Podcasts about Denise Levertov

It's the 55th anniversary of the killings at Kent State University. In a special encore episode, we're reposting our Kent State episode from 2020.In this episode, we commemorate the anniversary of the tragic events of May 4th, 1970 at Kent State University, where agents of the state murdered 4 students and shot 9 others. Students, who'd been told the war was winding down in Vietnam, erupted in protest at campuses all over  America when Richard Nixon  announced the U.S. invasion of Cambodia on April 30th.  At Kent State, a working-class public school in Northeast  Ohio, protesting students and other burned down an ROTC building, a common target in the Vietnam  protest era, and Ohio Governor James Rhodes, vowing a violent response, mobilized the National Guard and  sent them to Kent.  For two days the students and Guard skirmished, with the paramilitaries hurling tear gas and intimidating students.  On May 4th, the Guard, unprovoked, started shooting into the crowd of students and shot 13, killing 4, from distances beyond 300 feet.  These were extrajudicial killings and a sure sign the state would murder anyone who challenged its interests. The war had come home! Scott and Bob, who's also a historian of the Vietnam War and the 1960s and has published extensively on those subjects, talk about the background to  the protests, the official, violent response, the aftermath at places  like Jackson State, where 2 more students were killed, and the larger context of anti-state protests and their meaning, and lessons.Links//Kent State Tribunal Organization, established by Laurel Krause, sister of one of the students assassinated that day (https://bit.ly/3w2spdR);interview with Alan Canfora, one of the survivors of the shootings (https://bit.ly/3OUyjGq);The Kent State May 4th Poetry Collection; Denise Levertov, “The Day the Audience Walked Out on Me, and Why” (https://bit.ly/3kIVyFv);Governor Rhodes press conference, May 3 (https://bit.ly/37cIk0R);Robert Buzzanco, Vietnam and the Transformation  of American Life (https://bit.ly/3kB21ST).https://linktr.ee/greenandredpodcastCheck out our new website: https://greenandredpodcast.org/Support//+Become a recurring donor at  https://www.patreon.com/greenredpodcast+Or make a one time donation here: https://bit.ly/DonateGandRFollow Green and Red//Donate to Green and Red Podcast//This is a Green and Red Podcast (@PodcastGreenRed) production. Produced by Bob (@bobbuzzanco) and Scott (@sparki1969).  “Green and Red Blues” by Moody.  Editing by Scott.

Today's poems (too lovely to keep behind the paywall) come from Edwin Muir and Denise Levertov and both marvel at different aspects of the same great mystery. Happy reading. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Recorded on Sunday, March 23, 2025. Other scripture cited: Isaiah 53:1-3; Hebrews 5:7-8.Support the show

Notes and Links to Donna Minkowitz's Work         Donna Minkowitz is a writer of fiction and memoir who author Mary Gaitskill has celebrated as “original, energetic, witty, and meaty.” Andrew Solomon dubbed her “utterly entrancing… a writer with breathtakingly fluent language.” She is also the author of the fantasy-influenced memoir Growing Up Golem and the memoir Ferocious Romance, about being an openly lesbian reporter covering the Christian right undercover. Growing Up Golem was a finalist for both a Lambda Literary Award and for the Publishing Triangle's Judy Grahn Nonfiction Award, and Ferocious Romance won a Lambda Literary Award. Donna, a former columnist for the Village Voice and The Advocate, has also written for the New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Salon, Slate, and New York magazine.    DONNAVILLE, her first novel and third book, was recently published by Indolent Books. Buy Donnaville   Donna's Website   Book Review for Donnaville from Kirkus Reviews   At about 2:05, Donna provides background on her formative reading and writing years  At about 3:40, Pete and Donna talk about the benefits of reading works a bit too old for them At about 5:05, Donna responds to Pete's questions about the Torah and how its stories affected her writing At about 6:30, Donna talks about formative and transformative writers, including poets and Greek mythology At about 8:05, Donna responds to Pete's questions about representation in discussing the significance of Sappho's work At about 10:25, Donna discusses the nuances of the word “queer” and generational usages  At about 14:00, Pete and Donna stan Honor Thy Father by Gay Talese, which receives a shout out in Donnaville At about 17:20, Donna expands on writers who inspired her as a high school and college student; she talks about the complicated legacy and work of Tolkien  At about 21:30, Pete asks Donna and how the detail shown in Donnaville connects to her work as an esteemed journalist  At about 23:40, Donna talks about her undercover journalism work, including a memorable white nationalism conference and purported former Olympic hopeful At about 26:40, Donna talks about the book's opening scene and connections to her real life, with regard to therapy and therapists and ways of finding growth At about 31:55, Pete describes the book's exposition and compliments Donna's  At about 34:05, Donna cites Denise Levertov's and Delmore Schwartz's (“Narcissus”) work as inspiration for her book featuring a city inside her mind; Pete cites another wonderful Schwartz text, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” At about 36:40, Donna talks about Foucault and resistance in connection to an evocative line from her book At about 37:20, Donna expands upon how there are two characters in the book who are not pieces of her, and she explains the significance of Harlequin in the book At about 41:45, Donna responds to Pete's question about the lying nature of Harlequin  At about 44:15, Donna and Pete explore ideas of connection and confusion between abusers and their young victims At about 47:50, Donna talks about early “action” that Donna in the book is urged to take At about 49:40, Pete highlights a beautiful quote regarding the “sacred divine” and Donna talks about expectations of hurt At about 50:30, The two discuss the contradictions of the book's jailer, and Donna further discusses ideas of shame At about 53:25, Donna expands on how she sees parts of her life and family in certain characters in the book At about 54:40, Pete shouts out a story, William Carlos Willams' “The Use of Force,” that explores ideas of sadism in similar ways as Donnaville  At about 55:50, Donna muses over ideas of self-care, emotional regulation, and structure in our lives featured in the book At about 57:35, Pete gives details about the book's main focus, and Donna responds to his observations about Donnaville as “a happily queer book” as she also expands upon pleasures found in the book At about 1:02:05, Pete cites traumas alluded to in the book and a deep quote about traumas emerging in people's lives At about 1:04:10, Donna ponders Pete's question about a nurturing group of older people and connects the book to Joseph Campbell's “Hero's Journey” At about 1:07:30, Pete and Donna discuss a possible animated movie based on the book and possible voice actors At about 1:09:25, Donna shouts out as bookstores to buy her book, such as The Bureau of General Services, Queer Division, Stanza Books and Binnacle Books        You can now subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, and leave me a five-star review. You can also ask for the podcast by name using Alexa, and find the pod on Stitcher, Spotify, and on Amazon Music. Follow Pete on IG, where he is @chillsatwillpodcast, or on Twitter, where he is @chillsatwillpo1. You can watch other episodes on YouTube-watch and subscribe to The Chills at Will Podcast Channel. Please subscribe to both the YouTube Channel and the podcast while you're checking out this episode.       Pete is very excited to have one or two podcast episodes per month featured on the website of Chicago Review of Books. The audio will be posted, along with a written interview culled from the audio. This week, his conversation with Episode 255 guest Chris Knapp is up on the website. A big thanks to Rachel León and Michael Welch at Chicago Review.     Sign up now for The Chills at Will Podcast Patreon: it can be found at patreon.com/chillsatwillpodcastpeterriehl      Check out the page that describes the benefits of a Patreon membership, including cool swag and bonus episodes. Thanks in advance for supporting Pete's one-man show, his DIY podcast and his extensive reading, research, editing, and promoting to keep this independent podcast pumping out high-quality content!    This month's Patreon bonus episode will feature an exploration of the wonderful poetry of Khalil Gibran.    I have added a $1 a month tier for “Well-Wishers” and Cheerleaders of the Show.    This is a passion project of Pete's, a DIY operation, and he'd love for your help in promoting what he's convinced is a unique and spirited look at an often-ignored art form.     The intro song for The Chills at Will Podcast is “Wind Down” (Instrumental Version), and the other song played on this episode was “Hoops” (Instrumental)” by Matt Weidauer, and both songs are used through ArchesAudio.com.     Please tune in for Episode 277 with Jahmal Mayfield, who writes gritty crime novels that touch on large social issues. His stellar SMOKE KINGS was inspired by Kimberly Jones' passionate viral video, “How can we win?”    The episode airs on March 25.  

