Poetry Koan: Recent Episodes
Steve W.
In which Steve (psychotherapist, reader + various other selves) engages with a poem or a collection of poetry from a writer that has lit up his/their world in some way, exploring the other writer's work as an existential koan or riddle. The implicit premise being that the poems and books which "speak to us" deeply are trying to convey in their voicing some kind of encoded wisdom which we might have access to and benefit from, if like a traditional koan, we try engaging with them, heart and soul.
Email: stevewasserman AT gmail DOT com Website: stevewasserman.co.uk Twitter: @addictedtObooks
This episode is about Schubert's awful and awesome bohemian life/music/death; a Victor Hugo sonnet from "Les Contemplations" ("La mort et la beauté sont deux choses profondes"); K.G. Nishitani on Nihility, sin and redemption; Fernando Pessoa's Fragment 363 (love, possession and illusion, the interplay of beauty and horror), with visuals courtesy of a walk around Rickmansworth Lake with Max listening to Sviatoslav Richter play Schubert's Piano Sonata No. 18 in G Major: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4o12iQ6n6Rs&ab_channel=SviatoslavRichter-Topic.
Brigit Pegeen Kelly reads for Wallace Stevens' poem "Poetry Is A Destructive Force" and we then discuss.
Poetry Is a Destructive ForceThat's what misery is,Nothing to have at heart.It is to have or nothing.It is a thing to have,A lion, an ox in his breast,To feel it breathing there.Corazón, stout dog,Young ox, bow-legged bear,He tastes its blood, not spit.He is like a manIn the body of a violent beast.Its muscles are his own . . .The lion sleeps in the sun.Its nose is on its paws.It can kill a man.
TOPICS COVERED: Acceptance, Aggression, Animal nature, Appetite, Blood as essence, Civilization's facade, Consumption, Destructive instincts, Dominance and submission, Ego and identity, Ethical paradoxes, Experiential essence, Fear and survival, Flesh consumption, Human-animal dichotomy, Hunger (physical and metaphorical), Inner violence, Innocence as facade, Instinctual heritage, Joy in presence, Killing for pleasure, Love and connection, Man as predator, Meat industry cruelty, Misery's depth, Moral contradictions, Nature of happiness, Nietzsche's philosophy, Pain and suffering, Pleasure principle, Poetry's power, Predatory behavior, Primal fears, Romantic love, Sacrifice and consumption, Sexuality, Social constructs, Suffering's universality, Survival instincts, Violence inherent in life, Vulnerability of being, Wagner and Beethoven (cultural references), Words vs. experience, Yorgos Lanthimos's "Poor Things"
Sources and influences: BBC's "The Moral Maze," Frank O'Hara's "Lunch Poems," Nietzsche's writings on transformation and values, Yorgos Lanthimos's film "Poor Things". Music = Fela's Zombie, Tokens' Lion Sleeps Tonight, and System Of A Down's Chop Suey.
Are there any connections to be made between Miroslav Valek's poem Killing Rabbits (read here by the American poet Brigit Pegeen Kelly), and Craig David's R&B "banger" Seven Days from the year 2000?
Many.
Killing Rabbits
On Sunday after breakfast,when air is halfway to ice,and thin flutes of mice squeak in the chimney.On Sunday after breakfastto walk on virgin snowto the hutches.For the pink right to remove your gloves.To stick them on the picket fence like freshly severed palms, and to blow smoke through the wire-net door. Then to insert a searching hand, and speak sweet words through smoke-stained teeth, cajolery, fine words, to pity a bit, to grab the skin firmlyand to lift it from the cosy straw.On Sunday after breakfastto sniff ammonia.With your left hand to hold the head down, watch the ears turn purplish, tenderly to stroke the nape, blow on it, and suddenly with the right hand to strike the nape. Once more to feel on your handthe pushing off for the unrealised leap, to feel a heaviness in your hand, sweetness, to hear Rabbit Heaven open, and big clumps of fur falling down. Viennese blue, Belgium Giant, French Baron, Bohemian Skewbald Dappled. But even the mongrel with all kinds of blood, each dies as fast as the next and without a word. On Monday to have rings under your eyes, silent. On Tuesday to consider the lot of the world. On Wednesday and Thursday to inventthe steam engine and discover stars. On Friday to think of others, but mainly blue eyes, all week to pity orphansand admire flowers.On Saturday to scrub yourself pink and fall asleep on her lips. On Sunday, after breakfast, to kill rabbits.
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The image I've used for this episode was created by the Oracle after being shown a photograph I'd taken earlier on in the day of a cute little slug and spider duo hanging out together on my windowsill. I asked GPT to commemorate their loving connection through a portrait in the style of Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717).
Maria Sibylla Merian's work is known for its unparalleled attention to detail, especially in her studies of insects and plants. Merian's work in the late 17th and early 18th centuries was groundbreaking, not only for its artistic beauty but for its scientific accuracy. She meticulously documented the life cycles of insects, making detailed observations that were far ahead of her time, integrating precise scientific detail with artistic elegance. Her dedication to capturing the minutiae of her subjects has left a lasting impact on both art and science, making her work an exceptional example of the fusion of detailed observation and aesthetic beauty.
Inspired by Nader, Farritor and Schilliger's recent AI-assisted decryption of ancient texts, netting them the $1m Vesuvius Challenge Prize, I attempt to crack the code of a 1000 year old Japanese poem using Google's Gemini chatbot.
I pose to Gemini the four cryptic questions in the form of a poem about love's paradoxes by Izumi Shikibu, whose work was celebrated by Kenneth Rexroth with the following words: “Of all the poets of the classical period, she has, to my mind, the deepest and most poignant Buddhist sensibility.”
Can the latest Oogly Woogly Google tech finally solve riddles that have puzzled human readers and thinkers for centuries?
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Things I Want Decided
Which shouldn’t existin this world,the one who forgetsor the onewho is forgotten?Which is better,to loveone who has diedor not to seeeach other when you are alive?Which is better,the distant loveryou long foror the one you see dailywithout desire?Which is the least unreliableamong fickle things—the swift rapids,a flowing river,or this human world?
-Izumi Shikibu (tr. Jane Hirshfield)
An episode inspired by Tadeusz Dąbrowski's poem "Sentence", Nick Flynn's "Tattoo" and Jack Gilbert's "The Answer":
SENTENCE
It's as if you'd woken in a locked cell and found in your pocket a slip of paper, and on it a single sentence in a language you don't know.
And you'd be sure this sentence was the key to your life. Also to this cell.
And you'd spend years trying to decipher the sentence, until finally you'd understand it. But after a while you'd realize you got it wrong, and the sentence meant something else entirely. And so you'd have two sentences.
Then three, and four, and ten, until you'd created a new language.
And in that language you'd write the novel of your life.And once you'd reached old age you'd notice the door of the cell was open. You'd go out into the world. You'd walk the length andbreadth of it,
until in the shade of a massive tree you'd yearn for that one single sentence in a language you don't know.
TATTOO
You do know, right,that between the no-
longer & the still-to-come
you are being continuallytattooed, inked
with the skulls ofeveryone
you’ve ever loved—the you& the you
& the you & the you—you don’tsit in a chair, thumb
through a binder, pick adesign, it simply
happens each time youbring your fingers to your face
to inhale him back into you . . .tiny skulls, some of us are
covered. You, love, could
simply tattoo an opendoor, light
pouring in from somewhereoutside, you
could make your body a doorso it appears you
(let her fill you) are madeof light.
THE ANSWER
Is the clarity, the simplicity, an arriving
or an emptying out? If the heart persists
in waiting, does it begin to lessen?
If we are always good, does God lose track
of us? When I wake at night, there is
something important there. Like the humming
of giant turbines in the high-ceilinged stations
in the slums. There is a silence in me,
absolute and inconvenient. I am haunted
by the day I walked through the Greek village
where everyone was asleep and somebody began
playing Chopin, slowly, faintly, inside
the upper floor of a plain white stone house.
TOPICS COVERED: Alienation; Analytical preparation; Ashberry's trees; Authenticity; Birth and self-discovery; Boundaries of essence; Communication dynamics; Confinement vs. liberation; Consciousness; Contemplation of existence; Cosmic symbolism; Cultural backgrounds; Daily Mail controversy; Deciphering life's language; Developmental path; Disorientation and discovery; Emotional reactivity; Enlightenment and insight; Estrangement and alienation; Ethical boundaries in therapy; Experience of reading a poem; Exploration of self; Expression and concealment; Fowles' "The Magus"; Genie metaphor; Gilbert's "The Answer"; Goldilocks metaphor; Human existential trajectory; Identity construction; Illusion of continuity; Individuality vs. collective unconscious; Intercostal nerves and pain; Interpersonal misunderstanding; Interpretation of symbols; Introspection and growth; Kabbalah and symbolism; Language as a cage; Language's role in suffering; Liberation magic; Life-defining tattoos; Linguistic clichés; Locked cell metaphor; Masson's "Final Analysis"; Merwin's trees; Misunderstanding as growth; Mystic union with God; Narrative construction; Neurological aspects of communication; Personal biases; Physical and mental isolation; Poetic inspiration; Potential for exploitation; Psychoanalytic dynamics; Ramanujan's trees; Recycled materials of past experiences; Relational nuances; Revelation of self-awareness; Rites of passage; Self-awareness dawning; Semiotics of Hebrew letters; Silence and bliss; Social contexts; Spiritual symbolism; Stafford's "The Interior Castle"; Symbolic language complexity; Symbolic realm's labyrinth; Symbols interpretation; Tattoo as therapeutic act; Therapeutic boundaries; Transformation through language; Unraveling of human story; Vulnerability and humility.
