Episode 6 - Eve at the Beach, by Sarah Dickenson Snyder
The liminal space at the beach, where lands meet sea and vice versa, also brings us to a liminal space in our pysche as well, where we can be both alive in moment, flush with memories of the past, and sober about our mortality. Join for a brief exploration of this theme in Sarah Dickenson Snyder's poem 'Eve at the Beach.'
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5:40
Episode 5 - [as freedom is a breakfastfood] by E.E. Cummings
Where to find meaning in this muddle of confusion, in the way our brain clings to binary reasoning and heuristics and paradoxes? This week's poem points us towards a conclusion that perhaps meaning is in the act of merely existing.
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8:58
Episode 4 - After Collecting the Autumn Taxes, by Bao Juyi
Authority, identity, causality, being able to view your role and privilege through the lens of another - these all feels like very modern, very meta concerns. But are they? Around roughly 800 CE, in China's Tang dynasty, Bao Juyi wrestled with these same concerns, with both an incisiveness and lightness that might be instructiveness for our modern, digitally fractured culture.
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9:22
Episode 3 - When You Are Old, by WB Yeats
Yeats and the important of voice, or how to turn a quiet moment of reflection into a journey through time and space, and yet you never feel like you left your rocking chair.
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6:49
Episode 2 - Le Pont Mirabeau, by Guillaume Apollinaire
What is the power of symbolic language, particularly about so old a topic as love and heartbreak?
Passent les jours et passent les semaines
Ni temps passé
Ni les amours reviennent
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure
When was the last time you wrote a poem? Or studied a poem, or read one? Or even thought about poetry at all? Chances are, more recently than you think, particularly if you listen to popular music, if you read, or even watch Netflix.
If this podcast has a central idea, it is that poetry still has a place in connecting humans to a shared experience, and that exploring the ideas of poetry outside of university and high school classroom yields something more rich and meaningful. Let’s take poetry off the page and give you something to think, rather than just read.
Ireland