Amanda Holmes reads Denise Levertov's “Writing in the Dark.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you'll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman. This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“What are you going through?” This was one of the central animating questions in Simone Weil's thought that pushed her beyond philosophy into action. Weil believed that genuinely asking this question of the other, particularly the afflicted other, then truly listening and prayerfully attending, would move us toward an enactment of justice and love.Simone Weil believed that any suffering that can be ameliorated, should be.In this episode, Part 2 of our short series on How to Read Simone Weil, Cynthia Wallace (Associate Professor of English at St. Thomas More College at the University of Saskatchewan), and author of The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil: Feminism, Justice, and the Challenge of Religion and Evan Rosa discuss the risky self-giving way of Simone Weil; her incredible literary influence, particularly on late 20th century feminist writers; the possibility of redemptive suffering; the morally complicated territory of self-sacrificial care and the way that has traditionally fallen to women and minorities; what it means to make room and practicing hospitality for the afflicted other; hunger; the beauty of vulnerability; and that grounding question for Simone Weil political ethics, “What are you going through?”We're in our second episode of a short series exploring How to Read Simone Weil. She's the author of Gravity and Grace, The Need for Roots, and Waiting for God—among many other essays, letters, and notes—and a deep and lasting influence that continues today.In this series, we're exploring Simone Weil the Mystic, Simone Weil the Activist, Simone Weil the Existentialist. And what we'll see is that so much of her spiritual, political, and philosophical life, are deeply unified in her way of being and living and dying.And on that note, before we go any further, I need to issue a correction from our previous episode in which I erroneously stated that Weil died in France. And I want to thank subscriber and listener Michael for writing and correcting me.Actually she died in England in 1943, having ambivalently fled France in 1942 when it was already under Nazi occupation—first to New York, then to London to work with the Free French movement and be closer to her home.And as I went back to fix my research, I began to realize just how important her place of death was. She died in a nursing home outside London. In Kent, Ashford to be precise. She had become very sick, and in August 1943 was moved to the Grosvenor Sanitorium.The manner and location of her death matter because it's arguable that her death by heart failure was not a self-starving suicide (as the coroner reported), but rather, her inability to eat was a complication rising from tuberculosis, combined with her practice of eating no more than the meager rations her fellow Frenchmen lived on under Nazi occupation.Her biographer Richard Rees wrote: "As for her death, whatever explanation one may give of it will amount in the end to saying that she died of love.In going back over the details of her death, I found a 1977 New York Times article by Elizabeth Hardwick, and I'll quote at length, as it offers a very fitting entry into this week's episode on her life of action, solidarity, and identification with and attention to the affliction of others.“Simone Weil, one of the most brilliant, and original minds of 20th century France, died at the age of 34 in a nursing home near London. The coroner issued a verdict of suicide, due to voluntary starvation—an action undertaken at least in part out of wish not to eat more than the rations given her compatriots in France under the German occupation. The year of her death was 1943.“The willed deprivation of her last period was not new; indeed refusal seems to have been a part of her character since infancy. What sets her apart from our current ascetics with their practice of transcendental meditation, diet, vegetarianism, ashram simplicities, yoga is that with them the deprivations and rigors‐are undergone for the pay‐off—for tranquility, for thinness, for the hope of a long life—or frequently, it seems, to fill the hole of emptiness so painful to the narcissist. With Simone Well it was entirely the opposite.“It was her wish, or her need, to undergo misery, affliction and deprivation because such had been the lot of mankind throughout history. Her wish was not to feel better, but to honor the sufferings of the lowest. Thus around 1935, when she was 25 years old, this woman of transcendent intellectual gifts and the widest learning, already very frail and suffering from severe headaches, was determined to undertake a year of work in a factory. The factories, the assembly lines, were then the modem equivalent of “slavery,” and she survived in her own words as “forever a slave.” What she went through at the factory “marked me in so lasting a manner that still today when any human being, whoever he may be and in whatever circumstances, speaks to me without brutality, I cannot help having the impression teat there must be a mistake....”[Her contemporary] “Simone de Beauvoir tells of meeting her when they were preparing for examinations to enter a prestigious private school. ‘She intrigued me because of her great reputation for intelligence and her bizarre outfits. ... A great famine had broken out in China, and I was told that when she heard the news she had wept. . . . I envied her for having a heart that could beat round the world.'“In London her health vanished, even though the great amount of writing she did right up to the time she went to the hospital must have come from those energies of the dying we do not understand—the energies of certain chosen dying ones, that is. Her behavior in the hospital, her refusal and by now her Inability to eat, vexed and bewildered the staff. Her sense of personal accountability to the world's suffering had reached farther than sense could follow.”Last week, we heard from Eric Springsted, one of the co-founders of the American Weil Society and author of Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century.Next week, we'll explore Simone Weil the Existentialist—with philosopher Deborah Casewell, author of Monotheism & Existentialism and Co-Director of the Simone Weil Research Network in the UK.But this week we're looking at Simone Weil the Activist—her perspectives on redemptive suffering, her longing for justice, and her lasting influence on feminist writers. With me is Cynthia Wallace, associate professor of English at St. Thomas More College at the University of Saskatchewan, and author of The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil: Feminism, Justice, and the Challenge of Religion.This is unique because it's learning how to read Simone Weil from some of her closest readers and those she influenced, including poets and writers such as Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, and Annie Dillard.About Cynthia WallaceCynthia Wallace is Associate Professor of English at St. Thomas More College at the University of Saskatchewan, and author of The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil: Feminism, Justice, and the Challenge of Religion, as well as **Of Women Borne: A Literary Ethics of Suffering.About Simone WeilSimone Weil (1909–1943) was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. She's the author of Gravity and Grace, The Need for Roots, and Waiting for God—among many other essays, letters, and notes.Show NotesCynthia Wallace (Associate Professor of English at St. Thomas More College at the University of Saskatchewan), and author of The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil: Feminism, Justice, and the Challenge of ReligionElizabeth Hardwick, “A woman of transcendent intellect who assumed the sufferings of humanity” (New York Times, Jan 23, 1977)Of Women Borne: A Literary Ethics of SufferingThe hard work of productive tensionSimone Weil on homework: “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God”Open, patient, receptive waiting in school studies — same skill as prayer“What are you going through?” Then you listen.Union organizerWaiting for God and Gravity & GraceVulnerability and tendernessJustice and Feminism, and “making room for the other”Denise Levertov's  ”Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus”“Levertov wrote herself into Catholic conversion”“after pages and pages of struggle, she finally says: “So be it. Come rag of pungent quiverings,  dim star, let's try  if something human still can shield you, spark of remote light.”“And so she  argues that God isn't  particularly active in the world that we have, except for when we open ourselves to these chances of divine encounter.”“ Her imagination of God is different from how I think  a lot of contemporary Western   people think about an all powerful, all knowing God. Vae thinks about God as having done exactly what she's asking us to do, which is to make room for the other to exist in a way that requires us to give up power.”Exploiting self-emptying, particularly of women“Exposing the degree to which women have been disproportionately expected to sacrifice themselves.”Disproportionate self-sacrifice of women and in particular women of colorAdrienne Rich, Of Woman Borne: ethics that care for the otherThe distinction between suffering and afflictionAdrienne Rich's poem, “Hunger”Embodiment“ You have to follow both sides to the kind of limit of their capacity for thought, and then see what you find in that untidy both-and-ness.”Annie Dillard's expansive attentivenessPilgrim at Tinker Creek and attending to the world: “ to bear witness to the world in a way that tells the truth about what is brutal in the world, while also telling the truth about what is glorious  in the world.”“She's suspicious of our imaginations because she doesn't want us to distract  ourselves from contemplating the void.”Dillard, For the Time Being (1999) on natural evil and injusticeGoing from attention to creation“Reading writers writing about writing”Joan Didion: “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means, what I want and what I fear.”Writing as both creation and discoveryFriendship and “ we let the other person be who they are instead of trying to make them who we want them to be.”The joy of creativity—pleasure and desire“ Simone Weil argues that suffering that can be ameliorated should be.”“ What is possible through shared practices of attention?”The beauty of vulnerability and the blossoms of fruit trees“What it takes for us to be fed”Need for ourselves, each other, and the divineProduction NotesThis podcast featured Cynthia WallaceEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Emily Brookfield, Liz Vukovic, and Kacie BarrettA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Send us a textThe full text of this podcast, including the links mentioned, can be found in the transcript of this edition or at the following link:https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/2024/11/preparing-for-lowercase-c-christmas.htmlPlease feel free to post any comments you have about this episode there.The Cambridge Unitarian Church's Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation can be found at this link:https://www.cambridgeunitarian.org/morning-service/ Music, "New Heaven", written by Andrew J. Brown and played by Chris Ingham (piano), Paul Higgs (trumpet), Russ Morgan (drums) and Andrew J. Brown (double bass) Thanks for listening. Just to note that the texts of all these podcasts are available on my blog. You'll also find there a brief biography, info about my career as a musician, & some photography. Feel free to drop by & say hello. Email: caute.brown[at]gmail.com

Coordina Isaías GardePara participar de los encuentros de lectura:isaiasgarde@gmail.comhttps://isaiasgarde.blogspot.com/https://www.facebook.com/groups/textosentransicionTambién pueden seguir la actividad en los siguientes canales:Canal Whatsapp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaBZRE39sBIABWavgA1fCanal Telegram: https://t.me/+RJr1kBJeSDt_YLHZ#levertov #deniselevertov #poesía

"Having lost a sense of the sacred, the only thing we want is acquisitiveness—more of everything. How can we break this vicious cycle of avarice? It seems to me that the only way we can possibly reign this in on ourselves is some retrieval of the sense of the sacred, something beyond ourselves. And I think that relearning humility—realizing that a parasitic pathogen can spread across the globe and wreak havoc as it did—brings us to the question again of the sacred.Dare we speak of a God who is worthy of all our desire? That we as creatures might want with all of our heart, all of our mind, to contemplate. Should anything less deserve our desiring really? Clearly there's a hierarchy of desire, but what is our overarching desire? Can we gamble on reimagining the wonder of a capacious God of endless surprises?" (Micheal O'Siadhail, from the episode)About Micheal O'SiadhailMicheal O'Siadhail is an award-winning poet and author of many collections of poetry. His Collected Poems was published in 2013, One Crimson Thread in 2015 and The Five Quintets in 2018, which received Conference on Christianity and Literature Book of the Year 2018 and an Eric Hoffer Award in 2020. His latest works are Testament (2022) and Desire (2023). He holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Manitoba and Aberdeen. He lives in New York.Show NotesMicheal O'Siadhail, DesireRecitation: EpigraphUsing poetry as a means to record the COVID-19 PandemicUsing words to process emotionHuman desire for more; greedThe internet as a driving force for consumptionConsumerism feeding climate changeBreaking the cycle by retrieving the sacred“Bless” is not a word used easily in our cultureRecitation: Pest 12Gratitude within anxietyRecitation: Pest 20Stewarding the earthRecitation: Habitat 13What is worthy of our desire?The “stabilitas” of being where you areWanting acquisitiveness more than the sacredTruly being known versus being famousRecitation: Behind the Screen 17Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious GenerationRecitation: Behind the Screen 20The temptation towards certaintyRecitation: Behind the Screen 1Trusting the God of surprises“Dare we speak of a God who is worthy of all our desire?”Recitation: Desire 24 & 25“On Earth as it is in Heaven” as a dreamReordering and re-educating our desireUnity and Denise Levertov's concept of “One-ing”Production NotesThis podcast featured Micheal O'SiadhailEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, and Tim BergelandA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Luke 22:39-46[Jesus] came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives; and the disciples followed him. When he reached the place, he said to them, “Pray that you may not come into the time of trial.” Then he withdrew from them about a stone's throw, knelt down, and prayed, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done.” Then an angel from heaven appeared to him and gave him strength. In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground. When he got up from prayer, he came to the disciples and found them sleeping because of grief, and he said to them, “Why are you sleeping? Get up and pray that you may not come into the time of trial.” How many of you have had the good fortune of visiting Disney World or Disneyland? Whatever the case, Disney is the most magical place on earth, right? – especially if you're a child, but even for some of you grown-ups, too. I remember being skeptical and cynical and sort of a Scrooge about Disney the first time we took the boys when they were little, because I was doing the math… I was counting the cost… I was lamenting how much more or better or different we could be doing with all of that money, besides giving it to The Mouse. (And we have friends who work there, so we weren't even paying for all of the things!)But, we got there and I drank the Kool-Aid real quick. I bought it all hook-line-and-sinker, because the boys were excited and in awe and enamored by the rides and the fireworks, by Buzz and Woody, by Goofy and Mickey, and all the rest, coming to life, right before their very eyes. At one point, after dropping $27 dollars (or something similarly ridiculous) on a Buzz Light Year action figure/drink cup, probably with no more than 10 ounces of lemonade inside, I declared, “Walt Disney can have all of my money.” The boys were just having that much fun.Well, Disney works really hard at making their parks “the most magical places on earth.” Among so many ingeniously “imagineered” things, did you know that Disney has paint colors they've named “Go Away Green,” and “Bye Bye Blue?” They're the colors Disney uses to neutralize and “disappear” the unappealing, unattractive – but necessary – parts of any public space, like garbage cans, mechanical boxes, fences and partitions … even the utilitarian buildings you might see from the monorails and Skyliner gondola ride are hidden in plain sight with these cleverly camouflaged paint colors. And all of that is great, for fairy tales and child's play and a week's vacation in Never Neverland. But tonight – Ash Wednesday – is about precisely the opposite. It's about doing anything and everything BUT “disappearing” the unappealing, unattractive, ugly parts of our lives as people on the planet. Tonight is about laying them bear – the shame, the death, and the sin of it all. It's about calling it out, owning it, rubbing it into our foreheads for ourselves and others to see, and trusting that God will do God's thing with this dust and these ashes and the brokenness they represent – that God will forgive it, redeem it, wipe it off, wash it away, transform it into something other than the mere smudge and smut that stains us all.And I'd like to take this all a bit further – dig a bit deeper, maybe – this time around for our Lenten walk in the weeks ahead. If you read my newsletter article for February, you know I tried to get you all thinking about this plan long before tonight.Over the course of the last several months, I've been particularly moved by Anderson Cooper's All There Is podcast. He started it after the death of his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, a couple of years ago, when he began to take on the monumental, emotionally taxing, spiritually draining task of going through her things – and reliving his life and hers and theirs together – as the last living adult in his immediate family.For those of you who don't know, Anderson Cooper's father died when Anderson was just ten years old, and his older brother, Carter, died by suicide when he was 23, and Anderson was 21. Carter jumped from the 14th floor of their New York apartment while their mother watched.So, left with all of that history, tragedy, and sadness, Anderson was left to digest and deal with the grief he soon realized he'd never been taught or trained or equipped to do well. And he began to record his reflections about it all and to share conversations with others who'd traveled the road of grief and sorrow, too, so that he could learn from their experience and wisdom – and share it with whoever else might want to listen.I've been so moved by those conversations and inspired by the simple truth that grief is – or will be – the common ground we all share as human beings, that it felt like a holy calling and a faithful responsibility to do together, and for each other, however much we're able: the good work of teaching and learning and praying about and equipping one another to grieve well, I mean – or at least to broach the topic and engage the notion that that's possible, and a worthwhile endeavor, to grieve well – during this coming season of Lent.And in many ways, it should be nothing new. Like I've already said, it's so much a part of what brings us together on Ash Wednesday. And I think there's something about the common ground of grief that makes this service and our Good Friday worship every year, too, so compelling for so many of us. (More of us typically come together for those two worship experiences than all the Wednesdays in between. But I'm hoping to change that this time around.)Because it seems to me that – as hard as it can be – something about it all draws us to the ritual of and to the reflection on the grief that gathers us. So I'd like to do more of that, more deliberately in the weeks ahead. And while we don't always know or acknowledge or have language for it, our penchant for this is a great part of the human experience – and it would and should and could be, for us, a deep, meaningful, exercise of faith as children of God.In scripture, we read about Job, in the throes of relentless grief, repenting in dust and ashes. We know that, in Old Testament days, prophets and priests, kings and commoners, put on sackcloth and covered their heads with earth and dirt and dust and ashes, too. In the book of Judges, we read about the women of Israel who made an annual, public display of their grief over the murder of Jepthah's daughter – one of their own – so that the nation would never forget it. In Jeremiah, we read about the wailing of Rachel being heard in Ramah for God's children who were lost and banished into exile. And, of course we know of Jesus, weeping over Jerusalem, mourning the loss of his friend Lazarus, shedding tears as thick as blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, and crying from the cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” My point is, this is God's desire for us, believe it or not – to acknowledge, wrestle with, and experience the grief that finds us in this life. There's no such thing as – or at least not enough – “Go Away Green,” or “Bye Bye Blue” – or “Go Away Grief” or “Bye Bye Blues” as the case may be – when it comes to the sorrows of this world. It's hard and feels unholy and it can be unfair too much of the time. And our inclination can be to cover over it and pray it away and paint it into oblivion if we could – or sleep, and sleep-walk our way through it like the disciples in tonight's Gospel.But tonight … the ashes on our heads … these Lenten days that lie ahead … the cross of Christ that waits for us down the road … all of it is an invitation to see that grief and sorrow are part of life in the world, that no one escapes it, that none of us is immune from it, that not even the God we know in Jesus could shake it at every turn.And that's what this obnoxious wall is all about. Each week we'll bring something forward to this shrine of grief and sorrow. We will grieve those we've loved and lost on this side of Heaven. We will grieve the loss of and damage to creation. We will grieve our regrets, our missed opportunities, the generational sorrows of our people, God's children, the Church, and more. I suspect it will be hard and holy. I imagine it will beautiful and brutal, at times. And I pray it will be instructive and healing and unburdening and life-giving and hopeful, in the end, too.There's a poet named Denise Levertov who wrote this about grief: To speak of sorrow works upon it moves it from its crouched place barring the way to and from the soul's hall.That's what I hope we'll do with our grief in the days ahead. Speak of it, at the very least, so that it doesn't block our connection to God's greatest desire for us. Not deny or hide or run from it. Not keep quiet about the challenge it can be to our faith. Not feel bad or guilty for wishing it wasn't ours to bear.And I hope we'll trust what God can do with it … what God can do with us … if we will let our grief and sorrow be; if we feel it; if we learn to live with these ashes for more than just an evening, perhaps; more than just a season, even; as more than just a symbol, and as something God is always undoing, always making new, always redeeming, always raising from the dead … to new life … with love and full of hope, in Jesus' name.Amen