[Transcript of episode]
Being an Anne Carson megafan (looking forward to her new collection Wrong Norma published this month) I decided to spend an evening with an artefact she created in 2016 calledFloatcomprising 22 chapbooks held together in whatever order you choose to read them in, one of which is an essay that I’m about to read here.
This essay, "Variations on the Right to Remain Silent", is also linked to my favourite poem in Float which can be found in the chapbook Candor, written originally for a performance piece with dancer Rashaun Mitchell.
COULD I
If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself. Consider a person standing alone in a room. The house is silent. She is looking down at a piece of paper. Nothing else exists. All her veins go down into this paper. She takes her pen and writes on it some marks no one else will ever see, she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name.
I've called "Variations on the Right to Remain Silent" an essay, but I prefer to think of it as An Event, or a kind of Performance - or a weird and delightful lecture.
If you’re anything like me, finding such a koan is usually followed by an overwhelming desire to share. Hence.
POEMS REFERRED TO IN THIS EPISODE:
Fragment 286
In spring, on the one hand,the Kydonian apple trees,being watered by streams of riverswhere the uncut garden of the maidens [is and vine blossomsswellingbeneath shady vine branches,bloom.On the other hand, for me Eros lies quiet at no season.Nay rather,like a Thracian north windablaze with lightning,rushing from Aphroditeaccompanied by parching madnesses,black, unastonishable,powerfully,right up from the bottom of my feet [it] shakes my whole breathing being.
-Ibykos (translation by Carson)
Tubingen, January
Eyes talked overto blindness. Their—riddle is the purelyorginated"—, theirmemory ofswimming Hölderlintowers, gull- whirredaround.
Visits of drowned joiners to thesediving words:Came,came a man,came a man to the world, today, withthe lightbeard ofthe prophets: he could, if he spoke of thistime, he could, only stammer and stammer, over-, over-againagain.("Pallaksch. Pallaksch.")
-Paul Celan (translation by Carson)
TOPICS/THEMES:
Adam and Eve,
Aphrodite,
Artistic representation and interpretation,
Authenticity and translation,
Bacon, Francis,
Catastrophe as a creative force,
Celan, Paul,
Cliché and its avoidance,
Communication barriers,
Consciousness and self-awareness,
Divine versus human language,
Greek lyric poetry,
Historical and cultural translation,
Hölderlin, Friedrich,
Immortality and the divine,
Individual versus authority conflict,
Joan of Arc,
Language's limitations and potential,
Madness as a method of understanding,
Metaphorical versus literal interpretation,
Mythology's influence on art and literature,
Nature of reality and perception,
Personal identity and expression,
Power of silence and absence,
Rembrandt,
Relationship between language and thought,
Role of the translator,
Sacred versus profane knowledge,
Struggle against conventional norms,
Subjectivity of experience,
Untranslatability and the ineffable,
Violence and its representation
An episode inspired by two Dalton Day poems: "Love Poem" and "An Understanding" (from the chapbook Overlay).
All poems referenced in the episode (in order of appearance):
YOU SEE I WANT A LOT
You see, I want a lot.Perhaps I want everything:The darkness that comes with every infinite fallAnd the shivering blaze of every step up.
So many live on and want nothingAnd are raised to the rank of princeBy the slippery ease of their light judgments
But what you love to see are facesThat do work and feel thirst…
You have not grown old,And it is not too late to diveInto your increasing depths where lifeCalmly gives out its own secret.
-Rilke
LOVE POEM
Every now & then like a gazillion cicadas dig their way out of the dark earth & they are screaming against the air, against the very thing they have clawed their way into, & the time we call summer is stitched with this terror, this gratitude for knowing something will happen & still having some sense of awe when it actually does, & what I'm saying is, I feel like that, even when I don't.
-Dalton Day
AN UNDERSTANDING
Because howling is scary we begin to cover our eyes.
Because covering our eyesis scary webegin to go underground.
Because going underground is scary we begin to talk to each other.Because talking to each otheris scary webegin to howl.
One time,I knew your name. I said it to you every night.It sounded like AOOOOOOOOO AOOOOOOOOO AOOOOOOOOO.
-Dalton Day
STOP THINKING AND END YOUR PROBLEMS
How do I know that it’s “good”? I can’t compare it to anything.I think it’s largely unconscious, feels like a collective decision, not a chain of events.I think you just have to let it wash over you, like pain.I think of it as a very dramatic form of giving up.(It is pitch black outside, not the colour black but rather a complete absence of light.) I think it’s related to how you pick up your friends’ speech patterns. But more unsettling and intense.I just think it’s weird to sit around waiting to develop a sixth sense.I think it’s fooling yourself into thinking you’re thinking.I think it’s philosophical and physical and have not gotten a good answer.
Everything reminds me of it, but I don’t know what “it” is.
-Elisa Gabbert (remixed version | full poem)
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LINKS:
Saved By A Poem (Kim Rosen)
Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (David Abram)
The Wheels On The Bus (Noodle & Pals Version)
Drop It Like It's Hot (Snoop Dogg)
Brown Cicada Being Made To Scream By A Human Animal
Going Sane (Adam Phillips)
Dvořák: Gypsy Melodies, Op. 55, B. 104 - IV. Songs My Mother Taught Me (Arr. Soltani For Solo Cello and Cello Ensemble)
I Want A Little Sugar In My Bowl (Nina Simone: Live Version | album track)
Transcript
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TOPICS COVERED IN THIS EPISODE (in alphabetical order):
Abram, David; Appetite; Awakenings; Becoming Animal; Being; Buddhism; Carnal Knowledge; Cicadas; Cloned Voices; Consciousness; Creativity; Dalton Day; Death; Desire; Disappointment; Disconnection; Dreams; Ego; Elisa Gabbert; Emergence; Emotion; Empathy; Enlightenment; Essence; Existentialism; Expression; Fear; Fulfillment; Gwyneth Paltrow; Healing; Hot Yoga Teachers; Human Experience; Identity; Imagination; Indigenous Tribes; Inevitability; Insights; Instinct; Intellectual Curiosity; Introspection; Joy; Knowledge; Language; Learning; Liberation; Life; Longing; Love; Love Poem; Mastery; Meaning-Making; Memory; Misfits; Music; Nature; Neurons; Nursery Rhymes; Pain; Passion; Perception; Philosophy; Poem; Poetry; Practice; Psychoanalysis; Psychotherapy; Reciprocity; Reflection; Relationships; Resonance; Rilke, Rainer Maria; Rituals; Rosen, Kim; Samsara; Self-Awareness; Self-Improvement; Shamanism; Sheffield; Social Dynamics; Somatic Memory; South-East Asia; Speechify; Spiritual; Suffering; Symbolism; Terror; Therapy; Thought; Transformation; Transcendence; Understanding; Utterance; Validation; Vision; Voice; Wanting; Workshop; Yoga; Zen.
An episode inspired by two Wendell Berry poems:
A MEETING
In a dream I meetmy dead friend. She has,I know, gone long and far,and yet she is the samefor the dead are changeless.They grow no older.It is I who have changed,grown strange to what I was.Yet I, the changed one,ask: "How you been?"She grins and looks at me."I been eating peachesoff some mighty fine trees."
EXCEPT
Now that you have goneand I am alone and quiet,my contentment would becomplete, if I did not wishyou were here so I could say,“How good it is, Tanya,to be alone and quiet.”--LINKS:Jack Black's Peaches
Bieber's Peaches
Mahalia's Peaches
Virgins? What Virgins? (Moslem Martyrs)
Adam Phillips & Devorah Baum (Attention Seeking)
Text version (with longer/better explanation of W.D. Hamilton's R-values!)
An episode inspired by Noor Hindi's poem 🐳 The World’s Loneliest Whale Sings the Loudest Song 🐳
The World’s Loneliest Whale Sings the Loudest Song & Other Confessions
I won’t make metaphors out of fish.
If I have to die, I choose the ocean. If I have to live, I choose you.
You: Everyone I’ve ever mourned.
I believe less & less of sunlight these days. I won’t die alone.
To awaken crying is to awaken displaced. Ghost of your joy in the bathtub. A face in the mirror. Your nephew’s painting in the foyer.
My mother cried in bedrooms growing up. I would study her for hours.
In a study, researchers learned patients who cried less are likely to have dismissive attachment styles.
Today, every bedroom in the house is mine. I stopped crying at age 12.
As a child, I spoke a language no one understood.
Research suggests loneliness increases cardiovascular disease.
When my cousin died, she died alone. When the world collapsed around Darwish, he wrote of coffee and sex.
When you held my body close to yours, I thought of clementines, sweet citrus, all the world’s lemons we’d temper with honey.
The world’s loneliest whale sings the loudest song.
This is what you’ll tell me the first time we meet.
And I’ll think about the ocean. And I’ll think about you.
I never learned how to swim. I’ve been drowning my whole life.
Studies suggest drowning lasts 1-3 minutes. But I’ll never stop grieving.
Scientists are still searching for the 52-hertz whale. But I swear he’s here. In my bedroom.
