tom Odell and Laurie Blundell in Episode 30 here, or by searching or scrolling in your podcast player. It’s also the second time that the west coast of county Clare, on Ireland’s Atlantic seaboard, features in Poems to Live Well By. You can find "Postscript" by Seamus Heaney in Episode 14.
“The West Coast of Clare” was included on the debut album of the legendary Irish folk band Planxty released almost exactly 50 years ago, in the early months of 1973. It has been covered by various artists, including Ed Sheeran, Dervish and David Gray.
The line between poetry and song is a wispy one, and while I would encourage you whole-heartedly to listen to the full version of "The West Coast of Clare" live here, or the original track on Spotify here, with Irvine’s gorgeous voice and the lilting, haunting whistle and strings of his band, I believe it stands alone as a poem in its own right.
Perhaps fittingly for today, Valentine’s Day, “The West Coast of Clare” encapsulates the depth of a love, and the grief of its aftermath.
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This is Episode 44 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today’s poem is "Mirror in February", by Thomas Kinsella.
You can read the poem here.
Thomas Kinsella was an Irish poet, who passed away in 2021 at the age of 93.
Although relatively little known outside Ireland, he has been compared favourably to his Nobel-winning Irish countryman Seamus Heaney. (One reviewer in the LA Times in 2006 expressed the view that Heaney’s later work had gone stale whereas Kinsella "constantly surprises".)
This poem was one of his early poems, written in 1962 when he was 33 (“the age of Christ”). It was on the Irish school curriculum for many years. However, it’s not a simple or an easy poem. Every line invites us to stop, and pay close attention, and maybe stopping—even for a moment—and paying close attention—even for a moment, is something that will enhance every ordinary day of our lives.
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This is Episode 43 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today’s poem is "Woodland Burial", by Pam Ayres
You can read the poem here.
Pam Ayres is an English broadcaster, comedian and poet who has become a firm favourite of legions of listeners to her many shows and appearances on BBC radio.
She taps into a shared desire for humour, for our need to go through serious things but to bring to them whatever lightness we can muster.
This poem “Woodland Burial” is a poem about life and the afterlife, not a fluffy heaven inhabited by our souls, but a transformation of our spirit and our matter from one living thing into another.
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This is Episode 42 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today’s poem is "Praise of a Man", by Norman MacCaig
You can read the poem here.
Norman MacCaig was a Scottish poet whose life spanned most of the 20th century. He spent all his life in Scotland, first working as a primary school teacher before finishing his career in academia, teaching creative writing at the University of Edinburgh.
This poem, “In Praise of a Man”, is a eulogy to a dead friend. It’s much more than that too. It paints a picture of what a man can be, maybe what a man should be. In all the gender politics of the 21st century, the male role in society, in business, in the family has been reshaped and questioned.
At heart, what should a man be? What should a man do? This poem, reflecting on the life of a man who has passed away, goes some way to answering those questions.
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This is Episode 41 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today’s poem is "Go to the Limits of Your Longing", by Rainer Maria Rilke.
You can read the poem here.
Rainer Maria Rilke was a poet who came from the old Austro-Hungarian empire which existed until the end of World War I. He was a near contemporary of Friedrich Nietzsche, both men wrote in German, and it’s said that they even, 15 or 20 years apart, fell in love with the same woman (the psychoanalyst Lou Salomé).
Whereas the philosophy of Nietzsche can be dense and difficult to read, and is sometimes seen as depressing or nihilistic, and the poetry of Rilke is easy to read and often hopeful or spiritually uplifting, there are many parallels in their work too. For one thing, both reject easy summaries of the way life was or could be. Both, in their own way, questioned what life was for.
Rilke’s poems can often be adopted as affirmations or prayers, and often include short lines that seem to go straight to the heart of things. That can be said about today’s poem, “Go to the Limits of Your Longing”, a prayer given to us directly by God to encourage us to go out and live, fully, deeply, embracing the full complexity of our being.
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This is Episode 40 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today’s poem is "Up", by Margaret Atwood.
You can read the poem here.
Margaret Atwood is a legendary and prolific novelist, essayist, poet and activist from Canada. She has published more than 50 books, including the 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, set in a dystopian future and which has been made into a hugely successful TV series in recent years.
This poem, “Up”, is a very personal account of (in my reading) the experience of anxiety and depression.
It asks — and asks us to ask ourselves — pertinent questions about our present, our past and our future.