I'm Anita Lustrea and I'm privileged to be a spiritual director. Each time I begin a session, I use a quote or poem or prayer.  As I share one of these with you, see what might catch your attention. Maybe there's something here for you today. Today's poem is by... The post Poem/Prayer 34 Denise Levertov appeared first on Anita Lustrea.

An episode from 1/19/24: Tonight, I read a handful of poems about childhood. How does poetry capture our earliest memories, and how can it express the act of remembering itself, of nostalgia? The poems are: The Pennycandystore Beyond the El, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021) "Other echoes/Inhabit the garden," from Burnt Norton, by T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) Squarings #40, by Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) A Map of the Western Part of the County of Essex in England, by Denise Levertov (1923-1997) Those Winter Sundays, by Robert Hayden (1913-1980) Learning to Read, by Laurie Sheck (1953-) My Papa's Waltz, by Theodore Roethke (1908-1963) The Latin Lesson, by Eavan Boland (1944-2020) Fern Hill, by Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) The Leaving, by Brigit Pegeen Kelly (1951-2016) The Month of June: 13 1/2, by Sharon Olds (1942-) Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio, by James Wright (1927-1980) "I'm ceded" (#508), by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) Soap Suds, by Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/humanvoiceswakeus/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/humanvoiceswakeus/support

Join co-hosts Annie Liontas and Lito Velázquez in conversation with LitFriends Melissa Febos & Donika Kelly about their grand statements, big revelations, sentential seduction, queering forms, the power of vulnerability, and love poems. We're taking a break and will be back for our next episode with guests Yiyun Li & Edmund White on January 16,  2024. Happy Holidays, LitFam!   LINKS Libsyn Blog www.annieliontas.com www.litovelazquez.com www.melissafebos.com www.donikakelly.com LitFriends LinkTree LitFriends Insta LitFriends Facebook TRANSCRIPT Annie: (00:00) This episode is dedicated to Chuck, a dog we have loved, and Donika and Melissa's sweet pup.   Annie & Lito: Welcome to LitFriends! Hey Lit Friends!   Annie: Welcome to the show.    Lito: Today, we're speaking with memoirist Melissa Febos and poet Donika Kelly, lit friends in marriage,   Annie: About seduction, big boss feelings, and sliding into DMs.   Lito: So grab your bestie,   Annie & Lito: And get ready to fall in love!   Annie: What I love about Melissa Febos, and you can feel this across all four of her books, is how she declares herself free. There's no ambiguity to this. This is her story, not your telling of it, not your telling of her. I meet her on the page as someone who's in an act of rebellion or an act of defiance. And I was not really surprised but delighted to find that, when I read Donika Kelly, I had sort of the same reaction, same impression. And I'm wondering if that's true for you, and, Lito, what your understanding of vulnerability and its relationship to power is.   Lito: The power for me in these conversations, and the power that the authors that we speak with possess, seems to me, in the ways that they have found how they are completely unique from each other. And more so than in our other conversations, Donika and Melissa, their work is so different. And yet, as you've pointed out, the overlap, and the fire, the energy, the defiance, the fierceness is so present. And it was present in our conversation. And so inspiring.   Annie: Yeah. I'm thinking even about Melissa Febos has this Ted Talk. (01:54) Where she says "telling your secrets will set you free." And it feels that not only is that true, but it's also very much an act of self reclamation and strength, right? Where we might read it as an act of weakness. It's actually in fact, a harnessing of the self.   Lito: Right, it's not that Melissa has a need to confess. It's that she really uses writing to find the truth about herself and how she feels about something, which that could not differ more from my writing practice.   Annie: How so?   Lito: I find that I sort of, I write out of an emotion or a need to discover something, but I already sort of am aware of where I am and who I am before I start. I find the plot and the characters as I go, but I know sort of how I feel.   Annie: Yeah, I think for me, I do feel like writing is an act of discovery where maybe I put something on the page, it's the initial conception, or yeah, like you coming out of a feeling. But as I start to ask questions, right, for me, it's this process of inquiry. I excavate to something maybe a little more surprising or partially hidden or unknown to myself.   Lito: That's true. There is a discovery of, and I think you're, I think you've pointed to exactly what it is. It's the process of inquiry, and I think both of them, and obviously us, we're doing that similar thing. This is about writing, about this, this is about asking questions and writing through them.   Annie: Yeah, and Donika Kelly, we feel that in her work, her poetry over and over, even when they have the same recurring, I would say haunting images or artifacts. Each time she's turning it over and asking almost unbearable questions.   Lito: Right.   Annie: And we're joining her on the page because she is brave enough and has an iron will and says, no, I will not not look this in the eye.    Lito: That's the feeling exactly that I get from both of them is the courage, the bravura of the unflinching.   Annie: I think something that seemed to resonate with you was (03:58) how they talk about writing outside of publishing right? Yeah.   Lito: Yeah, I love I love that they talk about writing as a practice regardless, they're separated from The need to produce a work that's gonna sell in a commercial world in a capitalist society. It's more about the daily practice, and how that is a lifestyle and even what you said about the TED talk, that's just her. She's just talking about herself. Like that she's just telling an absolute truth that people don't typically talk about.   Annie: Right. And it's a conscious, active way to live inside one's life. It's a form of reflection, meditation, and rather than just moving through life, a way to make meaning of the experience.   Lito: I love that you use the word meditation because when you talk about meditation, you think of someone in a lotus position quietly being, but the meditations that both of them do, these are not quiet.   Annie: No. And of course we have to talk about how cute they are as married literary besties.   Lito: Oh my god, cute and like, they're hot for each other.   Annie: Oh my god.   Lito: It's palpable.   Annie: So palpable, sliding into DMs, chatting each other up over email.   Lito: They romanced each other, and I hope—no—I know they're gonna romance you, listener.   Annie: We'll be right back.   Lito: (05:40) Back to the show.   Annie: Melissa Febos is the author of four books, including the best-selling essay collection Girlhood, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was a Lambda finalist, and was named a notable book by NPR, Time Magazine, the Washington Post, and others. Her craft book Body Work is a national bestseller and an Indie's Next Pick. Her forthcoming novel The Dry Season is a work of mixed form nonfiction that explores celibacy as liberatory practice. Melissa lives in Iowa City with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly, and is a professor in the English department at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing.   Lito: Donika Kelly is the author of The Renunciations, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in poetry and Bestiary, the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston Wright Legacy Award for poetry, and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Donika has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Publishing Triangle Awards, the Lambda Literary Awards, and was long listed for the National Book Award. (06:00) Donika lives in Iowa City with her wife, the writer Melissa Febos, and is an assistant professor in the English department at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing.   Annie: Well, thank you for joining us for LitFriends to talk about the ultimate lit friendship. It does seem like you've won at the game of lit friends a little bit, having married your lit friend. I think of you both as writers who are in the constant act of subversion and resisting erasure. And that's the kind of work that Lito and I are drawn to, and that we're trying to do ourselves. And your work really shows us how to inhabit our bravest and most complex selves on the page. So we're really grateful for that.   Melissa: Thanks.   Annie: Yeah, of course. I mean, Donika, I think about poems of yours that my friends and I revisit constantly because we're haunted by them in the best way. They've taken residence inside of us. And you talk about what it means to have to do that work. And you've said, "to admit need and pain, desire and trauma and claim my humanity was often daunting. But the book demanded I claim my personhood."   And Melissa, I think you know how much your work means to me. I mean, as someone who is raised as a girl in this country and writing creative nonfiction, Body Work should not be as revelatory as it is. Yet what I see is that you're shaping an entire generation of nonfiction writers, many of them women. So, you know, also very grateful for that. And you've talked about that in Body Work. You've said "the risk of honest self-appraisal requires bravery to place our flawed selves in the context of this magnificent broken world is the opposite of narcissism, which is building a self-image that pleases you." So we'll talk more in a bit about courage and vulnerability and how you all do the impossible things you do, but let's dive into your lit friendship.   Melissa: Thank you, Annie, for that beautiful introduction.   Donika: Yeah, thank you so much. I'm excited to talk about our friendship.   Lito: We're so excited to have you here.   Melissa: Talk about our special friendship.   Annie: Very special friendship. Friendship with benefits.   Lito: So tell us about your lit friend, Melissa, tell us about Donika.   Melissa: (09:07) Tell us about her. Okay, she's fucking hilarious, like very, very funny and covers a broad spectrum of humor from like, there's a lot of like punning that goes on in our house, a lot of like silly wordplay, bathroom humor, and then like high level, like, literary academic sort of witticism that's also making fun of itself a lot. And we've sort of operated in all of those registers since like the day we met.   She is my favorite poet. There's like those artists that whose work you really appreciate, right? Sometimes because it's so different from your own. And then there are those artists whose work registers in like a very deep sort of recognition where they feel like creative kin, right? And that has always been my experience of Donika's work. That there is a kind of creative intelligence and emotionality that just feels like so profoundly familiar to me and was before I knew anything about her as a human being.   Okay, we also like almost all the same candy and have extremely opposite work habits. She's very hot. She only likes to watch like TVs and movies that she's seen many times before, which is both like very comforting and very annoying.   Lito: Well, I'm gonna have to follow that up now. What are some of the top hits?   Melissa: Oh, for sure, Golden Girls is at the very top. I mean…   Annie: No one's mad at that.   Lito: We can do the interview right now. Perfect. All we need to know. A++!   Melissa: She's probably like 50% of the time that she's sleeping, she falls asleep to the soundtrack of the Golden Girls or Xena, maybe. But we've also watched the more recent James Bond franchise, The Matrices, (11:00) and Mission Impossible, never franchises I ever thought I would watch once, let alone multiple times at some point.   Annie: I mean, Donika, your queerness is showing with that list.   Lito: Yeah.   Donika: I feel seen. I feel represented accurately by that list. She's not wrong. She's not wrong at all. But I've also introduced to her the pleasure of revisiting work.   Melissa: That's right.   Donika: And that was not a thing that Melissa was doing before we met, which feels confusing to me. Because I am a person who really likes to revisit. She was buying more books when we met, and now she uses the library more, and that feels like really exciting. That feels like a triumph on my part. I'm like…   Annie: That is a victory. Yeah.   Donika: …with the public services.   Melissa; Both of these examples really allude to like this deep, fundamental sort of capitalistic set of habits that I have, where I… like there's like this weird implicit desire to try to read as many books as possible before I perish, and also to hoard them, I guess. And I'm very happy to have been influenced out of that.   Annie: Well it's hard not to think—I think about that tweet like once a week that's like you have an imaginary bookshelf, and there are a limited amount of books on that you can read before you die, and that like troubles me every day.   Melissa: Yeah it's so fucked up. (12:22) I don't want that. It's already in my head. I feel like I was born with that in my head, and I'm trying to get free.   Lito: Same. Serious book FOMO, like…   Donika: There are so many books y'all.   Lito: I know. It's not possible.   Donika: And, it's like, there are more and more every year.   Annie: Well, uh Donika tell us about Melissa.   Donika: Oh Melissa As she has already explained we have a lot of fun It's a funny household. She's hilarious. Um, and also she's a writer of great integrity, which you know I'm sitting on the couch reading Nora Roberts, and she's like in her office hammering away at essays, and I don't know what's going on in there. I'm very nosy. I'm a deeply nosy person. Like, I just I want to know like what's going on. I want to know the whole history, and it's really amazing to be with someone who is like here it is.   Annie: How did you all meet?   Donika: (13:20) mere moments after Trump was elected in 2016. I was in great despair. I was living in Western New York. I was teaching at a small Catholic university. Western New York is very conservative. It's very red. And I was in this place and I was like, this place is not my place. This place is not for me. And I was feeling very alone. And Melissa had written an essay that came out shortly after about teaching creative writing at a private institution in a red county. And I was like, oh, she gets it, she understands.   I started, I just like looked for everything. I looked for like everything that she had written. I read it, I watched the TED talk. I don't know if y'all know about the TED talk. There was a TED talk. I watched the TED talk. I was like, she's cute. I read Whip Smart. I followed her on Twitter. I developed a crush, and I did nothing else. So this is where I pass the baton. So I did all of that.   Melissa: I loved Bestiaries, and I love the cover. The cover of her book is from this medieval bestiary. And so I just bought it, and I read it. And I just had that experience that I described before where I was just like, "Oh, fuck. Like this writer and I have something very deep in common." And I wrote her. I DMed her on Twitter.   Sometimes I obscure this part of the story because I want it to appear like I sent her a letter by raven or something. But actually, I slid into her DMs, and I just was like, "hey, I loved your book. If you ever come to New York and want help setting up a reading, like I curate lots of events, da da da." And I put my email in. And not five minutes later, refreshed my Gmail inbox, and there was an email from Donika, and…   Donika: I was like, "Hi. Hello. It's me."   Annie: So you agree with this timeline, Donika, right? Like, it was within five minutes.   Donika: Yeah, it was very fast. And I think if I hadn't read everything that I could get my hands on that Melissa had written, I may have been a little bit slower off the mark. It wasn't romantic. Like the connection, I wasn't like, oh, this is someone who like I want to (15:41) strike up a romantic relationship with, it really was the work. Like I just respected the work so much.   I mean, I did have a crush, like that was real, but I have crushes on lots of people, like that sort of flows in and out, but that often is a signifier of like, oh, this person will be my friend. And I was still married at the time and trying to figure out, like that relationship was ending. It was coming to a quick close that felt slow. Like it was dragging a little bit for lots of reasons.   But then once it was clear to me that I was getting divorced, Melissa and I continued writing to each other like for the next few months. Yeah. And then I was like, oh, I'm getting divorced. I was like, I'm getting divorced. And then suddenly the emails were very different. From both of us. It wasn't different.   Melissa: There had been no romantic strategy or intent, you know, and I think which, which was a really great way to, we really started from a friendship.   Annie: And sounds like a courtship really. I mean, it kind of is an old fashion.   