And I can hear him. And he’s telling me I can stop.
-Noor Hindi
🐳
The Loneliest Whale In The World
The Tone Deaf Saltburn TikTok Dance Craze
Noor Hindi - FPAC Speaker Series Presentation
In this episode, I explore our longing for basic trust, weaving together poetry (Pat Schneider, Rilke), philosophy (the Stoical idea of Logos, Cosmic Indifference, Animism), and psychology (Ego Psychology, Object Relations, and the developmental impact of early relationships) in order to make sense of mistrust and the desire for deeper, authentic connections in our digital and fragmented world.
I suggest that this existential trust, foundational to well-being, is often found in the poetics of objects, putting us on the path to discovering the You we need in our lives.
SEGMENTS:
(00:00) The Art of Online Personas: Decoding the Facade of Dating Profiles
(03:00) Unveiling Basic Trust: Perspectives from A.H. Almaas on Digital Connections
(04:35) Stoic Echoes in the Modern Psyche: Linking Logos to Basic Trust
(05:18) Rational Cosmos, Illusion of Free Will: Stoicism's View on Life's Order
(08:41) Embracing Cosmic Virtue: Stoicism's Guide to Harmonious Living
(9:50) Cosmic Indifference versus Inherent Benevolence: A Philosophical Dilemma
(10:41) Science and the Search for Universal Goodness: The Stoic Conundrum Faced With Camus' Absurd
(12:46) The Formation of Self: Insights from Ego Psychology and Early Experiences
(13:24) Decoding Personality: The Role of The Enneagram and MBTI in Ego Development
(19:09) Assessing Basic Trust: A Basic Trust Assessment
(21:58) Animism: Rebuilding Trust through a Connected Worldview?
(25:20) Ordinary Things, Extraordinary Patience: Finding Connection in Animism?
The Patience of Ordinary Things
It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they’re supposed to be.
I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?
-Pat Schneider
The Inner Rose
Where is there for this inner
an outer? Upon which hurt
does one lay such fine linen?
And which heavens are reflected within them,
upon the interior seas
of these open roses, these carefree ones, see:
how loose in looseness
they lie, as if a trembling hand
could never tip them over.
They can hardly hold themselves
erect; many allow themselves
be filled all too full and flow
over from inner space
into the days, which, ever
more and more full, close in upon themselves,
until the entire summer becomes
a chamber, a chamber in a dream.
-Rainer-Maria Rilke (tr. Mitchell)
Resources and Reference:
-Facets of Unity (A.H. Aalmas)
-In Our Time: Marcus Aurelius (Radio 4)
-The Handbook of Contemporary Animism (edited by Graham Harvey)
-Graham Harvey’s Animist Manifesto
-Michal Zerkowski's article about Irving Hallowell's research on the Ojibwe animism
-The Perception of The Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill (Tim Ingold)
Music:
-Breathless (Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds)
-Chips & Dip (Sam Greenfield)
-With You (Teenage Fanclub)
-Nocturnes & Meditations (Matt Tondut) -Goldberg Variations, BWV 988: Variation 1 (Arr. for Harp) - Parker Ramsay
-When Everything Fades (Matt Tondut)
Primarily an excuse to play you Tindersticks' gorgeous "Travelling Light", but also an attempt to unravel in 15 minutes the world of referential delusions, where ordinary events assume personal significance in ways that cross the boundary between quirky beliefs and mental disorders.
Meet, my ex-client 'Eric' and his unshakable notion that love signals are being played to him, and him alone, from a DJ's playlist who professes to have no romantic interest in him at all.
The poem mentioned in the episode is this one by Elizabeth Bishop:
One ArtThe art of losing isn’t hard to master;so many things seem filled with the intentto be lost that their loss is no disaster.Lose something every day. Accept the flusterof lost door keys, the hour badly spent.The art of losing isn’t hard to master.Then practice losing farther, losing faster:places, and names, and where it was you meantto travel. None of these will bring disaster.I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, ornext-to-last, of three loved houses went.The art of losing isn’t hard to master.I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gestureI love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evidentthe art of losing’s not too hard to masterthough it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Parallels drawn between Marcus Aurelius's Meditations and Byron Katie’s Loving What Is, with a nod to the Philosopher King’s son, Commodus (“a bit of a shit” - Cassio Dio, History of the Roman Empire).
Also, some late Wallace Stevens, doing "The Work”.
The Plain Sense of Things
After the leaves have fallen, we returnTo a plain sense of things. It is as ifWe had come to an end of the imagination,Inanimate in an inert savoir.It is difficult even to choose the adjectiveFor this blank cold, this sadness without cause.The great structure has become a minor house.No turban walks across the lessened floors.The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.A fantastic effort has failed, a repetitionIn a repetitiousness of men and flies.Yet the absence of the imagination hadItself to be imagined. The great pond,The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silenceOf a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all thisHad to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,Required, as a necessity requires.
Our desire for meaningful communication with an inner or outer You in W.S. Graham's What Is The Language Using Us For, and Maureen McClane's Open Sky.
OPEN SKY open sky—what you want? what you want I want for you, want whatever you want when you say you want everything under the sky— is that what everyone wantsnever to die— what you want? what you want I want for you, want what you wantwhen you say you want never to die except when you wantnothing—what you want?nothing's something to want, something annihilating,something beyond want that stops at nothing—ravenous want
An exploration of Rilke's poem "Du im Voraus verlorne Geliebte," ("You Who Never Arrived"), alongside Leon Russell's "A Song for You," and Martin Buber's bookI and Thou, delving into themes of elusive love, the intricacies of human connection, and the profound nature of both inner and outer I-You-ness.
(00:00) "You, In Advance, Lost Beloved”
(01:30) Only You (1994 Romantic Comedy - watch on YouTube)
(03:39) The "Mission" of Rilke's "Du Im Voraus" & The Duino Elegies
(07:52) Learning Rilke on Walks in the Kent Countryside in 2019
(09:19) Rilke's Death at The Age of 51: Slain By A Rose?
(10:38) The Main Ideas Behind Buber's Book Ich und Du (I and Thou)
(13:25) Split Brain Personalities
(15:00) GPT-4's Enneagram Nursery Rhyme Inspired By "This Little Piggy"
(15:56) The Left-Hemisphere "I" Narrator Vs. the Right-Hemisphere "Self"
(18:15) Primate Evolution in the Great Rift Valley: From Forest Dwellers to Survivors of the Savannah
(20:48) Greed is Good? (watch clip on YouTube)
(21:40) The Emergence of the 'I' in Human Evolution
(23:10) Present-Focused Animate Consciousness vs. Conceptual Consciousness
(24:17) Social Interactions and Survival in Early Human Communities
(25:28) Theory of Mind
(31:03) Conceptual Self-Description and Mental "I"-Focused Time Travel
(32:27) The "I" as Podcaster, the Self as Listener
(35:25) The Story Behind Leon Russell's "A Song For You"
(37:54) Analysis of Russell's Vocal Style
(39:51) Leon Russell's Childhood and Struggles With Disability
(44:25) Evolutionary Human Lifespan Limits
(44:35) Vulnerability
(47:54) The Desire To Be "Seen Through"
(52:00) Buber's Three Spheres of I-You Relating
(53:20) Podcasts As Messages In A Bottle
(55:35) Finding You in Slug Trails and Solitary Spiders
(56:30) Samuel Barber's Agnus Dei "You"
(57:00) Hello/Goodbye
--
[Du im Voraus]
Du im Vorausverlorne Geliebte, Nimmergekommene,You, the loved one lostin advance, you who never arrived,nicht weiß ich, welche Töne dir lieb sind.I don’t even know what sounds you like best.Nicht mehr versuch ich, dich, wenn das Kommende wogt,zu erkennen. Alle die großenBilder in mir, im Fernen erfahrene Landschaft,Städte und Türme und Brücken und un-vermutete Wendung der Wegeund das Gewaltige jener von Götterneinst durchwachsenen Länder:steigt zur Bedeutung in mirdeiner, Entgehende, an.so I try to discern you. All the greatimages in me—the landscape widening far off,cities and towers and bridges and un-suspected turns in the pathand the forcefulness of those landsonce intertwined with gods:they all mount up in me to signifyyou, forever not here.Ach, die Gärten bist du,You are the gardens.ach, ich sah sie mit solcherHoffnung. Ein offenes Fensterim Landhaus - , und du tratest beinahemir nachdenklich heran. With such hopeI saw them. An open windowin the country house–, and you almoststepped out pensively to meet me.Gassen fand ich, -du warst sie gerade gegangen,und die Spiegel manchmal der Läden der Händlerwaren noch schwindlich von dir und gaben erschrockenmein zu plötzliches Bild. I found streets, —you had just walked down them,and sometimes the mirrors in the merchants’ shopswere still drunk with you and with a startreflected my too-sudden image.Wer weiß, ob derselbeVogel nicht hinklang durch unsgestern, einzeln, im Abend?–Who knowsif the same birdsong did not ring through both of usyesterday, each of us alone, at evening?
I love it when a plan comes together, don't you?
This is the final episode of my personal Cannabis Koan, giving thanks to three people who were instrumental in helping me redefine and recalibrate my relationship with The Green One.
--
Marijuana, Cognition, Psychosis, Addiction: Mind & Matter podcast episode
Decoding Cannabis: Aerez Batat's podcast
Consciously High: Aerez's online program designed to help people change their relationship with cannabis.