As always on this podcast, take this introduction as a jumping-off point. If this poem says something different to you than it says to me, your response is equally valid.
A poem, as John Cleese says, is to be experienced, not explained. So invite it in, and allow it to speak.
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This is Episode 39 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today’s poem is "Snow", by Vladimir Holan, translated from the Czech by Ian and Jarmila Milner.
You can read the poem here.
Vladimir Holan was a Czech poet who lived and died in the country during the upheaval, war, torment and genocide of the 20th century.
Czechoslovakia was caught between the fascism of Nazi Germany and the communism of Soviet Russia, and was a member of the so-called Eastern Bloc communist states of eastern Europe from after World War II until 1989.
As such, it’s maybe understandable that Holan’s poetry is described as having a dark and bleak view of the world.
Still, there is some degree of hope and liberation in this poem, "Snow".
At one level, yes, it tells us that nothing matters. But at another level, does it also say that because none of the stuff deemed important matters, we might be able to stop worrying about it?
Let you decide. As always on this podcast, whatever this poem says to you is valid. Invite it in, and allow it to speak.
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This is Episode 38 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today's poem is "The Bell and the Blackbird", by David Whyte
You can read the poem here. You are also invited to listen to the author recite the poem aloud, in his own unique and powerful way, here.
David Whyte is an English poet whose work has drawn a phenomenal following in recent years. His work seems to tap into something vital in the world right now, something that all of us are hungry for, some connection with the land beneath us and the air around us, some connection too with all the other searching souls around the world with whom we share a path, even if they are at some other stage of the journey.
“The Bell and the Blackbird” is a short and beautiful poem that encourages us to contemplate the impossible choice all of us face: the choice between the built world of humanity and society and accomplishment, and the other world, of mystery and spirit and eternity.
This is the second poem by David Whyte in this podcast. You can search in your podcast player for Episode 7, "Sometimes". And as always with David Whyte poetry, I encourage you to seek out the poet reading and discussing his own work. His unique delivery brings the words alive in an extraordinarily powerful way.
Music Credit:
Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
This is Episode 37 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today’s poem is "Leaving the Empty Room", by Stephen Dunn
You can read the poem here.
Stephen Dunn was an American poet, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, who died in 2021 at the age of 82.
His subject matter was the normal everyday triumphs and tragedies, disappointments and despairs, and his style was described as easygoing and conversational, which meant you might have to look closely to see the seriousness below.
This poem is a study (I think) of loneliness, of emptiness, and of the impulse and thoughtlessness often baked into life’s big decisions.
I don’t know the context of the poem, but it was included in a 2011 edition of the Paris Review, and I do know that Dunn was married to his first wife Lois for almost 40 years before divorcing in 2001. Maybe that’s relevant here, maybe it's not.
I suspect that this sensation—a feeling of emptiness that seems to fill up when you leave—is something many of us have experienced in our lives.
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This is Episode 36 of Poems to Live Well By.
As with every poem on this podcast, the introductions here are only introductions. You are encouraged to listen to the poem, and to read it, and to allow it to speak to you however it does.
Perhaps fitting for today, February 1st, St Brigid’s Day, we have a female poet with both a strong Irish background and strong feminist philosophies.
British Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2019, Carol Ann Duffy has published more than 30 collections of poetry, including a number of books of children’s poetry. Raised in an Irish Catholic family in Glasgow, Scotland, she moved away from religion in her teens.
This poem, “Prayer”, is a testimony of the power of prayer. It tells us that prayer exists as something that’s bigger and goes much further than the normal boundaries of organised religion. A note on the text: there is a word in here that might need a definition. "Minim" is a term from music which means something like a tiny beat, a half-note. Also, the last line is a list of place names, which will be well known to anyone who has happened late at night to the Shipping Forecast on BBC Radio.
You can read the poem here.
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Perhaps best known for “Stepping Stones”, his book-length collection of interviews with his friend Seamus Heaney, Dennis O’Driscoll was a respected poet in his own right, publishing nine collections before his death at the age of 58 at Christmas 2012 (just a few months before Heaney also passed away).
O’Driscoll was a so-called “office poets”, one of those poets who worked their whole lives in non-poetic day jobs, a category which includes Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. (Incidentally, you can find poems by Stevens in Episode 21 and Williams on Episode 29 of this podcast.)
This poem, “You”, is about you.
It’s about all of us.
It’s about the unique and strange challenge of living.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 30 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today’s poem is “The Journey” by Mary Oliver.