Melissa: Yeah, in some way, it became that. I think it became that. But I think it was, I mean, the best kind of courtship begins as a, as a friendly courtship, you know what I mean? Where it was about sort of mutual artistic respect and curiosity and just interest. And it wasn't defined yet, like, what sort of mood that interest would take for a while, you know?   Lito: So how do you seduce each other on and off the page?   Donika: That's a great question.   Melissa: That is a great question.   Donika: I am not good at seduction. So that is not a skill set that is available to me. It has never been available.   Lito: I do not believe that.   Annie: I know. I'm also in disbelief out here, really.   Melissa: No one believes it, but she insists.   Annie: I feel like that's part of the game, is my feeling, but it is not.   Melissa: It's not. Here's the thing I will say is that like Donika, I've thought a lot about this and we've talked a lot about this because I balked at that statement as well. It's like Donika is seductive. Like there are qualities about her that are very seductive, but she does not seduce people. You know what I mean? Like she doesn't like turn on the charisma and shine it at you like a hypnotist. Like that's not… (18:08) that's not her form of seduction, but I will say…   I can answer that question in terms of like, I think in terms of the work, since we've been talking about that, like in a literary way, both in her own work, like the quality, like just someone who's really good at what they do is fucking sexy, you know? Like when I was looking for like a little passage before this interview, I was just like, "ah, this is so good." Like it's so attractive when someone is really, really good at their craft. right? Especially when it's a crop that you share.   Donika: So Melissa does have the ability to turn on what she has written about, which I think is really funny. Like she like she has like, she has a very strong gaze. It's very potent. And one of my gifts is to disrupt that and be like, what are you doing with your eyes? And so like, when I think about that in the work, when I'm reading her work, and I'm in like its deepest thrall, it is that intensity of focus that really like pulls me in and keeps me in. She's so good at making a grand statement.   Melissa: I was just gonna bring that up.   Donika: Oh, I think she and I like often get to, we arrive at sort of similar places, but she gets there from the grand statement, and I get there from the granular statement, like it's a very narrow sort of path. And then Melissa's like, "every love is a destroyer." I was like, whoa, every one? And there's something really compelling about that mode of— because it's earnest, and it's backed up by the work that she's written. I would never think to say that.   Melissa: I have a question for you, lit friend. Do you think you would be less into me if I weren't? Because I think for a nonfiction writer, I'm pretty obsessed with sentences. It's writing sentences that makes, that's the thing I love most about writing. It's like where the pleasure is for me. So I'm a pretty poetically inclined nonfiction writer. If I were less so, do you think that would be less seductive to you as a reader or a lit friend?   Donika: I mean, that's like asking me to imagine like, "so, what if… (20:30) water wasn't wet?" I just like, I can't like, I can't imagine. I do think the pleasure of the sentence is so intrinsic to like, I think there's something in the, in your impulse at the sentence level. That means that you're just careful. You're not rushing. You're not rushing us through an experience or keeping us in there and focused. And it's just it's tricky to imagine, or almost impossible to imagine what your work would look like if that weren't the impulse.   Lito: Yeah, I think that's an essential part of your style in some ways, that you're taking that time.   Melissa: Mm-hmm.    Annie: And how you see the world. Like I don't even think you would get to those big revelations Donika's talking about without it.   Melissa: Yeah. Right. I don't, yeah, I don't think I would either. We'll be right back.   Lito (21:19) Hey Lit Fam, Lit Friends is taking a break for the holiday. We hope you'll join us for our next episode with our guests, Ian Lee and Edmund White on January 16th. Till then, may your holiday be lit, your presents be numerous, and your 2024 be filled with joy and peace. If you'd like to show us some love, please take a moment now to follow, subscribe, rate, and review the LitFriends Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Just a few moments of your time will help us so much. Big hugs to you and yours. Thank you for listening. And thank you for making season one a big success!   Annie: (22:05) Welcome back.   Lito: I've noticed that both of you, you know, you have your genres that you work in, but within that you're experimenting a lot with form and structure. Does anything of that come from being queer? I guess it's a question about queering forms of literature, and what that has to do also with the kinds of friendships that queer people have, and if that's different, maybe. So I guess I'm asking to connect form with queerness and friendship.   Melissa: That's a beautiful question. I think, and I'm starting with thinking about my relationship to form, which has been one of inheriting some scripts for forms. This is what an essay should look like. This is what plot structure looks like. This is how you construct a narrative. And sort of taking those for granted a little bit, and then pretty early on, understanding the limitations of those structures and the ways that they require that I contort myself and my content such that it feels like a perversion or betrayal of sort of what I'm dealing with, right? And so the way I characterize my trajectory, the trajectory of my relationship to form has been sort of becoming conscious of those inherited forms, and then pushing the boundaries of them and modifying them and distorting them and adding things to them and figuring out, letting my work sort of teach me what form it rests most easily in and is most transparent in. And I suspect that my relationship to friendship and particularly queer friendship mimics that.   Donika: Yeah, that sounds right to me. And I'm reminded of Denise Levertov has this essay titled "On the Function of the Line." And in it, she presents an argument that closed forms, received forms, are based on a kind of assumption of resolution, and that free verse or open design, like in a poem, it shows evidence of the speaker's thinking.   (24:24) Right? So that where the line breaks, the speaker is pausing, right? To gather their thoughts or like a turn might happen that's unexpected that mimics the turns in thinking. And I really love that essay. Like that essay is one of my favorites. So when I think about my approach to form, I'm like, what is the shape that this poem is asking for? What is the shape that will do, that will help the poem do its best work? And not even like to be good, but just like to be true.   I really love the sonnet shape. Like it's one of my favorite shapes. And it's so interesting and exciting to use a shape that is based on like argumentative structure or a sense of resolution, to explore. Like to use that as an exploratory space, it feels like queering our, like my expectations of what the sonnet does. Like there's something about the box. If I bounce around inside that box, there's gonna be something that comes out of that, that I wouldn't necessarily have gotten otherwise, but it's not resolution. Like the point is not resolution.   And when I think about my relationships and my chosen family, in particular, and to some degree actually my given family, part of what I'm thinking about is how can I show up and care and what does care look like in this relationship and how can I make room to be cared for? And that's so hard, like being cared for is so much more alien to me than, like, as a concept, like I feel like very anxious about it. I'm like, "am I asking for too much?" And like over and over again, my chosen family is like, "no, it's not too much. Like we, we got each other."   Melissa: I think particularly for queer people, we understand that it doesn't preclude romance or healthy kinds of dependency or unhealthy kinds of dependency, you know, that all of the things that happen in a very deep love relationship happen inside of friendship, where I think sort of like straight people and dominant culture have been like, "oh, no, like friendship isn't the site of like great romance or painful divorce or abuse." And queer people understand that all of those things happen within relationships that we call friendships.   Annie: (26:46) Yeah, I mean, I'm hearing you both talk about kind of queer survival and joy and even, Donika, what you were saying about having to adjust to being cared for as a kind of, you know, that's a sort of, to me, it's a sort of like a survivor's stance in the world. One of the things that I love about my kinship with Lito as, you know, my queer lit friend and, you know, brother from another mother is that he holds that space for me and I, you know, vice versa.   Even thinking about vulnerability, I think you both wield vulnerability as a tool of subversion too, right? And again, Lito and I are both creating projects right now that require a kind of rawness on the page. I'm about to publish a memoir called Sex with a Brain Injury, so I'm very consciously thinking about how we define vulnerability, what kind of work it does to reshape consciousness in the collective. And the ways that you each write about trauma helps us understand it as an act of reclamation, you know, power rather than powerlessness. So maybe you could talk a little bit about what is or what can be transformative about the confessional and maybe even more to the point, what does your lit friend teach you about vulnerability?   Melissa: (28:06) Oh, God, what doesn't she teach me about vulnerability? It's interesting because like you're correct that vulnerability is like very central to my work and to the like lifelong project of my work, and also like there's literally nothing on earth I would like to avoid more. And I don't think that is visible in my work, right? Because my work is the product of counteracting that set of instincts, which I must do to survive because the part of me that wants to avoid vulnerability, its end point is like literally death for me.   It is writing for me often starts from like kind of a pragmatic practice. I don't start like feeling my feelings. I write to get to my feelings and sometimes that doesn't happen until like after a book is published sometimes. You know like it's really interesting lately I've been confronting some feelings in like a really deep way that I think I have gotten access to from writing Girlhood, which came out in 2021. And it's like I had to sort of lay it all out, understand what happened, redefine my role in it and everyone else's. And I definitely had feelings while I was writing it. But like the feelings that Donika refers to as the big boss, like the deepest feelings about it. Like I, I feel like I'm only really getting. to it now.   My relationship to vulnerability, it's just like, it's a longitudinal process, you know? And there's no one who's taught me about that and how to be sort of like gentle and patient within that and to show up for it than Donika.   And I'm just thinking of like, you know, starting from pretty early in our relationship, she was working on the poems in The Renunciations, and over the years of our early, the early years of our relationship, she was confronting some childhood, some really profound childhood trauma. And she was doing that in therapy. And then there were like pieces of that work that she had to do in the poems. And I just watched her not force it. And when it was time, she like created the space to do the work. And like, I wasn't (30:35) there for that. I don't think anyone else really could have been there for that. And just like showing up for that work.   And then like the long tail of like publishing a book and having conversations with people and the way that it changes one's relationship and like the act of the vulnerability—achieved feels like the wrong word—but the vulnerability like expressed or found in the writing process, how that is just like a series of doorways and a hallway that maybe it never terminates. Maybe it doesn't even turn into death. I don't know. You know, but I've just seen her show up for that process with like a patience and a tenderness for herself at every age that I find incredibly challenging. And it's been super instructive for me.   Donika: Ooh. I, I'm, it makes me really happy to know that's your experience of like being like in like shared artistic space together. I think I go to poetry to understand, to help myself understand what it is that I'm holding and what it is that I wanna put down. Like that's what the poems are for. You know, like the act of writing helps me sort out what I need and what I wanna put down because narrative is so powerful. It feels like the one place where I can say things that are really hard, often because I've already said them in therapy.   Right? So then it's like, I can then explore what having said those hard things means in my life or how it sits in my life. And what Melissa shows me is that one can revise. I know I've said this like a few times, but that one can have a narrative. Like I think about reading Whipsmart and the story that she has about herself as a child in Whipsmart, and then how that begins to change a bit in Abandon Me. And then in Girlhood, it's really disrupted. And there is so much more tenderness there, I think. It looks really hard. Like, honestly, that joint looks hard because I might be in a poem, but I'm in it for like, like we're in it, like if I were to read it out loud for like a minute and a half.   Melissa: (33:50) It's interesting hearing you talk. I wonder if this is true. I think I'm hearing that it is true. And I think that's where it's with my experience that you often get to the feelings like in therapy or wherever, and then write the poems as more of a sort of emotional, but like also cognitive and kind of systemic and like a way of like making sense of it or putting it in context. And I think very much I, there'll be like deeply submerged feelings that emerge only as like impulses or something, you know, but I experience writing— I don't that often feel intense emotion while I'm writing. I think it's why that is writing is almost always the first place that I encounter my own vulnerability or that I say the like unspeakable thing or the thing that I have been unable to say. I often write it and then I can talk to my therapist about it or then I can talk to Donika about it.   And I think I can't. I'm too afraid or it feels like too much to feel the feelings while I'm writing. So I sort of experience it as a cognitive or like intellectual and creative exercise. And then once I understand it, sometime in the next five years, I feel the feelings.   Annie: Do you feel like it's a kind of talking to yourself or like talking outside of the world? Like what is it in that space that does that for you?   Melissa: Yeah, I do. I mean, it's like. Talking outside the world makes more sense to me than talking to myself. I mean, it is talking to myself, right? It's a conversation with myself, but it's removed from the context of me in my daily life. That's why it's possible. Within my daily life, I'm too connected to other people and my own internal pressures and just like the busy, superficial part of me that's like driving a lot of my days. I have to get away from her in order to do that work.   And so the writing really happens in a kind of separate space and feels like it is not, it has a kind of privacy that I don't experience in any other way in my life, where I really have built or found a space where I am never thinking about what other people think of me, and I'm not imagining a skeptical reader. (35:18) It is really like this weird spiritual, emotional, creative, intellectual space that is just separate from all of that, where I can sort of think and be curious freely.   And I think I created that space or found it really early on because I was, even as a kid, I was a person who was like so concerned with the people around me, with the adults around me, with what performances were expected of me. And being a person who was like very deeply thinking and feeling, I was like, well, there's no room for that here. So I need to like find somewhere else to do it. And so I think writing became that for me way before I thought about being a writer.   Lito: That's so fascinating to me. I think that's so different than how I work or Donika works or a lot of people I know. We'll be right back.   Lito: (36:26) Back to the show.   So this question is for both of you really, but it just makes me wonder then like, what is the role for emotion, but in particular anger? How does that like, when things get us angry, sometimes that motivates us to do something, right? So if you're not being inspired by an emotion to write, you're writing and then finding it, how does anger work as not only a tool for survival, but maybe a path towards personhood and freedom?   