Sabbath and the Art of Rest: Ezra Klein's discussion with Judith Shulevitz about what it means to rest and revitalize each week.
Do you want to hear the happiest bass-line ever recorded? Here you go!
--
KINDNESS
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
-Naomi Shihab Nye
--
Enneagram Four & Nine in relationship: https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/relationship-type-4-with-type-9
My last relationship - rescripted as a Romantic Comedy.
--
TODAY
If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze
that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house
and unlatch the door to the canary's cage,
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,
a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peonies
seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking
a hammer to the glass paperweight
on the living room end table,
releasing the inhabitants
from their snow-covered cottage
so they could walk out,
holding hands and squinting
into this larger dome of blue and white,
well, today is just that kind of day.
-Billy Collins
--
Take this quiz to discover your primary love language: https://5lovelanguages.com/quizzes/love-language
Take this quiz to discover your Enneagram Personality style and wings: https://www.eclecticenergies.com/enneagram/test-2
For further info, please get in touch: cannabiskoan AT gmail.com
Vienna, 1884. A young man, highly intelligent, profoundly ambitious, but also nervy and anxious in character is stressing out about his life and prospects. He is something of a fearful over-thinker, which is to say an Enneagram Six in personality style, prone to panic attacks, depression, phobias, and various forms of paranoia. In this period of his existence, he is experiencing something that modern millennials often call their “quarter-life crisis”.
Little does he know at the time, that his quarter-life-crisis will provide him (as well as us) with a revolutionary new idea about consciousness and the mind. This idea will shape not only the rest of his momentous life, but also ours, especially when it comes to how we understand and perceive our selves.
--
A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
-Stephen Crane
"Hey Siri, other than buying weed from scallywags in my local park, what other avenues might you suggest I try in order to purchase this psychoactive dried plant matter?"
Enter stage left: Harrow School of Weed.
--
ROOKIE
You thought you could ride a bicycle
but, turns out, those weren’t bikes
they were extremely bony horses. And that wasn’t
a meal you cooked, that was a microwaved
hockey puck. And that wasn’t a book that was
a taco stuffed with daisies. What if
you thought you could tie your laces?
But all this time you were just wrapping
a whole roll of sellotape round your shoe and
hoping for the best? And that piece of paper
you thought was your tax return?
A crayon drawing of a cat. And your best friend
is actually a scarecrow you stole from a field
and carted away in a wheelbarrow.
Your mobile phone is a strip of bark
with numbers scratched into it.
Thousands of people have had to replace
their doors, at much expense, after you
battered theirs to bits with a hammer
believing that was the correct way
to enter a room. You’ve been pouring pints
over your head. Playing card games with a pack
of stones. Everyone’s been so confused
by you: opening a bottle of wine with a cutlass,
lying on the floor of buses, talking to
babies in a terrifyingly loud voice.
All the while nodding to yourself like
‘Yeah, this is how it’s done.’
Planting daffodils in a bucket of milk.
-Caroline Bird
So let’s say you’re a middle-aged man seeking to “get into” cannabis, but not living in a country where it’s available to buy legally, and no friends or acquaintance who use the substance anymore, what strategies for acquiring the drug might you wish to follow?
This episode of Cannabis Koan is sponsored by The Life You Can Save whose mission is to inspire more people to give to the most effective ways to tackle global poverty and suffering.
THE STAIRWAY
The architect wanted to build a stairway
and suspend it with silver, almost invisible
guy wires in a high-ceilinged room,
a stairway you couldn't ascend or descend
except in your dreams. But first--
because wild things are not easily seen
if what's around them is wild--
he'd make sure the house that housed it
was practical, built two-by-four by
two-by-four, slat by slat, without ornament.
The stairway would be an invitation
to anyone who felt invited by it,
and depending on your reaction he'd know
if friendship were possible.
The house he'd claim as his, but the stairway
would be designed to be ownerless,
tilted against any suggestion of a theology,
disappointing to those looking for politics.
Of course the architect knew
that over the years he'd have to build
other things the way others desired,
knew that to live in this world was to trade
a few industrious hours for one beautiful one.
Yet every night when he got home
he could imagine, as he walked in the door,
his stairway going nowhere, not for sale,
and maybe some you to whom nothing
about it need be explained, waiting,
the wine decanted, the night about to unfold.
-Stephen Dunn
Why do we habitually use mind-altering substances and strategies in ways that are not always healthy? Here's a very simple explanation which holds in some way (I believe) for all of us. Cannabis, and non-cannabis users alike.
--
THE DOOR
Go and open the door.
Maybe outside there’s
a tree, or a wood,
a garden,
or a magic city.
Go and open the door.
Maybe a dog’s rummaging.
Maybe you’ll see a face,
or an eye,
or the picture
of a picture.
Go and open the door.
If there’s a fog
it will clear.
Go and open the door.
Even if there’s only
the darkness ticking,
even if there’s only
the hollow wind,
even if
nothing
is there,
go and open the door.
At least
there’ll be
a draught.
-Miroslav Holub
The highs and lows of teenage dirtbag Arthur Rimbaud.
--
SENSATIONS
Through blue summer nights I will pass along paths,
Pricked by wheat, trampling short grass:
Dreaming, I will feel coolness underfoot,
Will let breezes bathe my bare head.
Not a word, not a thought:
Boundless love surging through my soul,
And I will wander far away, a vagabond
In Nature—as happily as with a woman.
-Arthur Rimbaud (1870)
We are all addicted to something.
--
THE JOURNEY
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around
and inside you
kept shouting
their bad advice –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do –
determined to save
the only life you could save.
-Mary Oliver
It is incumbent on all of us
to care for the passage of our souls—
for how grievous our fate when death arrives,
disjoining the siblings,
once going together,
body and soul!
-Anonymous (from: Soul & Body, an Anglo-Saxon poem from the 10th Century)
What might the essence of Rilke’s Egoic soul reveal to us, if we tried to put it into words, using all our knowledge of the poems transmitted through an Ich, Rilke’s Ich (aka Ego), over many years, as well as the letters, and notebooks, and biographies we have of him to guide us? This might also include our ability, now a century after Freud, to apply everything we have learnt in the last 100 years about the mechanism, or the Operating System of the Ego, the Self?
The word that I find best describes both the Panther’s predicament as well the predicament of Rilke’s Ich, is LONGING. It is this painful, and somewhat absurd emotional fixation that this episode mainly focuses on by examining the following three poems:
THE PANTHER
His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly--. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.
-Rainer Maria Rilke (tr. Stephen Mitchell)
YOU WHO NEVER ARRIVED
You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me—the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods—
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.
You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house—, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon,—
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back
my too-sudden image. Who knows? perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening.
-Rainer Maria Rilke (tr. Stephen Mitchell)
LOVE DOGS
One night a man was crying,
Allah! Allah!
His lips grew sweet with the praising,
until a cynic said,
"So! I have heard you
calling out, but have you ever
gotten any response?"
The man had no answer to that.
He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.
He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,
in a thick, green foliage.
"Why did you stop praising?"
"Because I've never heard anything back."
"This longing
you express is the return message."
The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.
Your pure sadness
that wants help
is the secret cup.
Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.
There are love dogs
no one knows the names of.
Give your life
to be one of them.
― Jalal Al-Din Rumi (tr. Coleman Barks)
--
Transcript: http://stevewasserman.co.uk/rilkes-panther-the-cage-of-self/
At the end of the 19th Century, art, and the study of art known as aesthetics, became a common point of convergence for two other new disciplines: Psychoanalysis, with its focus on unconscious/indirect experience, and Phenomenology, which in contrast to psychoanalytic psychology, sought to investigate consciousness and direct experience.
Psychologists at the time began to see how looking at people’s emotional responses to art, and the motivations that drove some to create it, could help explain aspects of human nature that had never been fully grasped before. One of these psycho-spiritual conundrums might be conceptualised by the follow question: What is a Self - which is to say: an “I”, a conscious, as well as self-conscious Ego? Also: what universal or variable factors might lie at the heart of such a phenomenon?
A crucial piece of this puzzle, in terms of understanding ourselves and others, arrived in the shape of something that the German philosopher Theodor Lipps called Einfühlung (“feeling into” or empathy). Freud used this notion of empathy in trying to “feel into” the inner world of himself and his patients in ways that had never been attempted before, and so did the young (26 year old) Rainer Maria Rilke, who had studied with Lipps, and was now setting out to apply these ideas in his writing.
Rilke would also learn about empathy at the knee of the sculptor August Rodin, who suggested he might like to empathically “regardez les animaux” (look at the animals) at the Jardin Des Plantes in Paris, where they were kept for this purpose. In applying himself to this special kind of looking, beginning with the task of watching a panther and writing about it, Rilke would learn not only something essential about himself, but also about the nature of the Egoic Self in general.
In this episode, we get a little bit closer to that understanding.
--
Transcript: http://stevewasserman.co.uk/rilkes-panther-the-cage-of-self/
On the 1st of May 1889, the young (33 year old) psychoanalyst-on-the-make Sigismund Schlomo Freud took on the case of a “a lady of about forty years of age”, a Frau Emmy von N., who we now know to be the Swiss noblewoman Baroness Fanny Louise von Sulzer-Wart.