Mary Oliver, who died in January 2019, was a beloved American poet whose simple lines, crafted out of the natural world and our place within it, always bring powerful pictures to our minds and empowering encouragement to our hearts. [This is the second time a Mary Oliver poem features on this podcast. Search in your podcast player for Episode 2, “Snowy Night”.]
This poem, “The Journey”, is about hearing the call to the life we know we must lead, and about answering that call, and about the journey between those two moments.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 33 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today’s poem is A Piper by Seumas O’Sullivan.
Seumas O’Sullivan was an Irish poet and literary editor whose work covered the turbulent first half of the 20th century in Ireland, decades of uprising and independence, of civil war and the growing pains of a new country.
He was well acquainted with the Irish literary scene, being friends with — and sometimes showcasing the work of — the likes of James Joyce, WB Yeats and the young Patrick Kavanagh. This poem, “A Piper”, was later set to song by a number of composers, including Ivor Gurney and Michael Head. It is a simple but moving ditty on the power of music to stop us in our tracks and transport us, momentarily, to a place where we belong.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 32 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today’s poem is “Do Not Be Ashamed” by Wendell Berry.
Wendell Berry is an American poet who has published more than 30 collections from 1964 to the present. His work was described by Andrew Angyal, a professor of English and environmental studies, as having “a commitment to the reality and primacy of the actual world”, a world where “nothing exists for its own sake, but for a harmony greater than itself which includes it”.
Berry’s focus, then, is on the full breadth of the universal: on the world around him and the people within that world.
This poem “Do Not Be Ashamed” is, I think, about the pressures to conform to the modern world. It was written in 1967, but its resonance, its way of speaking to me and you, its encouragement to find our voice even when doing so separates us from the safety-in-numbers that exists in unthinking compliance, is every bit as relevant today as it was more than half a century ago.
You can read "Do Not Be Ashamed" here.
This is Episode 31 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today’s poem is Landmarks by Breda Wall Ryan, an Irish writer and poet who deserves wider attention.
She has published two collections of poetry, In a Hare’s Eye and Raven Mothers. Her poems are full of powerful imagery, and she often brings the lives of women into sharp focus.
This poem, “Landmarks”, is a poem about place and memory and the connection between the two. You can read the poem here.
[A short note on the text: There are a number of Irish or Gaelic phrases in the poem. The first is lios, which means a ringfort or fairy fort, commonplace in old Irish fields where human culture stretches back thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of years. The other Irish phrases are a list of the names of fields. In the Irish landscape, every field always had a name.]
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This is Episode 30 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today’s poem is not, strictly, a poem. But some of the greatest poetry has always been written by songwriters. The boundary between song and poetry is a flimsy one, and just because these words are better known in song does not mean they don’t contain every essence of poetry too. Today’s poem, or song, is “The Best Day of my Life” by Tom Odell and Laurie Blundell. (I believe Odell is the writer of the words and Blundell the producer and musical composer, but both are listed as the songwriters.)
Odell’s lyrics often touch on the challenges of living in the modern world: pursued by expectations, trying to keep up with a fast pace, trying to carve out one’s own place in the world. You only have to read some of the comments posted beneath his official music videos on YouTube to see what his words mean to so many people.
To hear Tom Odell perform this song live, see this deeply moving rendition on the Jools Holland Hootenanny show on the BBC on New Year's Eve 2022, where he combines "The Best Day of My Life" with another of his songs, "Another Love".
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This is Episode 29 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today’s poem is "Spring and All", by William Carlos Williams
You can read the poem here.
John Cleese, of Monty Python fame, wrote a well-received book called Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide recently. There’s a conversation between Cleese and Iain McGilchrist, who has been both a practising psychiatrist and literary professor, and who has written vital books on the brain and the mind, including The Master and his Emissary, about the right-left brain divide. In the conversation they discussed poetry and Cleese said, "You shouldn’t try to explain a poem. You should experience it."
If my introductions to the poems I read five days a week here ever come across as an explanation, please feel free to ignore me, and just experience the poem instead.
William Carlos Williams was an American poet whose work spanned the first six decades of the 20th century. In a way he is similar to Wallace Stevens, in that he combined poetry with the professions (Stevens was a legal executive, Williams was a practicing doctor at a New Jersey Hospital for 40 years), but Williams’s poetry is sometimes seen as a little more accessible, maybe a little less complex, but in many ways no less powerful.
