Emotion Put Into Measure: Poetry Matters: Recent Episodes
Alex&Richard
When our emotions lack words (or the reverse), maybe those of the greatest poets can aid us. This is our challenge. How can the poets help us today?
Friedrich Hölderlin's poetry marks a mesmerizingly profound engagement with the philosophers of his time. Hölderlin performs his response to philosophers like Kant, Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel in his poetry. With the help of philosopher Christopher Satoor, we begin to enlighten ourselves on Hölderlin and his ability to help us contend with German Idealism, Romanticism, the Enlightenment and our own era.
Robert A. Boates is living his second life and poetry is everything for him. Today we discuss Man Without Memory, a manuscript from his first life, along with some of his more recent poems from Cataract of the Mind. We are fortunate to hear Robert's thoughts on memory, brain damage, survival, poetry and rhythm.
The famous Thirteenth Century Islamic poet and Sufi mystic, Jalāl ad-Dīn Mohammad Rūmī, had some profound ideas and an incomparable range of subject matter, from eroticism and vulgar sexuality to love and the divine. Today we begin a journey through Rūmī's life and poetry.
We recently had the immense privilege of speaking to our first guest, Albert Frank Moritz, current Poet Laureate of Toronto, who speaks to us today about new and old poetry, the past, terrorism, eternity, heroism, and so much more!
Finally we put politics aside and find a poet who can help us with the calming effect of poetry, narrative, and the ability to put images to words without the pressure to pin down interpretations. But listen next time. There's much more to Al Moritz.
Clifton takes some creative liberties with biblical characters, giving them desires and complexities unlike in any other telling of these stories. These characters take on meaning in their own right and within a context of African-American history. Most notably, Lucille seems to identify with Lucifer as God's critic, a critic who will not be silenced.
History's absences live today, as Clifton's imagination proves. From the plantation to Rodney King & the L.A. Riots.
Her work is vast, profound, everyday yet omnipresent, reviving history, multidimensional, impossible to categorize, and simply mesmerizing. This is the beginning of an impossible journey.
Stormy minds, hallucinatory wails, and questioning truth itself. Lampman gets philosophical.
Go somewhere gorgeous (in mind or in body) and appreciate some nature poems with us. Explore the moods of the earth and of Lampoon as Autumn approaches. Reflect on beauty, weariness, death, and eternity with the help of this confederation romantic.
The language of the unheard and the most sophisticated celebration of violence you've heard. A detailed look at Brooks as an "essential Afrikan" and the publication of RIOT. And, uncharacteristically, a touch of Beyoncé.
Link to original book: http://eclipsearchive.org/projects/RIOT/Riot.pdf
Sources
Debo, A. "Reflecting Violence in the Warpland: Gwendolyn Brooks's 'Riot'." African American Review. 39.1/2 (2005): 143-152.
--------. "Signifying "Afrika": Gwendolyn Brooks' Later Poetry. Callaloo. 29.1 (2006): 168-181.
Sullivan, J.D. "Killing John Cabot and Publishing Black: Gwendolyn Brooks's 'Riot'." African American Review. 36.4 (2002): 557-569.
The influence Langston Hughes had on Gwendolyn Brooks can't be easily pinned down. But one (or two) ought to try.
Let's talk about the perspective of John Cabot in "Riot" after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968.
More to follow.
In 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama was bombed in an act of racist terror. The four girls murdered were Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair.
Folklore, Time, Lady History, and so much more. Our first layer of analysis, cause we'll have to come back to this poem a few times...
After 5 hours of recording, and so many poems left, Richard and Alex read the hell out of Baldwin's poem. Analysis to follow.
Two brutally intense poems in this one. The lobotomized inmate and blues for a Mississippi black boy.
Afterimages: Emmett Louis Till & His Courageous Mother & How many mothers are Emmett's mothers? Also, maybe double jeopardy isn't the greatest law...
In this episode on the Harlem Renaissance, we discuss a few poems by Claude McKay: "Birds of Prey", "If We Must Die" and "The White House". On our minds are topics like police brutality, whiteness, law that wages war on its citizens and racist exclusion from social/political spheres.
"Let America Be America Again" ...But when was it America? Whose dream is it and is it just a dream?
Othello and double consciousness, the Negritude Movement (Senghor, Cesaire), Fanon's "The Fact of Blackness" and Caliban in both Tempests!
Richard and Alex introduce a new series and discuss their plans for upcoming episodes on Black poetry, Blackness in poetry and the history of Black resistance in poetry.
Today we continue the question of the character in the poem. Who is the character: a) William Blake, b) Robert Frost, c) William Wordsworth, or d) a Tired Housewife?
Who is speaking in a poem? The author? The narrator? A character? Author as character? We explore some possibilities with two poems by C.T. Coleridge and address 1) characters in poems and 2) the speaker's psychology.
On a whim, Richard and Alex dig into a few wonderful poems by Ted Hughes. Expect war, foxes, the "maternal octopus" slightly more commonly known as the literary theory establishment, the king of a "palace of skulls" and a drowned woman "daubed 'whore'."
Lull yourself to sleep to the soft sound of Hudson the dog's snores as Richard and Alex read poetry in the background. Today, they hope to help us overcome the loneliness of self-isolation by appealing to a few more poets (including Li Bai, Robert Frost, Pablo Neruda, Maya Angelou and Margaret Atwood). Expect emphasis on birds, Autumn and war.
In this rustic first attempt at a podcast episode, Richard and Alex turn to a vast aray of the greatest poets (including Shakespeare, Cowper, Keats, Coleridge, Dickinson, Hardy, Plath and Solie) to make sense of the loneliness of the isolation age. It gets dark...