Baroness Fanny had married 29 years previously at the tender age of 23 the 65 year-old Swiss watchmaker and industrialist Heinrich Moser, who died 4 years after the marriage from a heart attack. In the minds of Moser’s five children from his previous marriage, the idea got around that Fanny might have toe-tagged their father after having him sire her two new Moser offspring with birthright claims to his vast fortune.
This is the first time that Freud decides to give his friend Josef Breuer’s technique of “investigation under hypnosis” a try-out as he attempts to help his new patient with her suffering somatizations (resembling very much the symptoms of Fibromyalgia today). Freud starts using techniques which will in time become (after he has ditched the overt hypnosis angle) his own special contribution to human animal therapeutics.
What have these initial forays into our so-called "hysterical" human Egos (Freud's word for the Ego was simply "Ich", I) got to do with a poem that Rainer Maria Rilke would write a decade or so later about a panther he'd spent a day watching behind bars in the Jardin des Plantes, in Paris?
This first episode (part of a trio) begins exploring this koan, trying to join up some of these dots between one of Freud's first talking cure patients (Emmy/Fanny), with Joseph Mortimer Granville's invention of the medical vibrator (the percuteur) in 1880 and its uses by male doctors on their female patients' genitalia; James Strachey's mistranslations of Freud's Ich into Ego and the effect this would have on psychoanalytic thought and practice, and David Attenborough being chased around the Scottish Highlands by a large, angry grouse called The Caipercaillie.
Poems discussed in this episode:
THE PANTHER
His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
Only at times, the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly–.
An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.
-Rainer Maria Rilke (English translation by Stephen Mitchell)
--
FIRST FOOTNOTE ON ZOOMORPHISM
It seems we have said too little about
the heart, per se,
how it sits in its chambered nub
of grease and echo
listening for movement in the farthest
reed beds — any feathered thing will do,
love being interspecific, here,
more often than we imagine.
If anything, I’d liken us to certain
warblers, less appealing in the wild
than how we’d look
in coloured lithographs,
yet now and then, I’m on the point of
hearing
bitterns at the far edge of the lake,
that cry across the marshes like the doom
you only get in books, where people die
so readily for love, each heart becomes
a species in itself, the sound it makes
distinctive, one more descant in the dark,
before it disappears into the marshes.
-John Burnside
--
Transcript: http://stevewasserman.co.uk/rilkes-panther-the-cage-of-self/
What does it mean to be real. REALLY real? To be telling each other alive about each other alive etc.
I look to Mary Oliver’s Ten Commandments for living the good life, as well as her very Enneagram Nine-ish poem I Want To Write Something So Simply. Rilke’s Book of Hours also gets a look-in, as does WS Graham's Language Koan, Becker's Denial of Death, and Lizzo (avec Sasha).
Part of this must surely involve a very real "coming into Presence", which R.S. Thomas calls in The Bright Field, “that pearl of great price”? And what better way to do that than through the Incomparable Cosmic Verve of Cheryl Lynn circa 1978.
My mother is ageing. Her cognitive capacities are declining, but her wisdom and life experience are at their peak. In my Poems for Ma podcast, I try to tap into the latter, whilst being aware of the former.
Every few days, on my Poems for Ma podcast, I send Ma a poem I think she might like with some questions I have about the poem which I'm interested in talking about with her. I read the poem aloud and then we chat about the themes in this poem, enjoying each other's company.
The first poem we embark on together is Mary Oliver's Wild Geese.
Please consider subscribing to Poems for Ma if you'd like to hang out with us occasionally:[iTunes link] [Spotify link]
An exploration of The Tower via Frost's Fire and Ice.
The Tower is an archetype which invites us to explore and consider sudden change, upheaval, and chaos in our lives, as well as a kind of revelation or awakening sometimes associated with the word "enlightenment" as it is sometimes linked to personal transformation.
If you would like to hear more episodes like this, please consider subscribing to my Tarot Cure podcast: [iTunes link] [Spotify link]
This particular exploration of The Tower, we make together via the following cultural stepping stones:
- Irene Solà's novel When I Sing, Mountains Dance
- Nichiren and his Soka Gakkai chums chanting of Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō
- Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
- Robert Frost's poem Fire and Ice:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
- Sessions with my shrink "Magic Mike" discussing the end of a relationship
- Giant waterfalls
- Woody Allen's opening monologue to Annie Hall
- Mumford & Sons' cover of Bruce Springsteen's I'm On Fire
- Siddhartha Gautama's first "podcast" (The Four Noble Truths, with a focus on his "thirsting" (Second Truth) of Taṇhā
- Siddhartha Gautama's second "podcast" (the Adittapariyaya Sutta - The Fire Sermon) which has also been turned into the following poem:
ALL IS ARDOUR
All is ardour burning & blaze
Eye is ardour ear is ardour
nose lips tongue ardour
mind ardour body ardour
burning burning burning away.
Sound burning scent burning
taste burning touch burning
incandescent bone fires burning
burning pleasure burning pain<
Hello, hello!
Just wanting to touch base with you if you are still subscribed to this feed to talk about two new poetry-related projects I'm working on at the moment:
-The Tarot Cure:
Is the elusive "cure" of our (unwanted) selves, promised to us by therapy, possible through the archetypes of a Tarot deck?
-Poems for Ma:
Chatting about poetry with my mother as she faces dementia and her own demise in the next few years.
Accepting the mixed-bag Now of our lives. Hard.
--
THE THING IS
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you down like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.
-Ellen Bass
--
Full text of this episode can be found here: http://stevewasserman.co.uk/amor-fati/
--
Audio used in episode (in order of occurence):
-Jon & the Nightriders - Rumble at Waikiki: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41YvSrk5paQ&t=81s
-Can't Stop The Feeling (Justin Timberlake) - Original Piano Arrangement by Maucoli: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MpOfn4rDcU
-ET: https://open.spotify.com/album/1Wcggztq9SspsBeXcrnHZo?highlight=spotify:track:3VVilIGlUJ6tIirr7GGCHs
-Night Flight - Say Yes (Elliot Smith Cover): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnQ0ac8A8hk
-A Day In The Life (Orchestra Overdub): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecybFp71bnc
-Reading of The Thing Is (Ellen Bass): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JONWgsZ6vm8
-Steven C. Hayes talking about Feeling & Experiential Avoidance: https://www.soundstrue.com/collections/authors-steven-c-hayes/products/acceptance-and-commitment-therapy
-Extract from Bernard Malamud's A New Life: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Life-Penguin-Twentieth-Century-Classics/dp/0140186816/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=a+new+life+malamud&qid=1624180687&sr=8-1
-Jane Hirshfield reading her poem Amor Fati: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/92039/amor-fati
-Extract from The Gay Science: https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/The-Gay-Science-The-Joyful-Wisdom-Audiobook/B01EWAXDI4?qid=1624180836&sr=1-1&ref=a_search_c3_lProduct_1_1&pf_rd_p=c6e316b8-14da-418d-8f91-b3cad83c5183&pf_rd_r=ZN7BMAJ44S0DHR5PPNXE
-Susan Buffam reading her poem Amor Fati: https://www.lyrikline.org/en/poems/amor-fati-4435
-“Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye, A Poetry Film by Ana Pérez López: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFLQOOiAqxQ&t=15s
-Elliott Smith ~ Say Yes (Live in Stockholm): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOnHEApbjV0
-Itzhak Perlman plays Fiddler on the Roof (John Williams Los Angeles Philharmonic): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h745la-Lo1I
-Neil De Grasse Tyson giving an overview of our 65 million year-old hominid evolutionary history: https://samharris.org/podcasts/252-alone-universe/
-Can't Stop The Feeling by Justin Timberlake Live (Downbeat LA Cover): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGz7Nbaavgg&ab_channel=DownbeatDownbeat
-Hakeem Oluseyi waxing lyrical about astrophysics: https://www.startalkradio.net/show/a-quantum-life-with-hakeem-oluseyi/
--
This episode is proudly sponsored by the poem Amor Fati by Susan Buffam.
So I had this idea for a new strand on PK called Voice Noets With Poets. An audio gratitude (delivered as voice note) to some of my favourite makers about their work. In each episode you might hear my voice-note to them, and their voice note back, accompanied by other pleasant bleeps and bloops as part of the sonic package. I did one of these with Bryony Littlefair, and then ran out of steam, but I still like this one!
—
TOPICS COVERED (In Order of Appearance): Tara Miller (poem); “hooks” in songs and poems; the workings of desire (what is desire using us for?); interruption in poetic narrative; affectionate abuse / ambivalent intimacies; the (un)blemished truths about ourselves/others; long-legged vs short-legged happiness; Jane Hirshfield’s giraffes (Articulation, An Assay); many-jointed expressive structures in poetry; conceptual untidiness; Colette Bryce’s giraffes (The Hopes); random influences & unhinged delight; the post-depressive giraffe of serendipitous happiness; Tully (spoilers); suburbia (no spoilers); “I could speak and I was happy. / Or: I could speak, thus I was happy. / Or: I was happy, thus speaking." (Louise Glück; nostalgic anxiety; the joy of inconclusiveness; terrible at pub quizzes; And it was at that age … / Poetry arrived / in search of me." (Neruda poem); identification with Dorianne Laux's After Twelve Days of Rain; I have always loved too much,
/ or not enough; hatless in the rain; the freedom of writing from a place of unknowing; making it as someone who makes it simple and sad.