This poem, "Spring and All", is a poem about the stirring of the earth in the after-winter. One of the things it speaks to me is how occasional bleakness is always temporary, and always replaced by some new energy of life.
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This is Episode 28 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today’s poem is "Forgetfulness" by Billy Collins.
You can read the poem here.
Billy Collins is an American poet, formerly New York State poet and Poet Laureate of the United States in the early 2000s. He has published 17 collections.
This poem, "Forgetfulness" is lighthearted, but as serious as it gets too, as it considers the processing of ageing, of what is happening in our mind. As always, you’re invited to read the poem, and to allow it to speak to you however it speaks to you.
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This is Episode 27 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today’s poem is "Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward", by Anne Sexton,
You can read the poem here.
Anne Sexton was an American poet. She struggled with mental illness for much of her life, underwent extensive psychoanalysis treatment and therapy, and took her own life at the age of 45 in 1974. Her poetry is raw. Indeed, she started to write as a therapeutic outlet to ease her struggles.
This poem, "Unknown Girl in a Maternity Ward", places the reader in as a new mother in a hospital bed, having given birth to a baby who she knows will be taken from her.
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This is Episode 26 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today’s poem is “Weakness” by Alden Nowlan.
You can read the poem here.
Alden Nowlan was a Canadian poet, who died at the age of just 50 in 1983. He was taken out of school at the age of just 10 as his family saw academic education as a waste of time, but he soon discovered the power of reading and hitchhiked 20 miles every weekend for books. It was a secretive pursuit, however. Nowlan once said: "I wrote (as I read) in secret. My father would as soon have seen me wear lipstick."
Nowlan’s father is the central figure in this poem, “Weakness”, which captures a single moment in a complex rural life, when weakness is to be stamped out, but still there is a kernel of love and care.
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This is Episode 25 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today’s poem is “Rain” by Edward Thomas.
You can read the poem here.
TS Eliot once said that poetry communicates before it’s understood. I encourage you, with every poem on this podcast, to let it speak to you how it speaks. However it lands for you, let it land.
The poem may seem at first reading to be excessively downbeat—about solitude, about suffering, about the dissolution of love, the inevitability of death.
If that comes across, it’s perhaps understandable—Thomas wrote it while training to go to France with the British Army during World War I, where he was killed in action at the Battle of Arras at Easter 1917. Still, there is some tone of hopefulness within the bleakness, a hope that encourages us to embrace everything about life, including death itself.
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This is Episode 24 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today's poem is "I Went into the Maverick Bar", by Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder was associated with the “Beat” generation of the 1950s (which included the likes of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg). He has been described as “the poet laureate of deep ecology”, and his work has long been immersed in an appreciation of Buddhist spirituality and the natural world.
This poem is a snapshot of a moment in time, in a bar somewhere sometime, when among the usual bar-room stuff, a couple get up to dance. The moment inspires in the poet a wide vi of everything from the idea of America to a life’s “real work”.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 23 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today's poem is "In Broken Images", by Robert Graves.
Robert Graves was a prolific writer who worked through much of the 20th century. He fought in the First World War (and was seriously injured in the Battle of the Somme) and lived to the age of 90.
This poem is about the will to knowledge, about misplaced confidence, and about the danger of being certain. It calls to mind an idea that seems to have been popularised by a Stanford professor Paul Saffo, who encourages us to have “strong opinions, weakly held”.
As Saffo says, we should “allow your intuition to guide you to a conclusion, no matter how imperfect.” We should “engage in creative doubt, seek information that doesn’t fit, or indicators that are pointing in an entirely different direction.”
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 22 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today's poem is "spring is like a perhaps hand", by ee cummings.
With no titles and no (or strange) punctuation, the poetry of E.E. Cummings (often written as "ee cummings") is often shocking or at least disconcerting when we first encounter it on the page. This can become an obstacle to the enjoyment of the work.
When read aloud, though, those issues seem to fade away a little.
This is a short poem about spring.
Maybe it’s premature, in the dark days of early January, but the sun turned with the solstice, and if you’re in the northern hemisphere, and eagle-eyed, you might already be seeing the tiny stretching of the light.
Here, in two sentences that overlap and echo one another, Cummings talks about the things — familiar and less so — that spring always does.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 21 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today's poem is "The World as Meditation", by Wallace Stevens.
Wallace Stevens inhabited that halfway zone where maybe more and more of us find ourselves now: between the practical world of work and business, and the other world of spirituality and the mind. As a writer, his work made him a hero for a century of poets, but his day to day was as a legal executive for an insurance company for four decades.