Donika: Oh, I was just thinking, I can't write out of that space, the space of anger. It took me a long time to get in touch with anger as a feeling. That took a really long time because in my family, in my given family, the way that people expressed anger was so dangerous that I felt that I didn't want to occupy those spaces. I didn't want to move emotionally into that, into that space if that was what it looked like. And it took me a long time to figure out how to be angry. And I'm still not sure that I'm great at it. Because I think often I'm moving quickly to like what's under that feeling. And often what's under my feelings of being angry, often, not always, is being hurt, feeling hurt. And I can… write into exploring what that hurt is, because I know how to do that with some tenderness and some care.   Melissa: I feel similarly, which is interesting, because we've never talked about this, I don't think. But anger is also a feeling that I think, for very different reasons, when I was growing up… I mean, I think just like baseline being socialized as a girl dissuaded me from expressing anger or even from feeling it, because where would that go?   But I also think in the particular environment that I was in, I understood pretty early that my expressions of anger would be like highly injurious to the people around me and that it would be better if I found another way to express those things. I think my compulsive inclinations have been really useful in that way. And it's taken me a lot of my adult life to sort of… (38:44) take my anger or as Donika said, you know, like anger for me almost always factors down to something that is largely powerlessness, you know, to sort of not take the terror and fury of powerlessness and express it through like ultimately self harming means.   Writing can be a way for me to arrive at like justifiable anger and to sort of feel that and let that move through me or to be like, oh, that was unjust. I was powerless in that situation. You know? Yeah, it has helped me in that way. But like, if I'm really being honest, I think I exhaust myself with exercise. And that's how I mostly deal with my feelings of anger.   Annie: Girl.   Melissa: Yeah, there's also a way I will say that like, I do think it actually comes out in my work in some ways. Like there is like a very direct, not people-pleasing vibe and tone in my work that is genuine, but that I almost never have in my life. Like maybe a little bit as a professor, but like    When Donika met me, she was like, "Oh… like you're just like this little gremlin puppy person. You're not like this intense convicted former dominatrix." You know, which is, I express it in my writing because it is a space where I'm not worried about placating or pleasing really. It's a space where I'm, I am almost solely interested in what I actually think.   Donika: I was just thinking about like the beginning of, I think it's "Wild America," when you talk about like not cleaning your room, Melissa. Because you didn't, like when you were a kid, right? It was like you cleaned your room when you wanted to appear good, but that didn't matter to you when you were alone in your room. Like you could get lost in a book or you could, you know, like just be inside yourself alone when you were alone in your room. And that's one of my favorite passages that you read. Like I'm always sort of like mouthing along, like it's a song.   Melissa: (40:57) I'm just interested and I really love the sort of conception of like a girl's room as a potential space that sort of maps on to the way I described the writing space where it's just like a space where other, where the gaze of others, or the gaze that we're taught to please like can be kept out to some extent. And just like, you know, that isn't true, obviously for like lots and lots and lots of girls, but just that there is an impetus for us to create or invent or designate a space where that is true.   Lito: Yeah, I think that's what she's up to in "A Room of One's Own."   Annie: It makes me think of like girls' rooms as like kind of also these reductive spaces, like they all have to have pink or whatever, but then you like carve out a secret space for yourself in that room, which I think is what you're talking about with your writing.   Donika: Oh, I was just thinking about what happens when you don't have a room like that, cause I didn't, like I absolutely did not have a room that was… inviolable in some way or that like really felt like I could close the door. But writing became a place where that work could happen and where those explorations could happen and where I could do whatever I want and I had control over so many aspects of the work. And I hesitated because I was saying I didn't have that much control over the content.   Like I might think, oh, I'm gonna write a poem about this or a poem about that. And as is true with most writing, the poems are so much smarter and reveal so much more than I might have intended, but I could like shape the box. There are just like so many places to have control in a poem, like there's so many mechanisms to consider where like when Melissa was first sharing like early work with me, I would get so nervous because I would wanna move a comma.   Because in a poem, like that's a big deal, moving somebody's commas around, changing the punctuation. And she was like, "it doesn't matter."   Melissa: I would get nervous because she would be like, "well, I just have one note, but it's like, kind of big." And I would be like, "oh, fuck, I failed." And she would be like,    Donika: "What's going on with these semicolons?"   Melissa: She'd be like, "I just, these semicolons."   Annie: You know, hearing you both talk about (43:20) how you show up for one another as readers, right? In addition to like romantic partners. I mean, we do have the sense, and this can be true of all marriages, queer or otherwise, where like we as readers have a pretty superficial understanding of what you kind of each bring to the table or how you create this protective space or really see one another. I imagine that you've saved yourselves, but I'm curious about to what extent this relationship may have also been a way to save you or subvert relationships that have come before. And yet at the same time, we've asked this question of other lit friends too, which is, you know, what about competition between lit friends? And what does that look like in a marriage? What is a good day versus a bad day?   Donika: I mean, we could be here for years talking about that first question. And so I'm gonna turn to the second part to talk about competition, which is much easier to handle.   I feel genuinely and earnestly so excited at the recognition that Melissa has received. Part of what was really exciting for me about the beginning of our relationship that continues to be exciting is that, is getting to watch someone be truly mid-career and navigate that with integrity. It feels like such a good model, for how to be a writer.   I mean, she's much more forward-facing than I would ever want to be. But I think in terms of just thinking about like, what is the work? How, like, where is the integrity? Like, it's just, it's always so, so forward and it feels really grounding for me and us in the house, so it's always big cheers in here. It helps that we write in different genres. I think that's super helpful.   Melissa: I think it's absolutely key. Yeah.   Donika: It's not, I mean, I think, and that we have very different measures of ambition. I think those two things together are really, really helpful.   But I've read everything that Melissa has written, I think. (45:38) There might be like a few little, I mean, I've read short story, like that short, there was like a short story from like shortly, I think after you, like before you were in your MFA program, maybe.   Melissa: Oh my God. What short story?   Donika: I can't, I'll find it. And show it to you later.   Melissa: Is it about that little plant?   Donika: No, no, it might've been an essay. I'm not sure.   Annie: I love this. This is sort of hot breaking news on LitFriends.   Donika: It's like, I've just like, I did a deep Google dive. I was like, I want to read everything and it's, it feels really exciting.   Melissa: You know, I've dated writers before, and it was a different situation. And I think even if I hadn't, even before I ever did, I thought, that seems unlikely to work. Because even though there are lots of like obvious ways that it could be great, the competition just seemed like such a poison dart that it would be really hard to avoid because writers are competitive, and I'm competitive. And maybe it would have been harder if we were younger or something.   And certainly if we were in the same genre, I think actually, who knows? Maybe it would be possible if we were in the same genre, but it would require a little more care. Even if for some reason we would never publish again, we would keep writing. It just like it functions in our lives in similar ways. And it's like a practice that we came to, you know, I have a more hungry ambition or have historically. And I think our relationship is something that helps me keep the practice at the center because we're constantly talking about it. And I'm constantly observing Donika's relationship to her work. So it really hasn't felt very relevant. Like it's kind of shocking to me how, how little impact competition or comparing has in our relationship. It's really like not even close to one of the top notes of things that might create conflict for us, you know, and I'm so grateful for that. And so happy to have like underestimated what's possible when you have a certain level of intimacy and respect and sort of compatibility with someone.   Lito: We'll be right back.   Annie: (47:57) Welcome back. Well, then I'm wondering, you know, you both have had some like incredible successes in the last few years. And I'm wondering if conversely, you've been able to show up for one another in moments of high pressure or exposure, or, you know, having to confront the world, having been vulnerable on the page in the ways you have been.   Melissa: Donika was not planning on having a book launch for The Renunciations.   Donika: What's a book launch? Like, why do people do that?   Annie: Listen, mine's going to be a dance party, Donika. So…   Melissa: And I made, meanwhile, like when I published Abandon Me, I had a giant dance party that I had like several costume changes for during. But I remember feeling pretty confident about making a strong case multiple times for her to have a book launch for The Renunciations. And also like having a lot of respect and like tenderness watching her navigate what it meant to take work that vulnerable and figure out how to like speak for it and talk about it and like present it to the world. Parts of her would have preferred to just let the book completely speak for itself out there.    Donika: But you were right it was a good time.   Melissa: I was right.   Donika: Because like when Melissa's so when Girlhood came out it was like, that was still the time of like so many virtual events. And it was just like, I think that first week there was like something every day that week, like there was an event every day that week. And now, now like, again, I had to be talked into having a book launch. So I own this. Um, but I was like, Ooh, why, why would you do that? Oh, yeah. Four?   Melissa: This is definitely one of the ways that she and I are like diametrically opposed, and therefore I think, helpful to each other in sort of like creating a kind of tension that can be uncomfortable but is mostly good for both of us to be sort of pulled closer to the middle.   Donika: But my favorite part of that is then hearing you give advice to your friends who are very similar and be like, "whoa, you did too much. You put too many things on the calendar."     Melissa: (50:15) You know, some people would say that that's hypocrisy, but I actually think, I have a real dubious like position and thinking about hypocrisy because I am an expert in overdoing things. And so I think I speak from, I am like the voice of Christmas future. You know what I mean? I'm like, let me speak to you from the potential future that you are currently planning with your publicist. And like, it's not pretty and it doesn't feel good. And it's not, it has not delivered the feeling that you're imagining when you're scheduling all those events.   Annie: I can appreciate this. And I appreciate Donika's kind of role, this particular role in a relationship, because sometimes I just have to go see Leto and literally just lay on Lito and be like, stop me from doing anymore.   Melissa: I know, I know.   Lito: You and Sara are like super overachievers. I have to be like, "can you calm down?"   Annie: We do too much.   Lito: Way too much. What would you like to see your lit friend make or create next?   Donika: I got two answers to this. The first one is the Cape Cod lesbian mystery. I'm ready. You know, we got, I've offered so much assistance as a person who will never write prose. Um, but I got notes and ideas. The second one is, uh, a micro essay collection titled Dogs I Have Loved. Cause I think it would be a New York Times bestseller.   Lito: Oh, I love that.   Donika: I know.   Lito: Speaking of, who's the little gremlin puppy there?   Donika: Oh, yeah, that's Chuck. Chuck is a 15-year-old chihuahua. I've had him since he was a puppy.   Annie: Is Chuck like a nickname, or is that just, it's just Chuck?   Donika: It's just Chuck.   Lito: I love that.   Melissa: His nickname is Charles sometimes. One of his nicknames is Charles, but his full name is Chuck.   Melissa: OK, so I would say, I mean, my first thought at this question was like, I want Donika to keep doing exactly what she's been doing? As far as I can tell, she doesn't have a lot of other voices getting in the way of that process. My second thought is that I'm really interested. I've never heard her talk. She has no interest in writing prose of any kind. She is like deeply wedded to poetry. But I have heard her talk more recently about potential collaborations with (52:40) other artists, visual artists and other writers. And I would, I'm really excited to see what comes out of that space.   Lito: Would you all ever collaborate beyond your marriage?   Annie: I could see you all doing a craft book together.   Melissa: I feel like we could make like a chapbook that had prose and poems in it that were responding to a shared theme. I could definitely see that.   Donika: I really thought you were gonna say Love Poems for Melissa Febos, that's what you wanted to see next.   Melissa: I mean, I already know that that's on deck, so I don't... I mean, it's in, it's on the docket. It's on deck. Yeah. So…   Lito: Those sonnets, get to work on the sonnets.   Donika: Such a mess.   Melissa: This is real, you think, this is not, like, a conversation of the moment. This is…   Annie: Oh no, we can, this is history.   Donika: "Where's my century of sonnets?" she says.   Lito (53:33) What is your first memory?   Donika: Dancing?   Melissa: Donika telling me I'm pretty.   Annie (54:15.594) Who or what broke your heart first?   Melissa: Maddie, our dog.   Donika: Kerri Strug, 1996 Olympics. Vault.   Lito: Atlanta.   Donika: The Vault final. Yeah. Heartbreaking.   Lito: Who would you want to be lit friends with from any time in history, living or dead?   Donika: I just thought Gwendolyn Brooks. I'm gonna go with that.   Lito: I love Gwendolyn Brooks.   Donika: Oh yeah.   Melissa: My first thought is Baldwin.   Donika: It's a great party. We're at a great party.   Melissa: I just feel like I would be like, "No, James!" all the time.   Melissa: (54:30) Or like Truman Capote.   Lito: It'd be wild.   Donika: Messy. So messy.   Annie: What's your favorite piece of music?   Melissa: Oh my god, these questions are crazy! "Hallelujah"?   Donika: Oh god, there's an aria from Diana Damraus' first CD. She's a Soprano. And it's a Mozart aria, and I don't know where it's from, and I can't tell you the name because it's in Italian and I don't speak Italian, but that joint is exceptional. So that's what I'm gonna go with. Oh God, just crying in the car.   Lito: If you could give any gift to your lit friend without limitations, what would you give them?   Donika: Just like gold chains. So many gold chains. Yeah! If I could have a gold chain budget, it'd be a lot.   Annie: (55:23) Donika, we can do this.   Lito: Achievable.   Donika: I mean, yeah. Yeah.   Lito: Bling budget.   Donika: That's the first thing I thought.   Annie: Love it.   Donika: Just like gold, just thin gold chains, thick gold chains.   Melissa: I'm going to go with that, then, and say an infinite sneaker budget.   Lito: Yes. Oh, I want a shoe room. (55:50) That'd be awesome.   Melissa: We need two shoe rooms in this house, or like one. Or we just need to have a whole living room that's just for shoes.   Donika: I just like there's just like one closet that's just like for shoes. Like that's what we need.   Lito: That's great.   Donika: Yeah, but it's actually a room. Yes. With like a sorting system, it's like computer coded.   Annie: Soft lighting. That's our show.   Annie & Lito: Thanks for listening.   Lito: We'll be back next week with our guests Yiyun Li and Edmund White.   Annie: Find us on all your socials @LitFriendsPodcast.   Lito: Don't forget to reach out and tell us about the love affair of you and your LitFriend.   Annie: I'm Annie Liontas.   Lito: And I'm Lito Velázquez. Thank you to our production squad. Our show is edited by Justin Hamilton.   Annie: Our logo was designed by Sam Schlenker.   Lito: Lizette Saldana is our marketing director.   Annie: Our theme song was written and produced by Robert Maresca.   Lito: And special thanks to our show producer, Toula Nuñez.   Annie: This was LitFriends, Episode Three.    