This episode is proudly sponsored by the poem CHANCE DARKENED ME:
Chance darkened me
as a morning darkens,
preparing to rain.
It goes against its arc,
betrays its clock-hands.
The day was a dark-eyed giraffe,
its unfathomable legs
kept walking.
A person is not a day,
not rain,
no gentle eater of high leaves.
I did not keep walking.
The day inside me,
legs and lungs, kept walking.
-Jane Hirshfield
THE MOTHER
The girl wrote a story. “But how much better it would be if you wrote a novel,” said her mother. The girl built a dollhouse. “But how much better if it were a real house,” her mother said. The girl made a small pillow for her father. “But wouldn’t a quilt be more practical,” said her mother. The girl dug a small hole in the garden. “But how much better if you dug a large hole,” said her mother. The girl dug a hole and went to sleep in it. “But how much better if you slept forever,” said her mother.
-Lydia Davis
THIS BE THE VERSE
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
-Philip Larkin
THE OPTICAL PRODIGAL
A man sees a tiny couple in the distance, and thinks they might be his mother and father. But when he gets to them they're still little. You're still little, he says, don't you remember? Who said you were supposed to be here? says the little husband. You're supposed to be in your own distance; you're still in your own foreground, you spendthrift. No no, says the man, you're to blame.
-Russell Edson
With additional audio clips and references to:
Love, Love, Love By Mike Bartlett. The Lyric Hammersmith Theatre production (recorded under lockdown): https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000k26n
Astor Piazzolla's Las Estaciones - Otono Porteno, Violin. Arabella Steinbacher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms1BR55bOmg
This American Life, Episode 672, "No Fair!": https://www.thisamericanlife.org/672/no-fair
Nadine Labaki's Capernaum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULUo0048xZE
Sam Harris's Free Will: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Free-Will-Sam-Harris/dp/1451683405
Peter Strawson's essay "Freedom and Resentment: http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/P._F._Strawson_Freedom_&_Resentment.pdf
West Side Story - "Gee Officer Krupke!": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7TT4jnnWys&t=2s
My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout: https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/My-Name-Is-Lucy-Barton-Audiobook/B01AX00OH0
Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.
-James Wright
Shook as we all are at the moment by global pandemics, and social protest, perhaps this is a good time to think about what wasting our lives and those of others might look like. And what about not-wasting? How to define as well as apply that to our lives? I reflect on this koan via Mike Leigh's 1993 film Naked, Jean Renoir's 1932 film Boudu Saved from Drowning, Harold Brodkey's short story "Dumbness is Everything", and the philosopher Robert Kane's ideas about three dimensions of value that stack up or make up the landscape and inscape of our lives.
Transcript and shownotes (including links to films discussed which you can watch for free online): http://stevewasserman.co.uk/am-i-wasting-my-life-are-you-wasting-your-life-james-wrights-lying-in-a-hammock-at-william-duffys-farm-in-pine-island-minnesota/
PRAYER
Every day I want to speak with you. And every day something more important
calls for my attention – the downloads, the books-to-read, the collapsible
dog bowls I need to buy on Amazon.
Even now I can hardly sit here
among the falling piles of paper and clothing, the garbage trucks outside
screeching and banging.
The mystics say you are as close as my own breath.
Why do I flee from you?
My days and nights pour through me like complaints
and become a story I forgot to tell.
Help me. Even as I write these words I am planning
to rise from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence.
-Marie Howe
In this episode, I explore through the above koan the challenges of living with our fidgety and distractible minds. Why are our minds like this, and is there anything we can do to bring ourselves more into flow?
Joining me on this journey: Melville's Bartleby and his I-would-prefer-not-to mantra; Nir Eyal and his book Indistractible; a couple of philosophers (Bentham and Epicurus), as well as a few more poets (Kim Addonizio, Carlos Drummond Andrade, Sarah Lindsay, and Robert Burns writing a poem to a homeless mouse).
The physicist Jim Al-Khalili muses on universal entropy; psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (me-high cheek-sent-me-high) and William James muse on psychic entropy, and Jenny Odell does "nothing".
Transcript and shownote: http://stevewasserman.co.uk/and-every-day-something-more-important-calls-for-my-attention-marie-howes-prayer/
Some reflections on Chio Nakamura's Wild Strawberries via The Book of Job, Hansel & Gretel, 22 year-old Amy in Madison Wisconsin struggling with Covid-19, Bergman's Seventh Seal, and a brief (but very effective) psychological grounding practice called 3-2-1.
WILD STRAWBERRIES
You’re having a bad day.
Chased by a tiger to the edge of a cliff,
you scramble over and grab hold of a vine.
But now there’s another one prowling below,
and two hungry mice heading for your lifeline.
You take a deep breath,
adjusting to how things are,
and notice some wild strawberries
growing nearby,
dotted with flowers
and tiny red fruit.
What else can you do now but reach for a berry?
What else can you do now?
-Chio Nakamura
Transcript: http://stevewasserman.co.uk/what-else-can-you-do-now-but-reach-for-a-berry/
Some reflections on Caedmon's hymn via Beckett, Barthes, Foucault, Dracula, Corona, poem-twittery as identity politics, and why poetry koans are (maybe?) more important than the poets who wrote them.
“Someone speaks, someone hears: no need to go any further. It is not he, it is not she, it’s I. (Or another, or others – what does it matter?) The case is clear: it is not he, she, they who I know I am (that’s all I know), who I cannot say I am. (I can’t say anything – I’ve tried, I’m trying.) We know nothing, know of nothing: neither what it is to speak, nor what it is to hear.”
SAMUEL BECKETT (from The Unnameable)
Text version of this episode here: http://stevewasserman.co.uk/ttm-3-the-joys-delights-of-being-nobody-everybody-caedmons-hymn/
THE WAREHOUSE
This is not a false alarm. This is not a drill.
This is an emergency. It’s not just about an emergency.
It’s not just on the subject of an emergency,
it doesn’t merely refer to some emergency
that’s taking place elsewhere. Neither is it
a metaphor for an emergency, or an exclamation
drawing attention to an emergency.
It is actually the emergency, and it requires attention.
It’s not so much like a fire in a warehouse
where paper is stored, ordered by colour and weight
and finish and size, ordered by shape and age;
it’s more like a fire in a warehouse built for the storage of fire.
The fire can make nothing of its heat inside its burning home.
-Mark Waldron
Some reflections on Mark Waldron's poem The Warehouse and what it might have to teach us at the moment about dealing with the apocalyptic anxieties of the coronavirus, as well as our more day-to-day worries. Also included: a grounding practice called RAF (Recognise, Allow, Focus) which I find very helpful when anxiety dominates my thought processes.
Text version of this episode here: http://stevewasserman.co.uk/4184-2/
In which I talk to myself about Mary Ruefle’s sadness, social media, our inner interlocutors, and the decision to deliver electric shocks to one's own gonads rather than sit in a room quietly listening to the mind’s chatter.
“Gray sadness is the sadness of paper clips and rubber bands, of rain and squirrels and chewing gum, ointments and unguents and movie theaters. Gray sadness is the most common of all sadnesses, it is the sadness of sand in the desert and sand on the beach, the sadness of keys in a pocket, cans on a shelf, hair in a comb, dry-cleaning, and raisins. Gray sadness is beautiful, but not to be confused with the beauty of blue sadness, which is irreplaceable. Sad to say, gray sadness is replaceable, it can be replaced daily, it is the sadness of a melting snowman in a snowstorm.”
(Mary Ruefle, from My Private Property)
Text version of this episode here: http://stevewasserman.co.uk/ttm-1-mary-ruefles-sadness/
In this episode of Poetry Koan, Richard Scott prescribes Practising by Marie Howe which you can read here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54778/practicing.
RICHARD SCOTT was born in London in 1981. His poems have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies including Poetry Review, Poetry London, PN Review, Swimmers, The Poetry of Sex (Penguin) and Butt Magazine. He has been a winner of the Wasafiri New Writing Prize, a Jerwood/Arvon Poetry Mentee and a member of the Aldeburgh 8. His pamphlet ‘Wound’ (Rialto) won the Michael Marks Poetry Award 2016 and his poem ‘crocodile’ won the 2017 Poetry London Competition. Soho (Faber & Faber) is his first book. Richard is on Twitter @iamrichardscott.
This week in the pharmacy we have the poet SANDRA SIMONDS!
Sandra Simonds is the author of six books of poetry: Orlando, (Wave Books, 2018), Further Problems with Pleasure, winner of the 2015 Akron Poetry Prize from the University of Akron Press, Steal It Back (Saturnalia Books, 2015), The Sonnets (Bloof Books, 2014), Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2012), and Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2009). Her poems have been published in the New York Times, the Best American Poetry 2015 and 2014 and have appeared in many literary journals, including Poetry, the American Poetry Review, the Chicago Review, Granta, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Fence, Court Green, and Lana Turner. In 2013, she won a Readers’ Choice Award for her sonnet “Red Wand,” which was published on Poets.org, the Academy of American Poets website. She lives in Tallahassee, Florida and is an Associate professor of English and Humanities at Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia.
Here are the poems we discuss in the episode:
I Know a Man by Robert Creeley
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42839/i-know-a-man
Sonnet by Bernadette Mayer
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49729/sonnet-you-jerk-you-didnt-call-me-up
This week in the pharmacy we have the poet RONNA BLOOMprescribing poems for ONLINE DATING BLUES!