This poem is a poem about what Stevens calls “meditation”. (In the written form, it includes an epigraph in French from the Romanian composer Georges Enesco, which translates as “'I have spent too much time performing on my violin, and traveling. But the essential exercise of the composer — meditation — nothing has ever interrupted that for me.”)
This, then, is a poem about the essential exercise of anyone who wishes to create. An exercise that is as much a communion with the world, the planet, the universe, as it is with those of us within it.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 20 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today's poem is "Toward the Solstice", by Adrienne Rich.
Adrienne Rich was an American poet, essayist and feminist, who has been described as “one of the most widely influential writers of the second half of the 20th century”.
This poem “Toward the Solstice”, takes as its starting point two dates: the end of November and the end of May, as the world turns towards the solstice — the point when the sun reaches its peak or nadir, marking the year’s midpoint and the beginning of the slow turn of the seasons.
One line jumps out: “I am trying to hold in one steady glance all the parts of my life”.
This is a challenge that faces all of us. All the different roles we play in a lifetime. Multiple roles and responsibilities and identities we try to hold simultaneously, identities that are often not only different but actively in opposition within one another.
The poem's words and lines flow together with a perfect rhythm, even as they describe the unavoidable imperfectness of a life.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 19 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today's poem is "And Death Shall Have No Dominion", by Dylan Thomas. It's a poem about life, death and immortality, written by the poet when he was still in his teens.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 18 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today's poem is "Thirteen" by Kae Tempest. It's a poem about the differences in world, and worldview, and possibilities, that seem to be available to boys and to girls.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 17 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today's poem is "Beannacht" by John O'Donohue. It's O'Donohue's life-affirming variation on old Irish blessings, which could bring hope to a dark day.
You can read the poem here.
You can also hear the late poet read "Beannacht" himself here on the podcast of the On Being Project.
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This is Episode 16 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today's poem is "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" by John Keats. It's a poem about poetry itself: about how the experience of reading poetry can open up a world of possibility before you.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 15 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today's poem is "Piano" by DH Lawrence. It's a poem about the power of remembrance, the weight of the past, and the burden of the present.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 14 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today's poem is "Postscript" by Seamus Heaney. It's a poem about the startling beauty of the natural world, a moment caught in time on the Atlantic coast of Ireland, and also about the challenge of the poet, the artist, the musician to try to capture it.
You can read the poem here.
You are also encouraged to listen to the poet himself read Postscript here.
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This is Episode 13 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today's poem is "Hope is the thing with feathers" by Emily Dickinson, a poem about that most precious of emotions, one we always need, and one that might be in short supply for many people around the world after three challenging years.
Happy New Year, and thanks for listening.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 12 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today's poem is "Palm Leaves" by Charles Bukowski, a poem about a New Year's Eve in 1973 as experienced from the darkness of the poet's bedroom in Los Angeles.
You can read the poem here.
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This is Episode 11 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today's poem is "Wait" by Galway Kinnell, a poem about life and death and the choice between the two.
You can read the poem here.
And you can also hear the poet talk about and read the poem at this Soundcloud link.
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This is Episode 10 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today's reading is of "Advent" by Patrick Kavanagh.
You can read the poem, and a short essay in exploration of its themes, on The Guardian website here.
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Episode 9 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today's reading is of "Snow Fairy" by Claude McKay.
You can read "Snow Fairy" here.
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Episode 8 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today's reading is of a great Christmas poem, "Journey of the Magi", by TS Eliot.
Music Credit: Christmas Miracle by Steve Oxen, Feslyan Studios
Episode 7 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today's poem is "Sometimes" by David Whyte.
If you'd like to hear the poet himself read the poem, in his own unmistakable and gorgeous way, please check out this Soundcloud page.
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Episode 6 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today's poem is "The People of the Other Village", by Thomas Lux.
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This is Episode 5 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today's poem is "Happiness" by Raymond Carver, about a fleeting moment of beauty and peace on an otherwise routine morning.
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This is Episode 4 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today's poem is "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost.
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Today's reading is "Night Drive" by Tom French.
It's from the poet's first collection, Touching the Bones, published by The Gallery Press in 2002.
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Today's reading is "Snowy Night" by Mary Oliver.
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Episode 1 of Poems to Live Well By.
Today's reading is a poem called "Harrowing" by Parker J Palmer.
The poet writes about the origins of the poem on Facebook here.
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