Shaun Griffin is a poet and writer who hopes to bring some part of that world to you every other week on KWNK with a new audio segment on Sundays at 5pm. The following program is partly funded by a grant from Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Today's poem is by Priscilla Denise Levertov (24 October 1923 – 20 December 1997), a British-born naturalised American poet.[3] She was a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. Levertov wrote and published 24 books of poetry, and also criticism and translations. She also edited several anthologies. Among her many awards and honours, she received the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Frost Medal, the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Lannan Award, a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.—Bio via Wikipedia This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

To say that this week's podcast is going to take us on a journey would be an understatement. Join us as we go bravely into the desert and into this remarkable poem - it will move you.

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This April's issue of Poetry celebrates the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize recipients. In previous years, one poet was awarded the prize. This year, in honor of the 110th anniversary of the magazine, eleven poets were selected—a nod to the eleven decades of the magazine's existence. This week, we hear from one of these winners, someone who's been illuminating a way forward for poetry for over fifty years: Arthur Sze. Sze is a poet, a translator, and an editor. He's authored eleven books of poetry, most recently The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems out from Copper Canyon Press. We asked his friend, Pulitzer Prize winning writer Forrest Gander, to speak with Sze for this episode of the podcast. Sze shares the story of how he became a poet, which included encouragement from poets and teachers Denise Levertov and Josephine Miles, and the two recall how their friendship started through publication. Not surprisingly, they also lead us into the cosmos. Sze introduces the ancient Sanskrit idea of Indra's net: Everything that happens in the cosmos is like a crystal. If you imagine the cosmos as an immense chandelier and shine light into it, each hanging jewel reflects and absorbs the light of every other. “That's one of the things poetry does,” Sze says. “We're not writing in competition—we're all trying to create poems, and they're all shining light on each other.

In the summer of 2022, research assistants Don Shipton and Teddie Brock took part in a roundtable discussion that explored the archival work of student researchers involved with the audio archives of Canadian poet, Fred Wah. Alongside his literary and academic work, Wah has had a longstanding practice of recording poetry readings, lectures, and conversations, documenting key moments in North American poetry.This sonic-archival meditation highlights the impact of recording technology on the trajectory of poetic circulation and composition, as it brings together the ‘many voices' that constituted Wah's listening and recording practices as a young poet. The first part of this episode will revisit a recording of Wah's conversation with Deanna Fong, co-director of the Fred Wah Digital Archive, in which Wah reflects on the significance of portable tape recording to literary community-building and the development of a poetic ‘voice.' The episode will also present a selection of archival clips documenting the poets whose recorded voices Wah encountered throughout the 1960s, including Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, Denise Levertov, and Ed Dorn, among others.Special thanks to Kate Moffatt and Miranda Eastwood for their production support in the making of this episode, and to Simon Fraser University's Special Collections and Rare Books for hosting the “Mountain Many Voices” roundtable event.

Wellness Within instructor, Annie Mascorro shares Denise Levertov's inspiring poem "For the New Year".Annie Mascorro received her M.F.A. in poetry from The University of Montana and her B.S. in nursing from Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing.  She has also studied poetry therapy through the International Federation for Biblio/Poetry Therapy and attended the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Poetry workshop. Her poems have been widely published.  She has lead poetry workshops for many years in both clinical and non-clinical community centers, focusing on the writing process as a way to promote wellness. Annie finds joy in sharing the transformative power of poetry with writers of all levels.  Her background as a poet, teacher, nurse, and student of poetry therapy helps create a supportive, nurturing, and energetic atmosphere in all of her workshops. Be sure to keep a look out for her next workshop at Wellness Within.This podcast is sponsored in part by UC Davis Health, Elizabeth A. Harmon D.D.S., and Columbia Bank. It is offered freely to ensure everyone has access to these practices and conversations offered by Wellness Within Cancer Support Services. If you feel inspired to donate to support Wellness Within offerings, please visit www.wellnesswithin.org/giveSupport the show

If we had the opportunity to speak to our younger self, what would we say? What wisdom could we give to that younger self about the meaning and purpose of life? What does our experience tell us about why we are here and who we are? This conversation explores these questions and why they may be important to our lives. Jacob Needleman, Ph.D. is a professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University and former director of the Center of the Study of New Religions at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. He has also served as a research associate at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. His books include Why Can't We Be Good? (Tarcher 2003), The Heart of Philosophy (Tarcher 2003), Time and the Soul: Where Has All the Meaningful Time Gone -- and Can We Get It Back? (Berrett-Koehler Publishers 2003), Lost Christianity (Tarcher 2003), Money and the Meaning of Life (Doubleday 1994), The Wisdom of Love: Toward a Shared Inner Life (Morning Light Press 2005), What Is God? (Tarcher 2010), Necessary Wisdom (Fearless Books 2013) and An Unknown World: Notes on the Meaning of the Earth (Tarcher 2012)Interview Date: 6/2/2016 Tags: Jacob Needleman, freedom, ethics, listening, truth, Gurdjieff, essential questions, polarized times, ancient mystical wisdom traditions, Christianity, attention, Denise Levertov poem A Gift, Philosophy, Personal Transformation, Spirituality, Science

Today on the show, we remember the poet Denise Levertov. @1517 #christianhistory #christian #history #poetry — SHOW NOTES are available: https://www.1517.org/podcasts/the-christian-history-almanac GIVE BACK: Support the work of 1517 today CONTACT: CHA@1517.org SUBSCRIBE: Apple Podcasts Spotify Stitcher Overcast Google Play FOLLOW US: Facebook Twitter Audio production by Christopher Gillespie (gillespie.media).

Regardless of our gender we all have masculine and feminine energy within us. The masculine and feminine energies within us create polarity within us. When they are in balance and harmony we feel better! Throughout this series, we will bring the unhealthy and wounded aspects of our masculine and feminine sides out of the shadows. The wounded masculine and feminine from our ego, fear and darkness and cause us to suffer. When we bring the light of awareness to the shadow sides of our masculine and feminine wounding, we can heal and transform into healthy and divine energy. In our wounded state, we may get triggered by an outside experience or person. The wounded masculine may feel: competitive, controlling, aggressive, withdrawing, intimidating or defensive. When we heal our emotional wounds and traumas, we are able to be present and compassionate with ourselves in difficult and triggering situations. Then the divine masculine is: supportive, present, focused, holds space, assertive, resilient, protects boundaries, lets go of judgment and centered. Poem: Witness by Denise Levertov

Regardless of our gender we all have masculine and feminine energy within us. The masculine and feminine energies within us create polarity within us. When they are in balance and harmony we feel better! Throughout this series, we will bring the unhealthy and wounded aspects of our masculine and feminine sides out of the shadows. The wounded masculine and feminine from our ego, fear and darkness and cause us to suffer. When we bring the light of awareness to the shadow sides of our masculine and feminine wounding, we can heal and transform into healthy and divine energy. In our wounded state, we may get triggered by an outside experience or person. The wounded masculine may feel: competitive, controlling, aggressive, withdrawing, intimidating or defensive. When we heal our emotional wounds and traumas, we are able to be present and compassionate with ourselves in difficult and triggering situations. Then the divine masculine is: supportive, present, focused, holds space, assertive, resilient, protects boundaries, lets go of judgment and centered. Poem: Witness by Denise Levertov

Cuando sentís que sos apenas una frágil telaraña de preguntas, recibís las preguntas de los otros para que las sostengas en el hueco entre las manos juntas, los huevos de algún pájaro cantor que todavía son capaces de romper el cascarón si les das calorcito, mariposas que se abren y se cierran en el cuenco de las manos, confiando en que no vas a dañar su pelaje centelleante, su polvo. Recibís las preguntas de los otros como si fueran las respuestas a todo aquello que te preguntabas. A lo mejor el don sea tu respuesta.