Ronna is a poet, speaker, psychotherapist, and author of six books. Her poems have been broadcast on the CBC, displayed in public spaces, recorded by the CNIB, and translated into Spanish and Bengali.
Ronna speaks and writes at corporate events, leads organizational retreats, runs workshops, and does poetry and writing coaching. She brings twenty years of psychotherapy practice to her work as a poet and facilitator.
She is currently Poet in Community at the University of Toronto and Poet in Residence at Mount Sinai Hospital.
Ronna has performed with Juno award-winning musician Jayme Stone. A one minute film based on the poem “Grief Without Fantasy” was made by filmmaker Midi Onodera and screened in the Official Selection at the Toronto Urban Film Festival.
Ronna has written 5 books of poetry, which some people really liked. Several of these have been shortlisted for Canadian literary prizes. Her sixth book, The More, was released October 12, 2017.
This week in the pharmacy we have the poet ED DOEGAR!
Ed’s poem “Anon” as well as the Karen Solie poem he prescribes can be found here.
Edward Doegar’s poems, reviews and translations have appeared in various magazines, including Poetry London, Prac Crit, clinicand Poetry Wales. He’s a fellow of the Complete Works programme, a scheme promoting diversity in British poetry. His poems are featured in the anthology Ten: The New Wave (Bloodaxe, 2014), and his pamphlet For Now was published by clinic in 2017. Ed also works as a Commissioning Editor at The Poetry Translation Centre.
This week in the pharmacy we have the poet CAConrad!
The poems we prescribe and talk about in this episode can be found here:
Sophie Robinson’s “biggest loser”: https://www.lambdaliterary.org/features/poetry-spotlight/10/16/a-poem-by-sophie-robinson/
Emily Dickinson’s “Remorse – is Memory – Awake”: https://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/emily-dickinson/remorse-is-memory-awake/
CAConrad grew up in Pennsylvania, where they helped to support their single mother during Conrad’s difficult youth. Influenced by Eileen Myles, Audre Lorde, Alice Notley, and Emily Dickinson, Conrad writes poems in which stark images of sex, violence, and defiance build a bridge between fable and confession. In a 2010 interview with Luke Degnan for BOMBMagazine’s BOMBlog, Conrad discussed their approach to poetry, which focuses on process and on engaging the permeability of the border between self and other. “Ultimately, I want my (Soma)tic poetry and poetics to help us realize at least two things. That everything around us has a creative viability with the potential to spur new thinking and imaginative output and that the most necessary ingredient to bringing the sustainable, humane changes we need and want for our world requires creativity in all lives, every single day.”
Conrad is the author of seven books, the latest is titled While Standing in Line for Death (Wave Books, 2017). They are a 2015 Headlands Art Fellow, and has also received fellowships from Lannan Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Banff, Ucross, RADAR, and the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. They conduct workshops on (Soma)tic Poetry and Ecopoetics.
—
Intro music: Of Montreal’s Knight Rider; outro music is also by Of Montreal (The Party’s Crashing Us)
This week in the pharmacy we have the poet NATALIE EILBERT!
All the poems we prescribe and talk about in this episode can be found here:http://bit.ly/2n9lxHZ
NATALIE EILBERT is the author of Indictus, winner of Noemi Press’s 2016 Poetry Prize, slated for publication in early 2018, as well as the poetry collection,Swan Feast (Bloof Books, 2015). Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Granta, The New Yorker, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, jubilat, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the 2016 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship at University of Wisconsin–Madison and is the founding editor of The Atlas Review.
—
Intro music: Prince. Outro music: Will & Ali
This week in the pharmacy we have the poet DONIKA KELLY!
All the poems we prescribe and talk about in this episode can be found here: http://bit.ly/2zO7zUm
Donika is the author of BESTIARY (Graywolf 2016), winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, long listed for the National Book Award (2016), and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award (2017), and the chapbook AVIARIUM (500 Places 2017). A Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, she received her MFA in Writing from the Michener Center for Writers and a Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University. She is an Assistant Professor at St. Bonaventure University, where she teaches creative writing.
If you’ve enjoyed the episode, please (pretty please) could you leave us a nice review on iTunes,
Also, in the next year, I’m trying to raise funds for the S.H.E College Fund initiative in Kenya by learning 52 poems in 52 weeks. Here is my 52 Poems in 52 Weeks Donations Page: https://chuffed.org/project/52-poems-in-52-weeks
If you’re feeling some poetry-love after listening, a donation, no matter how small (or large) would be greatly appreciated.
Don’t forget, the Poetry Pharmacy is open every day on Twitter, dispensing poems for whatever ails body and soul. Feel free to @/DM us there, or email us here (thepoetrypharmacy AT gmail.com) with your requests for a poem prescription.
This week in the pharmacy we have the poet KEEGAN LESTER!
All the poems we prescribe and talk about in this episode can be found here: http://bit.ly/2gJQDDX
Keegan splits his time between New York City and Morgantown, West Virginia. Mary Ruefle selected his first collection of poetry this shouldn’t be beautiful but it was & it’s all i had so i drew it for the 2016 Slope Editions Book Prize. His work is published in or forthcoming from the Boston Review, The Atlas Review, Powder Keg, Boaat Journal, The Journal, Phantom Books, Tinderbox, CutBank, Reality Beach and Sixth Finch among others and has been featured on NPR, The New School Writing Blog and ColdFront Mag. He is the co-founder and poetry editor for the journal Souvenir Lit. He also performs monthly with the New York City Poetry Brothel. He’s taught at the West Virginia Young Writers’ Holiday, Stonehill College, and multiple workshops in Morgantown, West Virginia, and was a mentor for the 2016 Adroit Journal Summer High School Mentorship Program. At West Virginia University he was a writing center tutor for three years and a tutor for the WVU Men’s Soccer & Woman’s Basketball teams. He was born in Huntington Beach, California. He earned his MFA from Columbia University.
[Theme music for the podcast is played by the wonderful coversart]
This week in the pharmacy we have the writer, poet, and artist KHAIRANI BAROKKA!
All the poems we prescribe and talk about in this episode can be found here: http://bit.ly/2klT8AG
KHAIRANI BAROKKA was born in Jakarta and currently lives in London. Among her honours, she was an NYU Tisch Departmental Fellow for her masters, Emerging Writers Festival’s (AUS) Inaugural International Writer-In-Residence (2013), and Indonesia’s first Writer-In-Residence at Vermont Studio Center (2011).
Okka is the writer/performer/producer of, among others, a deaf-accessible, solo poetry/art show, Eve and Mary Are Having Coffee. It premiered at Edinburgh Fringe 2014 as Indonesia’s only representative, with a grant from HIVOS. She was recognized in 2014 by UNFPA as one of Indonesia’s “Inspirational Young Leaders Driving Social Change”, for highly prolific, pioneering international work in inclusive, accessible arts.
Published internationally in anthologies and journals, Okka has presented work extensively, in ten countries, is a frequent public speaker, and has been awarded six residencies and various grants. She is author and illustrator of poetry-art book Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis Press, 2016), co-editor with Ng Yi-Sheng of HEAT: A Southeast Asian Urban Anthology (Fixi, 2016), and co-editor, with Sandra Alland and Daniel Sluman, of Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches Press, May 2017). A PhD-by-practice researcher at Goldsmiths, as an LPDP Scholar in Visual Cultures, Okka is currently working on a book and visual works. Her first full-length poetry collection, Rope, is currently out with Nine Arches Press (October 2017).
[Theme music for the podcast is by Aretha Franklin played by the wonderful coversart & also Ahmad Jamal from his album Tranquility]
Oh yes, it’s KAVEH AKBAR in da ~~house~~ Pharmacy this week!
All the poems we prescribe and talk about in this episode can be read here: http://bit.ly/2xu8VST
Kaveh’s debut full-length collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, is just out with Alice James in the US and Penguin in the UK, and his chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press. The recipient of a 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Pushcart Prize, and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives and teaches in Florida.
Kaveh also founded and edits Divedapper, a home for dialogues with the most vital voices in contemporary poetry. Previously, he ran The Quirk, a for-charity print literary journal. He has also served as Poetry Editor for BOOTH and Book Reviews Editor for the Southeast Review. Along with Gabrielle Calvocoressi, francine j. harris, and Jonathan Farmer, he starred on All Up in Your Ears, a monthly poetry podcast.
CONTACT: kaveh@kavehakbar.com or on Twitter @KavehAkbar.
[Theme music for the podcast is by Aretha Franklin played by the wonderful coversart & also Ahmad Jamal from his album Tranquility]
So pleased to have Finn Menzies in the Poetry Pharmacy this week!
Finn prescribes Max Ritvo‘s AFTERNOON which can be found here, and I reciprocate with Jim Ferris‘s FACTS OF LIFE (read Jim’s poem here).
We also read and talk about a poem from Finn’s debut collection Brilliant Odyssey Don’t Yearn.
Finn Menzies is an out transgender teacher in Seattle, WA. He received his MFA from Mills College. He is the creator of FIN Zine, a bi-annual zine dedicated to his journey through transition.
Finn’s debut collection, Brilliant Odyssey Don’t Yearn is out with Fog Machine. You can order it on Amazon. His poetry can also be seen in Gigantic Sequins, Quiet Lightning, SUSAN /the journal, Open House, SPORK, HOLD: a journal, The Shallow Ends, and various other journals.
