Shows
Poet on SongMatsuo Basho on cultivating focus and humilityBasho’s poetry delves into the present moment and leaves us with flashes, echoes of ordinary things made extraordinary because he took the time to look at them. Short and seemingly simple, it is the very spaciousness of the Haiku that allows him to open the doors of contemplation for us
-- and that is what he does, when we let him. 2023-05-0630 min
Poet on SongWalt Whitman on love of self and countryWhitman's song catalogs a profound empathy for the other, whom he in many ways identified as himself. That sense of oneness pervades his poetry, and in my mind stands as his most important message--that we are one and must therefore include the other. These ideas are conveyed with forward intimacy, a closeness that engages and reflects with you, a voice that speaks directly to you. It is almost shocking how Whitman gets to us, how well he seems to understand what is most vibrant about the American character: it’s diversity. 2022-11-3038 min
Poet on SongRumi on wisdom: knowledge seasoned by loveRumi's poetry speaks to us from a state of deep inspiration. The luminescence of his verse carries hope, delivers method and the emotional depth needed to find our way to the knowledge seasoned by love—wisdom. From reading Rumi, one learns that there is a rigor to love. That it reaches beyond attachment to something closer to what we do. “Let the beauty we love be what we do.” Love is action, love is devotion, love is a willingness to make sacred the demands of our higher self, cater to its need for beauty, for gentleness, for light. Such p...2022-07-0829 min
Poet on SongToni Morrison on the pursuit of goodness“Out of the gospel of the middle passage, the blues of slavery, the jazz of big city ghetto nights,” the Nobel Prize winning Toni Morrison whose generative depth and sounding of interiority produces a lyricism that is radiant in its generosity and in my mind can only be described as song. Morrisson rivets because she has an ear tuned to the complexities of the American saga in all of its beauty and travesties. Her dives into her characters' inner lives read like ballads, like rhapsodies, like adagios-- its all music. 2022-03-0735 min
Poet on SongCharles Baudelaire on suffering in the first world
“Baudelaire’s life ended in 1861 in syphilitic delirium in a hotel room in Brussels. With him died the caustic dandy: the son of an art critique, the translator who brought Edgar Allan Poe to the French public, the stepson of general Jacques Aupick, the aesthete of impeccable style whose trenchant remarks often made him cruel, who flaunted his Haitian Mulatto mistress- his Black Venus- in the face of bourgeois conventions, and whose every breath and every stroke of the pen showed us why it hurts…”
Musical Selection for this Podcast
Für Alina by Arvo Pärt...2021-06-0138 min
Poet on SongPaul Laurence Dunbar on accepting the truth about who we are“Paul Laurence Dunbar was the first to take a bird’s-eye view of black identity in America. The first to look at his people objectively and catalog their humor, their pain, their strength, their shortcomings. In short, he offers one of the first literary portraits of Black America. He introduces an African-American character to our literary landscape, one that rises above the painted black faces which made the minstrels such a landmark of our theater.”
Musical Selection for this Podcast
The shadow of your smile by Dexter Gordon
Farewell Blues by Eric We...2021-05-0130 min
Poet on SongRainer Maria Rilke 's invitation to contemplative insight“With Rilke there is always this sense that the universe was not made for us; rather we are a part of it and subject to greater hierarchies–that celestial realm that he felt we could access by leaning into our pain. Beauty is both turmoil and peace, alluring and alarming–a pregnant emptiness. Creativity. This understanding and continuity is what Rilke adds to the frame of our personal stories. As if to say: “Someone like you has sat in such a chair before and has wondered the same things eons ago. Someone like you will desire and reach in the same...2021-04-0141 min
Poet on SongAnna Akhmatova on the human cost of populism“Akhmatova’s song is capable of articulating love with exactitude and an emotional precision that cuts to the core of you. What makes her so powerful a voice is the emotional history she carries. It’s that feeling documented about what tyrannous institutions do to the human soul; what happens to us when that compassionate part of ourselves is in retreat, when our baser instincts are masters of the public scene.”
Musical Selection for this Podcast
Another man done gone by OdettaWe praise thee by Pavel Chesnokov interpreted by Dmitri Hvorostovsky with the Saint Petersbu...2021-03-0131 min
Poet on SongDerek Walcott on loving the Caribbean into history
“Walcott is in my mind — without a doubt –the great poet of the late 20th century. His is a mellifluous song; a voice of such breadth and longing…perhaps a longing to right old wrongs. In any case, he enshrines an entire people in truth beyond all confabulations so that we may come to know how they came to be who they are now. In, Omeros, Walcott’s sun-dusted rewriting of Homer’s epic, we ride with the crest of a history where Helen of Troy is Helen of the West Indies, personified in the haugh...2021-02-0132 min
Poet on SongWilliam Carlos Williams on showcasing the American temperament“My tribute to the doctor, novelist, playwright, imagist and poet William Carlos Williams whose rigorous notes strike close to the core of the American ethos because they are scrupulously just. He has two fingers on the American pulse: its beauty, its devastation, its solitude, its reveries, its ignorance…yes. Creative imaginings whose excacting strophes are as simple as they are meaningful. What makes William Carlos Williams remarkable are his snapshots of the American landscape. In essence, he showcased the mood, the temperament of a whole country – the people, their inner turmoil…”[PATERSON by William Carlos Williams, copyright ©1946, 1948, 1949, 1951, 1958 by William Car...2021-01-0127 min