Denise Levertov was an outstanding poet who became one of the finest religious poets of the twentieth century, or any century. Cristina Gámez-Fernández is an outstanding scholar of Levertov's work, and she joins the podcast to discuss Levertov's religious poetry in the context of her distinguished career. Gámez-Fernández teaches at the University of Córdoba in …

Brent Billings and Reed Dent discuss Thomas—a seemingly strange disciple—and question the nature of doubt and belief.“The Seeing Heart” by Frederick Buechner — YouTube“Frederick Buechner, Novelist With a Religious Slant, Dies at 96” by Robert D. McFadden — The New York TimesWishful Thinking by Frederick Buechner“St. Thomas Didymus” by Denise LevertovThe Stream & the Sapphire by Denise LevertovJoin the BEMA Slack

“Rejoice with me for I have found my sheep that was lost” (Lk. 15). Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28 Psalm 14 1 Timothy 1:12-17 Luke 15:1-10 Mark Johnson and George Lakoff's Metaphors We Live By is one of my favorite books. These authors point out that simple unexamined metaphors lie behind the very structure of our thought. The idea of “argument as war” is an example. We talk about winning an argument, an indefensible position, being right on target, shooting down an assumption, etc. We could imagine another culture regarding argument as being more like a kind of dance.[i] Today Jesus addresses two primal understandings of religion that deeply influenced the people of his society and our own. The first is the idea of a spiritual quest, a search for God. The second idea is that of church as a community of saints set apart from the world. Jesus upsets assumptions that lie so deep in our consciousness that we simply assume that this is just what life in God means. The spiritual quest. On December 24, 1915 Albert Einstein was drinking tea in his Berlin apartment when he received a crumpled, muddy, blood-stained letter from the trenches of World War I. It contained a message from the great genius and astronomer Karl Schwarzschild (1873-1916). Let me quote the letter's final words. “As you see, the war treated me kindly enough, in spite of heavy gunfire, to allow me to get away from it all and take this walk in the land of your ideas.”[ii] The letter astounded Einstein not simply because one of the most respected scientists in Germany was commanding an artillery unit on the Russian front, or because of the author's fear of a coming catastrophe. In tiny print on the back page, only legible through the use of a magnifying glass, Schwarzschild had sent him the first exact solution to the Einstein field equations of general relativity. Schwarzschild's approach worked well on a normal star which you might imagine as being like a bowling ball sitting on your bed and gently compressing the space around it. The problem arises when a large star exhausts its fuel and collapses. That star would keep compressing until the force of gravity grew to be so great that space would become infinitely curved and closed in on itself. The result would be, “an inescapable abyss permanently cut off from the rest of the universe.” Out of a sense of duty and perhaps also to show that a faithful Jew could be a good German, Schwarzschild volunteered to serve in the war. During a mustard gas attack he helped two of his men put on masks. Slow to put on his own, this exposure may have been what initiated an autoimmune disorder that painfully covered his body with sores and killed him months later. At first Schwarzschild dismissed his discovery as a kind of mathematical anomaly, but over time it began to really frighten him. In his last letter from Russia to his wife he wrote that this idea, “has an irrepressible force and darkens all my thoughts. It is a void without form or dimension, a shadow I can't see, but one that I can feel with the entirety of my soul.” A young man named Richard Courant stayed up talking with Schwarzschild on the night before he died. Schwarzschild told him that this concentration of mass would distort space and causality.[iii] The true horror was that since light would never escape from it, this singularity was unknowable, utterly unchanging, entirely isolated from everything else. Schwarzschild was one of the first people to contemplate the meaning of a black hole.[iv] But all of us are quite capable of imagining a place completely cut off from God. In fact most of us have been there. Isolation can feel terrifying. Perhaps you feel misunderstood, or set apart by a secret, or by experiences that makes you different from the people around you. Maybe you believe that something that you did in the past simply cannot be forgiven or that you have been harmed and cannot be healed. Perhaps just the busyness of your life, or the loneliness of it, makes real connection with another person impossible. Or maybe you just feel that you are missing something that others have, that you are cut off from God. The religious leaders of Jesus' time see him sharing meals with deplorable, notoriously immoral people, with prostitutes and the tax collectors who collaborate with the Roman army. They often point out that these people haven't really changed or repented. They wonder if Jesus is incurably naïve. They argue that someone who was from God would have the wisdom to realize how bad these people really are. In response Jesus tells three stories. One is about a wealthy shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep to find one in the wilderness. “When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices” (Lk. 15). Another is about a woman sweeping the whole house to find a coin and concludes saying, “There is joy in the presence of the angels over one sinner who repents.” The last is the story of the Prodigal Son. In other words Jesus takes our dominant metaphor of a spiritual quest and turns it on its head. Religion is not about seeking God. It is about God's persistence in finding us. It is about overcoming separation and the joy of reunion. As a young management consultant one of my closest friends in our Santa Monica office was a young engineer named Walid Iskandar. Walid had grown up in Lebanon during the 1970's. He was a deeply sincere, thoughtful and fun person with a kind of mischievous smile that I can still see in my mind's eye. In college I played rugby with a young freshman who was still trying to figure out the game. His name was Mark Bingham. What these two friends of mine share in common is that they both lost their lives twenty one years ago today when terrorists hijacked their airplanes. In my imagination they are perpetually young. In their last moments, despite the confusion and fear, I believe that God was with them. In 2018 twelve boys on a soccer team with their coach found themselves trapped deep below the earth in a labyrinthine network of flooded caves in Thailand. As the monsoon season progressed it seemed impossible to nearly everyone in the world that they would be saved. Cave divers from England talked about not being able to see their hands in front of their masks, of wriggling through impossibly narrow spaces again and again unsure of the way out. I will never forget that image of the diver emerging from the water and the amazement on the boys' faces that they had been found. This joy at being discovered lies at the heart of faith. The second idea that Jesus overturns is that the church exists as a community of holy people set apart from the world. You see this in the conviction that you must first think, say, or do something before you can be acceptable to God. A few weeks ago a very close friend went to the funeral of her father. At the end of the service, the very last words that the pastor spoke went something like this. “Pat was a great husband, father, lawyer and community leader. But until Pat found Jesus and accepted him in his heart, he was a sinner. Only through the sacrifice of Jesus are we cleansed from sin. No matter how hard you might try to be good, until you have accepted Jesus you are a sinner.” Jesus completely overturns this picture of how to be in God. It's not that you become good and then God helps you. Instead, God helps us so that we can be healed. The critics of Jesus feel offended by his connection to the people who break the rules. And Jesus tells them, “these are exactly the people I came to help. God's love is abundant and overflowing. God will always persist in finding those who are lost.” The point is that God's love and mercy always comes before anything else. We do not first accept Jesus in our heart and then become free from sin. The church is not a community of former sinners, but of actively sinning sinners. God does not reward us for living well or believing something, God makes living well and faith itself possible by loving us back to life. Today we celebrate Congregation Sunday and our calling as a unique people of God. There is no other community quite like this one and I love who we are. But let me be perfectly clear, we have not stopped screwing up. And yet we are loved by God anyway. Although we continue to slip up, we keep encountering God's grace. This makes us a joyful community of people who against all odds God has found in the way that God is finding all people. Let me close with a poem by Denise Levertov about this peace that passes all understanding. It's called “The Avowal.” “As swimmers dare / to lie face to the sky / and water bears them, / as hawks rest upon air / and air sustains them, / so would I learn to attain / freefall, and float / into Creator Spirit's deep embrace, / knowing no effort earns / that all-surrounding grace.”[v] In the face of isolation, everyday cruelty and sudden death what metaphor are we going to live by? Will we choose to see our life as a spiritual quest or as the experience of being found by God? Are we the holy ones or lost souls grateful every day to be found by God. My friends rejoice with me. [i] George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) 3-7. [ii] Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World tr. Adrian Nathan West (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2020) 34ff. See also “Karl Schwarzschild” on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Schwarzschild [iii] A hypothetical traveler capable of surviving a journey into a black hole would receive light and information from the future. [iv] And the frightening question asked by this dying man was that if such a thing exists in nature, could there be something like this in the human psyche. Could a concentration of human will cause millions to be exploited so that the laws of human relations no longer held? Schwarzschild feared that this was already happening in Germany. [v] Denise Levertov, “The Avowal.” https://allpoetry.com/The-Avowal

During this series, we have asked each guest to share a mediation. Deb reads a poem by Denise Levertov called "To Live in the Mercy of God" She reads it twice. In the first reading, she invites us to just listen. In the second reading, she invites us to notice what catches our attention, what feeling remains in our body, and how the poem has spoken to us today. You can follow along and read a copyright version of 'To Live in the Mercy of God" here https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48710/to-live-in-the-mercy-of-god Learn more at Hints of Gladness- https://www.hintsofgladness.com/contemplation-with-deb-steinkamp

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera shares poems that consider the questions, what exactly is poetry? What does it do? Herrera crafts an expansive answer to these questions through Marvin Bell's reflection on poetry as philosophy (“The Poem”), Denise Levertov's engagement with truth in sacred spaces (“The Day the Audience Walked Out on Me, and Why”), and Lorna Dee Cervantes's assertion that poetry is the force and form of resistance (“From the Bus to E.L. at Atascadero State Hospital”). To close, Herrera shares his poem “For George Floyd, Who Was a Great Man,” a work that encapsulates humanity, compassion, action, and protest.  You can listen to the full recordings of Bell, Levertov, and Cervantes reading for the Poetry Center on Voca:Marvin Bell (1977)Denise Levertov (1973) Lorna Dee Cervantes (1991)You can also enjoy two recordings of Juan Felipe Herrera on Voca, from 1993 and 2009.Have you checked out the new Voca interface? It's easier than ever to browse readings, and individual tracks can be shared. Many readings now include captions and transcripts, and we're working hard to make sure every reading will have these soon.

Spiritual experiences are famously transformative. They sometimes inspire dramatic effects of conversion and healing, of vision and new life direction. But even in their more quotidian forms they expand our cognitive and emotional capacities, help cultivate virtues, and intensify our feelings of closeness to God, others, and things we deem ultimate. For Matthew Wickman, spiritual experience makes us feel more deeply alive. And literature functions as a special medium for capturing the nuances of spiritual experiences, helping us reflect more deeply on them and become more receptive to them. In Wickman's experience, which he reflects on in his new book from the Maxwell Institute's Living Faith Series, LIFE TO THE WHOLE BEING: THE SPIRITUAL MEMOIR OF A LITERATURE PROFESSOR, literature has also helped him negotiate the complex relationship between spirituality, faith, and organized religion. He discusses all this by way of deeply personal experiences, theological reflection, and discussion of literary texts by Virginia Woolf, Denise Levertov, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christian Wiman, and more. Due to unforeseen circumstances, you cannot currently hear this episode on our website. You can listen on YouTube, at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5phuSEN0Hw The post Maxwell Podcast Episode #144: A Spiritual Life in Literature, with Matthew Wickman appeared first on Neal A. Maxwell Institute | BYU.