Annually, Finn facilitates UNdoing Ego a workshop on meditation and generative writing.
[Theme music for the podcast is from Vladimir Martynov’s The Beatitudes played by the wonderful coversart on YouTube]
Today in the Poetry Pharmacy, we’re hanging out with CHEN CHEN.
Chen prescribes aKeegan Lester poem which can be READ HERE, and I reciprocate with jayy dodd‘s incredibleARS POETICA. We also read and talk about Chen’s poem POPLAR STREET.
Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. A Kundiman and Lambda Literary Fellow, Chen has also authored two chapbooks. He helps edit Iron Horse and Gabby. He also works on a new journal called Underblong, which he co-founded with the poet Sam Herschel Wein. He lives in Lubbock with his partner Jeff Gilbert and their pug dog Mr. Rupert Giles.
[Theme music for the podcast is from Vladimir Martynov’s The Beatitudes played by the wonderful coversart on YouTube]
Welcome to a new season of the show, now rebranded and slightly reformatted as POETRY PHARMACY!
You might notice that we have a slightly different way of doing things: two readers, three poems, and even more POETRY LOVE than ever before.
We’re kicking off the new season with AMAAN HYDER, author of a recent collection of poetry At Hajj (Penned In The Margins) who reads to me a poem from a collection he loves by the writer and visual artist Shani Mootoo. I then read and we talk about a poem I love by Kaveh Akbar, and we finish with Amaan’s poem The Clot.
Links to the poems read and discussed in this episode: Shani Mootoo’s A RECOGNITION / Kaveh Akbar’s DO YOU SPEAK PERSIAN? /Amaan Hyder’s THE CLOT.
[Theme music for the podcast is from Vladimir Martynov’s The Beatitudes played by the wonderful coversart on YouTube]
Today in the Poetry Pharmacy, we had a visit from MARY JEAN CHAN.
Mary Jean’s work has appeared in The Poetry Review, Ambit, The Rialto, The London Magazine, Callaloo and elsewhere. She is also a Co-Editor at Oxford Poetry.
Her poem “//” is currently shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. She also recently won the Poetry Society Members’ Competition, as well as the Poetry and Psychoanalysis Competition.
Mary Jean brought in Adrienne Rich’s poem DEDICATIONS to read and discuss. We also talked about our love for the poet Chen Chen and read his poem WINTER, followed by a reading of Mary Jean’s own SELF-PORTRAIT, a poem I’ve recently been by-heart dosing myself on.
If you’ve enjoyed the episode, please (pretty please) could you leave us a nice review on iTunes,
Also, in the next year, I’m trying to raise funds for the S.H.E College Fund initiative in Kenya by learning 52 poems in 52 weeks. Here is my 52 Poems in 52 Weeks Donations Page: https://chuffed.org/project/52-poems-in-52-weeks
If you’re feeling some poetry-love after listening, a donation, no matter how small (or large) would be greatly appreciated.
Don’t forget, the Poetry Pharmacy is open every day on Twitter, dispensing poems for whatever ails body and soul. Feel free to @/DM us there, or email us here (thepoetrypharmacy AT gmail.com) with your requests for a poem prescription.
[Theme music for the podcast is from Vladimir Martynov’s The Beatitudes played by the wonderful coversart on YouTube]
RYAN VAN WINKLE is a poet, live artist, podcaster and critic living in Edinburgh.
His second collection, The Good Dark, won the Saltire Society’s 2015 Poetry Book of the Year award.
His poems have appeared in New Writing Scotland, The Prairie Schooner, The American Poetry Review, AGNI and Best Scottish Poems 2015.
As a member of Highlight Arts he has organized festivals and translation workshops in Syria, Pakistan and Iraq.
He is always happy to hear from you, you can contact Ryan here.
RACHEL KELLY is a mental health campaigner, public speaker, and writer.
In her early thirties, Rachel was diagnosed with serious depression and subsequently suffered two major depressive episodes. These two episodes have become the defining events of her life. Since then, she has written about the condition, and how she has recovered, in books that have been read by tens of thousands of people. Her memoir about her experience of serious depression Black Rainbow was a Sunday Times bestseller in 2014.
Rachel now speaks publicly about her experience of depression and recovery, and regularly writes for press and gives TV and radio interviews to help educate and break stigma. She also runs workshops for mental health charities to share what she has learnt about how to stay calm and well. She is an official ambassador for Rethink Mental Illness, Young Minds, Sane and The Counselling Foundation. Her latest book “The Happy Kitchen: Good Mood” food was published in January 2017.
ALEXANDER MACLEOD was born in Inverness, Nova Scotia and raised in Windsor Ontario. His first book, a collection of short stories called Light Liftingwon the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award and was named a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Book Award, the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, and the Danuta Gleed Award. Alexander teaches at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax.
THE PLAIN SENSE OF THINGS
After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.
It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.
The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.
Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence
Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.
JOSH COHEN is Professor of Modern Literary Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London and a psychoanalyst in private practice. He is the author of books and articles on modern literature, cultural theory and psychoanalysis, including How to Read Freud (Granta, 2005). His latest book is The Private Life: Why We Remain in the Dark.
Read the tiny Lydia Davis story ‘What She Knew” mentioned in our discussion.
STORY WATER
A story is like water
That you heat for your bath.
It takes messages between the fire and your skin. It lets them meet,
and it cleans you!
Very few can sit down
in the middle of the fire itself,
like a salamander, or Abraham.
We need intermediaries.
A feeling of fullness comes,
but usually it takes some bread
to bring it.
Beauty surrounds us,
but usually we need to be walking
in a garden to know it.
The body itself is a screen
to shield and partially reveal
the light that’s blazing
inside your presence.
Water, stories, the body,
all the things we do, are mediums
that hide and show what’s hidden.
Study them,
and enjoy this being washed
with a secret we sometimes know,
and then not.
EDWARD ESPE BROWN began cooking and practicing Zen in 1965. He was the first head resident cook at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center from 1967 to 1970. He later worked at the celebrated Greens Restaurant in San Francisco, serving as busboy, waiter, floor manager, wine buyer, cashier, host, and manager.
Ordained a priest by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, he has taught meditation retreats and vegetarian cooking classes throughout North America and Europe. He is the author of several cookbooks and the editor of Not Always So, a book of lectures by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi.
He is also the subject of the critically acclaimed 2007 film How to Cook Your Life.
SARAH SALWAY is a British poet, novelist, short story writer, journalist and creative writing tutor.
She has written six books: three novels, Something Beginning With, Tell Me Everything and Getting the Picture, a book of short stories, Leading the Dance, and two collections of poetry, You Do Not Need Another Self-Help Book and Digging Up Paradise.
LAURA BARBER is the editor of four popular poetry anthologies – including the hugely successful Penguin’s Poems for Life – and former ‘Poetry Doctor’ at The School of Life. She is also Editorial Director at Granta Books where her interests range from literary fiction to memoir, reportage, travel, narrative history and nature writing,
NIALL O’SULLIVAN hosts Poetry Unplugged, London’s longest running poetry open mic. He teaches poetry at London Metropolitan University, his main module being Poetry and Performance. He is currently working on a series of online posts that critically explore Spoken Word.
He has published three books of poetry with flipped eye . He also edit other poets for the press.
MARCUS SLEASE (JJ Mars) is a visionary writer from Portadown, N. Ireland and Utah in the U.S.
Some influences include: Buddhist practice, surrealism, collage art, low-fi graffiti, Brian Eno, Spacemen 3, Leonora Carrington, Richard Brautigan, Ariel Pink, bill bissett, Tim Atkins, Susumu Yokota, Ron Padgett, Chika Sagawa, & Guy Maddin.
He is a graduate of the MFA creative writing program at University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the author of ten books from micro presses. Such as Rides from Bart Books and Mu (dream) So (window) from Poor Claudia.
His latest book, Play Yr Kardz Right, is now available from Dostoyevsky Wannabe:
His writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, featured in the Best British Poetry series, translated into Polish and Danish, and has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Tin House, Poetry, and Fence.
WILLIAM SIEGHART has had a distinguished career in publishing and the arts. He established the Forward Prizes for Poetry in 1992, and founded National Poetry Day in 1994. He is a former chairman of the Arts Council Lottery Panel, and current chairman of both the Somerset House Trust and Forward Thinking, a charity seeking peace in the Middle East and acceptance of British Muslims. Occasionally, William also offers his services as a poetry pharmacy apothecary at literary festivals in the UK.
ETGAR KERET is an Israeli writer known for his short stories, graphic novels, and scriptwriting for film and television. His books had been published in more than thirty languages.
Keret has received the Prime Minister’s award for literature, as well as the Ministry of Culture’s Cinema Prize. In 2010, Keret received the Chevalier (Knight) Medallion of France’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
JANE DAVIS is changing the way people relate to literature, to each other and to themselves through a shared reading model called Get Into Reading, which brings small groups together on a weekly basis to read books and poems aloud.
Run in care homes, libraries, hostels, mental health centers, schools, and prisons Get Into Reading brings literature to where people are. At the core of Jane’s approach is the insight that reading can be used as a therapeutic tool to help people articulate their thoughts, feelings, and life experiences.
Through the Get Into Reading model, Jane is redefining the value of literature and the role that reading aloud can play in improving mental health, community, and well-being.