Éste es el año en que nuestros mayores, los grandes de verdad, nos dejan solos en medio de la ruta. La ruta lleva al mar. En los bolsillos guardamos las palabras, indicaciones crípticas. Se llevaron consigo la luz de su presencia, la vemos alejarse sobre un monte y perderse a un costado. No es que se estén muriendo; sólo se han retirado a una dolorosa intimidad, y deben aprender a vivir sin palabras. E. P. “Se parece a morir.” Williams: “Yo no podría describirte las cosas que han estado sucediéndome”. H.D.: “No puedo hablar”. La oscuridad se retuerce en el viento, las estrellas se ven chicas, y tiñe el horizonte una confusa niebla luminosa que la ciudad proyecta. Dijeron que la ruta lleva al mar, y nos pusieron el lenguaje en las manos. Oímos nuestros pasos cada vez que un camión nos pasa por al lado, encandilándonos, para dejarnos luego en silencio otra vez. No se puede llegar al mar por esta ruta interminable, a menos que al final uno se aparte de ella y siga, así parece, al búho silencioso que planea, yendo y viniendo encima de nosotros, y que después se interna en la espesura. Pero para nosotros la ruta se despliega por sí sola, contamos las palabras que tenemos guardadas aún en los bolsillos, nos preguntamos cómo será sin ellas todo, seguimos caminando, sabemos que nos queda mucho por recorrer, a veces nos parece que el viento de la noche trae el olor del mar…

Absoluta paciencia: los árboles erguidos, sus rodillas hundidas en la niebla. La niebla lentamente sube por la colina. Pálidas telarañas, el pasto que ralea allí donde los ciervos anduvieron en busca de manzanas. En el bosque, desde el arroyo hasta la cumbre que se alza por encima de la niebla, no se ve un solo pájaro. Tan absoluta es, que no podría ser más que la dicha, una respiración que de tan sosegada no se escucha. Traducción: Ezequiel Zaidenwerg

Algo tira de mí suave, invisible, silenciosamente: un hilo, o una red hecha de hilos, más delgada que una telaraña e igual de elástica. Yo aún no probé su resistencia. No me ensartó un anzuelo, desgarrándome. ¿Habrá sido hace poco que este hilo empezó a tirar de mí? ¿O fue hace mucho? ¿Habré nacido, con este nudo alrededor del cuello, una correa? No es miedo, sino un súbito asombro lo que me hace contener el aliento, al sentir un tironeo justo cuando empezaba a parecerme que se había aflojado y ya no estaba. Traducción: Ezequiel Zaidenwerg

Dos chicas, en un verso súbito, descubren el secreto de la vida. Yo que no sé el secreto escribí el verso. Ellas me contaron (a través de un tercero) que lo habían encontrado pero no en qué consistía ni siquiera cuál era el verso. Ahora no tengo dudas, pasada más de una semana, de que olvidaron el secreto, el verso, el nombre del poema. Las amo porque vieron lo que no puedo ver, y por amarme por el verso que escribí, y por olvidárselo de modo que mil veces más, hasta que las alcance la muerte, puedan descubrirlo de nuevo en otros versos en otros acontecimientos. Y por querer saberlo, por suponer que existe tal secreto, sí, por eso más que nada. Traducción: Ezequiel Zaidenwerg

I Contás con mi atención: y eso es una forma de ternura, más allá de lo que yo pueda decir. Y yo cuento con tu constancia en algo que me trasciende. La fuerza de tu compromiso nos recarga: vivimos de ese empuje, prestándonos coraje el uno al otro. II Quiero hablarte, ¿con quién más podría hablar? Sos vos el que hace un mundo del que hablar. Va madurando en tu calor la fruta: todas esas manzanas y las peras que crecen junto al muro, al sur de mi cabeza. Si prestás atención llueve para ellas, y ellas beben. Y si les respondés saltan al suelo las semillas. Hablá o no digas nada: tu silencio va a hablarme. Traducción: Ezequiel Zaidenwerg

Hacia no ser el centro de gravedad de nadie. Un deseo de amar: no de inclinarse hacia otro, y caer, sino sentir dentro de uno una barra de acero flexible, vertical, que corra paralela a la columna pero más larga, que permita estirarse; un trampolín solemne, vertical que le deje al espíritu lanzarse hacia el espacio. Traducción: Ezequiel Zaidenwerg

Ladrillos de la tapia, tanto más viejos que la casa misma, extraídos, supongo, de una granja que tiraron abajo para construir la calle, angostos ladrillitos de otro siglo. Hecha con parapetos y paneles, de todas formas es una modesta tapia tras las flores: rosas y malvarrosas, las vainas color plata del lupín, el flox de sabor dulce y la lavanda gris, que nadie ve. Pero yo descubrí los colores ocultos de la tapia, que despertaron cuando rocié con la manguera su áspera superficie: un rojo indefinido, un dorado rugoso, un malva salpicado por unas tenues sombras, surgido del callado y reseco marrón: arquetipo del mundo un paso siempre más allá del mundo, que no puede buscarse, solamente encontrarse con ojo vagabundo. Traducción: Ezequiel Zaidenwerg

Cuando la niebla blanca se disipa, se descubre el abismo de la luz infinita. Las últimas hilachas de niebla en los abetos negros son copos de ceniza en el hogar del mundo. El frío del mar es la contrapartida de esta grandiosa hoguera. Emergiendo del frío abrasador del mar, entramos en un mar de intenso mediodía. Sal sagrada salpica nuestros cuerpos. Una vez que la bruma nos envuelva de nuevo en lana delicada, que el sabor de la sal nos recuerde las grandes profundidades a nuestro alrededor. Traducción: Ezequiel Zaidenwerg

¡Ay, Pena! Yo no debería tratarte como a un perro de la calle que llega hasta la puerta de atrás a buscar sobras, algún hueso pelado. Debería confiar en vos. Debería tratar de convencerte de que entraras a mi casa, y ahí darte un rinconcito propio, una alfombra en la que puedas echarte, tu propio plato para el agua. ¿Te pensás que no sé que vivís hace tiempo bajo el porche de casa? Vos querés que el lugar que merecés esté listo antes del invierno. Necesitás tu nombre, tu collar con chapita, el derecho a ladrarle a los extraños. Necesitás poder considerar que mi casa es la tuya, y que yo soy tu dueña, y que vos sos mi perro. Traducción: Alejandro Crotto

Join Leilani and Kimberlyn as they explore the ways in which they create sacred space for ritual and for their own personal energetic work.   Get exclusive content and support us on Patreon:http://www.patreon.com/WitchyWit  Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/WitchyWitPodcast  Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/Witchy_Wit  Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/3azUkFVlECTlTZQVX5jl1X?si=8WufnXueQrugGDIYWbgc3A  Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/witchy-wit/id1533482466  Pandora:https://pandora.app.link/nNsuNrSKneb  Google Podcast:Witchy Wit (google.com)

It's the 52nd anniversary of the killings at Kent State University. In a special encore episode, we're reposting our episode from 2020. In this episode, we commemorate the anniversary of the tragic events of May 4th, 1970 at Kent State University, where agents of the state murdered 4 students and shot 9 others. Students, who'd been told the war was winding down in Vietnam, erupted in protest at campuses all over America when Richard Nixon announced the U.S. invasion of Cambodia on April 30th. At Kent State, a working-class public school in Northeast Ohio, protesting students and other burned down an ROTC building, a common target in the Vietnam protest era, and Ohio Governor James Rhodes, vowing a violent response, mobilized the National Guard and sent them to Kent. For two days the students and Guard skirmished, with the paramilitaries hurling tear gas and intimidating students. On May 4th, the Guard, unprovoked, started shooting into the crowd of students and shot 13, killing 4, from distances beyond 300 feet. These were extrajudicial killings and a sure sign the state would murder anyone who challenged its interests. The war had come home! Scott and Bob, who's also a historian of the Vietnam War and the 1960s and has published extensively on those subjects, talk about the background to the protests, the official, violent response, the aftermath at places like Jackson State, where 2 more students were killed, and the larger context of anti-state protests and their meaning, and lessons. -------------------------------------------------------------- Outro// "My City Was Gone" by The Pretenders Links// Kent State Tribunal Organization, established by Laurel Krause, sister of one of the students assassinated that day (https://bit.ly/3w2spdR); interview with Alan Canfora, one of the survivors of the shootings (https://bit.ly/3OUyjGq); The Kent State May 4th Poetry Collection; Denise Levertov, "The Day the Audience Walked Out on Me, and Why" (https://bit.ly/3kIVyFv); Governor Rhodes press conference, May 3 (https://bit.ly/37cIk0R); Robert Buzzanco, Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life (https://bit.ly/3kB21ST). Follow Green and Red// https://linktr.ee/greenandredpodcast Check out our new website: https://greenandredpodcast.org/ Donate to Green and Red Podcast// Become a recurring donor at https://www.patreon.com/greenredpodcast Or make a one time donation here: https://bit.ly/DonateGandR This is a Green and Red Podcast (@PodcastGreenRed) production. Produced by Bob (@bobbuzzanco) and Scott (@sparki1969). “Green and Red Blues" by Moody. Editing by Scott.

Keith Hansen brings us Denise Levertov's grouping of poems titled "Lake, Mountain, Moon." These are lush, grand, and worth listening to with closed eyes and a still body...if you can pull that off. 

In this special segment, Colorado Review celebrates National Poetry Month with readings across our issues beginning with our first issue dating back to Winter 1956-57. During the last few weeks, interns have curated selections from Langston Hughes, Gillian Kiley, Denise Levertov, Lisa Fishman, Martha Ronk, Kevin Goodan, Charles Bukowski, and C.D. Wright.

“Prayers are tools not for doing or getting, but for being and becoming.” These are words of the late legendary biblical interpreter and teacher Eugene Peterson. At the back of the church he pastored for nearly three decades, you'd be likely to find well-worn copies of books by Wallace Stegner or Denise Levertov. Frustrated with the unimaginative way he found his congregants treating their Bibles, he translated the whole thing himself and that translation has sold millions of copies around the world. Eugene Peterson's literary biblical imagination formed generations of pastors, teachers, and readers. His down-to-earth faith hinged on a love of metaphor and a commitment to the Bible's poetry as what keeps it alive to the world.Eugene Peterson wrote over 30 books including Answering God, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology, and The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language. In 2021, a Lenten sermon series of his was published posthumously with the title: This Hallelujah Banquet: How the End of What We Were Reveals Who We Can Be. He served as the pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church for 29 years. He spent the last years of his life with his wife, Jan, at the home his father built in Lakeside, Montana, just outside Glacier National Park. That's where he was when he spoke with Krista in 2016, two years before he died at the age of 85.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.This show originally aired in December 2016.

“Prayers are tools not for doing or getting, but for being and becoming.” These are words of the late legendary biblical interpreter and teacher Eugene Peterson. At the back of the church he pastored for nearly three decades, you'd be likely to find well-worn copies of books by Wallace Stegner or Denise Levertov. Frustrated with the unimaginative way he found his congregants treating their Bibles, he translated the whole thing himself and that translation has sold millions of copies around the world. Eugene Peterson's literary biblical imagination formed generations of pastors, teachers, and readers. His down-to-earth faith hinged on a love of metaphor and a commitment to the Bible's poetry as what keeps it alive to the world.Eugene Peterson wrote over 30 books including Answering God, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology, and The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language. In 2021, a Lenten sermon series of his was published posthumously with the title: This Hallelujah Banquet: How the End of What We Were Reveals Who We Can Be. He served as the pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church for 29 years. He spent the last years of his life with his wife, Jan, at the home his father built in Lakeside, Montana, just outside Glacier National Park. That's where he was when he spoke with Krista in 2016, two years before he died at the age of 85.This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Eugene Peterson – Answering God.” Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.This show originally aired in December 2016.

It is 14 months since the military once again seized power in Myanmar, using merciless brutality to suppress civic protest. From day one of the coup in February 2021, millions of students, workers, opposition politicians, and professionals have mobilized daily with extraordinary courage. The International Crisis Group reports that 1,500 civilians have been killed and nearly 9,000 more arrested, charged or jailed. Even as public protest continues, a great many have concluded that armed resistance is the only option. Help from international actors has been slow to build, an ambivalence all the more glaring amid the global mobilization to defend “democracy's frontline”in Ukraine. Rohingya organiser Wai Wai Nu reflects on the roots of Burmese protest and determination. And in the Coda, LGBTQ+ activist Ryan Figueiredo shares a Denise Levertov poem that lightens the spirit. For a list of supplemental readings and additional information about this episode's content, visit https://strengthandsolidarity.org/podcasts/Contact us atpod@strengthandsolidarity.org

Denise Levertov's poem, Making Peace, says that we bring peace into the world by speaking it and for Ryan Figueiredo, there's special meaning here for the social justice activist. Fighting to make rights and justice a reality inevitably causes in friction but that's not a negative, Ryan says, it polishes us in the work that we do, perhaps-as the poem has it-“facets of the forming crystal.”

The archetypal threads of the recent Venus-Mars conjunction in Aquarius help you to seed new pathways of loving self and the world in more authentic ways. Later this week, the Sun conjoins Neptune in Pisces to invite deep dreaming and opening to multi-levels of awareness. Believe in your dreams and support the ones of you that are caught in the spells of fear and victimization.Poem: The Well by Denise Levertov

Joy talks with Joel (her composer brother) about advent carols, and then reflects on two works of art about the the annunciation: a poem by Denise Levertov and a painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner.