Podcasts about John Berryman

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Peter Solomon speaks with Greg Brosfske, writer and composer of a jazz-infused operetta called "Strange Heart," in spired by Pulitzer-winning poet John Berryman's writings. Actors Anna Hashizume and Bradley Greenwald also join the conversation. "Strange Heart" opens at Open Eye Theatre opened March 5th and runs through March 22nd.

Peter Solomon speaks with Greg Brosfske, writer and composer of a jazz-infused operetta called "Strange Heart," in spired by Pulitzer-winning poet John Berryman's writings. Actors Anna Hashizume and Bradley Greenwald also join the conversation. "Strange Heart" opens at Open Eye Theatre opened March 5th and runs through March 22nd.

How do you build a creative life that spans music, writing, film, and spiritual practice? Alicia Jo Rabins talks about weaving multiple creative strands into a sustainable career and why the best advice for any creator might simply be: just make the thing. In the intro, backlist promotion strategy [Written Word Media]; Successful author business [Novel Marketing Podcast]; Alliance of Independent Authors Indie Author Bookstore; Bones of the Deep – J.F. Penn This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Alicia Jo Rabins is an award-winning writer, musician, performer, as well as a Torah teacher and ritualist. She's the creator of Girls In Trouble, a feminist indie-folk song cycle about biblical women, and the award-winning film, A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff. Her latest book is a memoir, When We Are Born We Forget Everything. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights, and the full transcript is below. Show Notes Building a sustainable multi-disciplinary creative career through teaching, performance, grants, and donations Trusting instinct in the early generative stages of creativity and separating generation from editing Adapting and reimagining religious and cultural source material through music, writing, and performance The challenges of transitioning from poetry to long-form prose memoir, including choosing a lens for your story Making an independent film on a shoestring budget without waiting for Hollywood's permission Finding your creative voice and building confidence by leaning into vulnerability and returning to the practice of making You can find Alicia at AliciaJo.com. Transcript of the interview with Alicia Jo Rabins Joanna: Alicia Jo Rabins is an award-winning writer, musician, performer, as well as a Torah teacher and ritualist. She's the creator of Girls In Trouble, a feminist indie-folk song cycle about biblical women, and the award-winning film, A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff. Her latest book is a memoir, When We Are Born We Forget Everything. So welcome to the show, Alicia. Alicia: Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here. Joanna: There is so much we could talk about. But first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you've woven so many strands of creativity into your life and career. Alicia: Yes, well, I am a maximalist. What happened in terms of my early life is that I started writing on my own, just extremely young. I'm one of those people who always loved writing, always processed the world and managed my emotions and came to understand myself through writing. So from a very young age, I felt really committed to writing. Then I had the good fortune that my mother saw a talk show about the Suzuki method of learning violin—when you start really young and learn by ear, which is modelled after language learning. It's so much less intellectual and much more instinctual, learning by copying. She was like, that looks like a cool thing. I was three years old at the time and she found out that there was a little local branch of our music conservatory that had a Suzuki violin programme. So when I was three and a half, getting close to four, she took me down and I started playing an extremely tiny violin. Joanna: Oh, cute! Alicia: Yes, and because it was part of this conservatory that was downtown, and we were just starting at the suburban branch where we lived, there was this path that I was able to follow. As I got more and more interested in violin, I could continue basically up through the conservatory level during high school. So I had a really fantastic music education without any pressure, without any expectations or professional goals. I just kept taking these classes and one thing led to another. I grew up being very immersed in both creative writing and music, and I think just having the gift of those two parts of my brain trained and stimulated and delighted so young really changed my brain in some ways. I'll always see the world through this creative lens, which I think I'm also just set up to do personally. Then the last step of my multi-practice career is that in college I got very interested in Jewish spirituality. I'm Jewish, but I didn't grow up very religious. I didn't grow up in a Jewish community really. So I knew some basics, but not a ton. In college I started to study it and also informally learned from other people I met. I ended up going on a pretty intense spiritual quest, going to Jerusalem and immersing myself after college for two years in traditional Jewish study and practice. So that became the third strand of the braid that had already been started with music and writing. Torah study, spiritual study, and teaching became the third, and they all interweave. The last thing I'll say is that because I work in both words and music, and naturally performance because of music, it began to branch a little bit into plays, theatre, and film, just because that's where the intersection of words, performance, and music is. So that's really what brought me into that, as opposed to any specific desire to work in film. It all happened very organically. Joanna: I love this. This is so cool. We are going to circle back to a lot of this, but I have to ask you— What about work for money at any point? How did this turn into more than just hobbies and lifestyle? Alicia: Yes, absolutely. Well, I'm very fortunate that I did not graduate college with loans because my parents were able to pay for college. That was a big privilege that I just want to name, because in the States that's often not the case. So that allowed me to need to support myself, but not also pay loans, which was a real gift. What happened was I went straight from college to that school in Jerusalem, and there I was on loans and scholarship, so I didn't have to worry yet about supporting myself. Then when I came back to the States, I actually found on Craigslist a job teaching remedial Hebrew. It was essentially teaching kids at a Jewish elementary school who either had learning differences or had just entered the school late and needed to be in a different Hebrew class than the other kids in their grade. That was my first experience of really teaching, and I just absolutely fell in love with it. Although in the end, my passion is much more for teaching the text and rituals and the wrestling with the concepts, as opposed to teaching language. So all these years, while doing performance and writing and all these things, I have been teaching Jewish studies. That has essentially supported me, I would say, between 50 and 70 per cent. Then the rest has been paid gigs as a musician, whether as a front person leading a project or as what we call a sideman, playing in someone else's band. Sometimes doing theatre performances, sometimes teaching workshops. That's how I've cobbled it together. I have not had a full-time job all these years and I have supported myself through both earned income and also grants and donations. I've really tried to cultivate a little bit of a donor base, and I took some workshops early on about how to welcome donations. So I definitely try to always welcome that as well. Joanna: That is so interesting that you took a workshop on how to welcome donations. Way back in, I think 2013, I said on this show, I just don't know if I can accept people giving to support the show. Then someone on the podcast challenged me and said, but people want to support creatives. That's when I started Patreon in 2014. It was when The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer came out and— It was this realisation that people do want to support people. So I love that you said that. Alicia: It's not easy. It's still not easy for me, and I have to grit my teeth every time I even put in my end-of-year newsletter. I just say, just a reminder that part of what makes this possible is your generous donations, and I'm so grateful to you. It's not easy. I think some people enjoy fundraising. I certainly don't instinctively enjoy it, but I have learned to think of it exactly the way that you're saying. I mean, I love donating to support other people's projects. Sometimes it's the highlight of my day. If I'm having a bad day and someone asks for help, either to feed a family or to complete a creative project, I just feel like, okay, at least I can give $36 or $25 and feel like I did something positive in the last hour, even if my project is going terribly and I'm in a fight with my kid or something. So I have to keep in mind that it is actually a privilege to give as well as a privilege to receive. Joanna: Absolutely. So let's get back into your various creative projects. The first thing I wanted to ask you, because you do have so many different formats and forms of your creativity—how do you know when an idea that comes to you should be a song, or something you want to do as a performance, or written, or a film? Tell us a bit about your creative process. Because a lot of your projects are also longer-term. Alicia: Yes. It's funny, I love planning and in some ways I'm an extreme planner. I really drive people in my family bonkers with planning, like family vacations a year in advance. In terms of my creativity, I'm very planful towards goals, but in that early generative state, I am actually pure instinct. I don't think I ever sit down and say, “I have this idea, which genre would it match with?” It's more like I sit on my bed and pick up my guitar, which is where I love to do songwriting, just sitting on my bed cross-legged, and I pick up my guitar and something starts coming out. Then I just work with that kernel. So it's very nebulous at first, very innate, and I just follow that creative spirit. Often I don't even know what a project is, sometimes if it's a larger project, until a year or two in. Once things emerge and take shape, then my planning brain and my strategy brain can jump on it and say, “Okay, we need three more songs to fill out the album, and we need to plan the fundraising and the scheduling.” Then I might take more of an outside-in approach. At the beginning it's just all instinct. Joanna: So if you pick up your guitar, does that mean it always starts in music and then goes into writing? Or is that you only pick up a guitar if it's going to be musical? Alicia: I think I'm responding to what's inside me. It's almost like a need, as opposed to, “I'm going to sit down and work.” I mean, obviously I sit down and work a lot, but I think in that early stage of anything, it's more like my fingers are itching to play something, and so I sit down and pick up my guitar. Sometimes nothing comes out and sometimes the kernel of a song comes out. Or I'm at a café, and I often like to write when I'm feeling a little bit discombobulated, just to go into the complexity of things or use challenging emotions as fuel. I really do use it as a—I don't know if therapeutic is the word, but I think it maybe is. I write often, as I always have, as I said before, to understand what I'm thinking. Like Joan Didion said—to process difficult emotions, to let go of stuck places. So I think I create almost more out of a sense of just what I need in the moment. Sometimes it's just for fun. Sometimes picking up a guitar, I just have a moment so I sit down and mess around. Sometimes it's to help me struggle with something. It doesn't always start in music. That was a random example. I might sit down to write because I have an hour and I think, I haven't written in a while. Or I do have an informal daily writing thing where I'll try to generate one loose draft of something a day, even if it's only ten pages. I mean, sorry, ten words. Joanna: I was going to say! Alicia: No, no. Ten words. I'm sorry. It's often poetry, so it feels like a lot when it's ten words. I'll just sit down with no pressure, no goal, no intention to make anything specific. Just open the floodgates and see what comes out. That's where every single project of mine has started. Joanna: Yes, I do love that. Obviously, I'm a discovery writer and intuitive, same as you. I think very much this idea of, especially when you said you feel discombobulated, that's when you write. I almost feel like I need that. I'm not someone who writes every day. I don't do ten lines or whatever. It's that I'll feel that sense of pressure building up into “this is going to be something.” I will really only write or journal when that spills over into— “I now need to write and figure out what this is.” Alicia: Yes. It's almost a form of hunger. It feels to me similar to when you eat a great meal and then you're good for a while. You're not really thinking of it, and then it builds up, like you said, and then there's a need—at least the first half of creativity. I really separate my generation and my editing. So my generative practice is all openness, no critique, just this maybe therapeutic, maybe curious, wandering and seeing what happens. Then once I have a draft, my incisive editing mind is welcome back in, which has been shut out from that early process. So that's a really different experience. Those early stages of creativity are almost out of need more than obligation. Joanna: Well, just staying with that generative practice. Obviously you've mentioned your study of and practice of Jewish tradition and Jewish spirituality. Steven Pressfield in his books has talked about his prayer to the muse, and I've got on my wall here—I don't talk about this very often, actually — I have a muse picture, a painting of what I think of as a muse spirit in some form. So do you have any spiritual practices around your generative practice and that phase of coming up with ideas? Alicia: I love that question, and I wish I had a beautiful, intentional answer. My answer is no. I think I experience creativity as its own spiritual practice itself. I do love individual prayer and meditation and things like that, but for me those are more to address my specifically spiritual health and happiness and connectedness. I'm just a dive-in kind of person. As a musician, I have friends who have elaborate backstage rituals. I have to do certain things to take care of my voice, but even that, it's mostly vocal rest as opposed to actively doing things. There's a bit of an on/off switch for me. Joanna: That's interesting. Well, I do want to ask you about one of your projects, this collaboration with a high school on a musical performance, I Was a Desert: Songs of the Matriarchs, and also your Girls in Trouble songs about women in the Torah. On your website, I had a look at the school, the high school, and the musical performance. It was extraordinary. I was watching you in the school there and it's just such extraordinary work. It very much inspired me—not to do it myself, but it was just so wonderful. I do urge people to go to your website and just watch a few minutes of it. I'm inspired by elements of religion, Christian and Jewish, but I wondered if you've come up against any issues with adaptation—respecting your heritage but also reinventing it. How has this gone for you. Any advice for people who want to incorporate aspects of religion they love but are worried about responses? Alicia: Well, I have to say, coming from the Jewish tradition, that is a core practice of Judaism—reinterpreting our texts and traditions, wrestling with them, arguing with them, reimagining them. I don't know if you're familiar with Midrash, but just in case some of your listeners aren't sure I'll explain it. There's essentially an ancient form of fanfic called Midrash, which was the ancient rabbis, and we still do it today, taking a biblical story that seems to have some kind of gap or inconsistency or question in it and writing a story to fill that gap or recast the story in an interestingly different light. So we have this whole body of literature over thousands of years that are these alternate or added-on adventures, side quests of the biblical characters. What I'm doing from a Jewish perspective is very much in line with a traditional way of interacting with text. I've certainly never gotten any pushback, especially as I work in progressive Jewish communities. I think if I were in an extremely fundamentalist community, there would be a lot of different issues around gender and things like that. The interpretive process, even in those communities, is part of how we show respect for the text. When I was working with the high school—and I just want to call out the choir director, Ethan Chen, who has an incredible project where he brings in a different artist every two years to work with the choir, and they tend to have a different cultural focus each time. He invited me specifically to integrate my songwriting about biblical women with his amazing high school choir. I was really worried at first because most of them are not Jewish—very few of them, if any. I wanted to respect their spiritual paths and their religious heritages and not impose mine on them. So I spent a lot of time at the beginning saying, this project has religious source material, but essentially it is a creative reinterpretive project. I am not coming to you to bring the religious material to you. I'm coming to take the shared Hebrew Bible myths and then reinterpret those myths through a lens of how they might reflect our own personal struggles, because that's always my approach to these ancient stories. I wanted to really make that clear to the students. It was such a joy to work with them. Joanna: It's such an interesting project. Also, I find with musicians in general this idea of performance. You've written this thing—or this thing specifically with the school—and it doesn't exist again, right? You're not selling CDs of that, I presume. Whereas compared to a book, when we write a book, we can sell it forever. It doesn't exist as a performance generally for an author of a memoir or a novel. It carries on existing. So how does that feel, the performance idea versus the longer-lasting thing? I mean, I guess the video's there, but the performance itself happened. Alicia: I do know what you mean. Absolutely. We did, for that reason, record it professionally. We had the sound person record it and mix it, so it is available to stream. I'm not selling CDs, but it's out there on all the streaming services, if people want to listen. I do also have the scores, so if a choir wanted to sing it. The main point that you're making is so true. I think there's actually something very sacred about live performance—that we're all in the moment together and then the moment is over. I love the artefacts of the writing life. I love writing books. I love buying and reading books and having them around, and there's piles of them everywhere in this room I'm standing in. I feel like being on stage, or even teaching, is a very spiritual practice for me, because it's in some ways the most in-the-moment I ever am. The only thing that matters is what's happening right then in that room. It's fleeting as it goes. I'm working with the energy in the room while we're there. It's different every time because I'm different, the atmosphere is different, the people are different. There's no way to plan it. The kind of micro precision that we all try to bring to our editing—you can't do that. You can practice all you want and you should, but in the moment, who knows? A string breaks or there's loud sound coming from the other room. It is just one of those things. I love being reminded over and over again of the truth that we really don't control what happens. The best that we can do is ride it, surf it, be in it, appreciate it, and then let it go. Joanna: I think maybe I get a glimpse of that when I speak professionally, but I'm far more in control in that situation than I guess you were with—I don't know how many—was it a hundred kids in that choir? It looked pretty big. Alicia: It was amazing. It was 130 kids. Yes. Joanna: 130 kids! I mean, it was magic listening to it. And yes, of course, showing my age there with buying a CD, aren't I? Alicia: Well, I do still sell some CDs of Girls in Trouble on tour, because I have a bunch of them and people still buy them. I'm always so grateful because it was an easier life for touring musicians when we could just bring CDs. Now we have to be very creative about our merch. Joanna: Yes, that's a good point because people are like, “Oh yes, I'll scan your QR code and stream it,” but you might not get the money for that for ages, and it might just be five cents or whatever. Alicia: Streaming is terrible for live musicians. I mean, I don't know if you know the site Bandcamp, but it's essentially self-publishing for musicians. Bandcamp is a great way around that, and a lot of independent musicians use it because that's a place you can upload your music and people can pay $8 for an album. They can stream it on there if they want, or they can download it and have it. But, yes, it's hard out there for touring musicians. Joanna: Yes, for sure. Well, let's come to the book then. Your memoir, When We Are Born We Forget Everything. Tell us about some of the challenges of a book as opposed to these other types of performances. Alicia: Well, I come out of poetry, so that was my first love. That's what I majored in in college. That's what my MFA is in. Poetry is famously short, and I'm not one of those long-form poets. I have been trained for many years to think in terms of a one-page arc, if at all. Arc isn't even really a word that we use in poetry. So to write a full-length prose book was really an incredible education. Writing it basically took ten years from writing to publication, so probably seven years of writing and editing. I felt like there was an MFA-equivalent process in the number of classes I took, books I read, and work that went into it. So that was one of my main joys and challenges, really learning on the job to write long-form prose coming out of poetry. How to keep the engine going, how to think about ending one chapter in a way that leaves you with some torque or momentum so that you want to go into the next chapter. How many characters is too many? Who gets names and who doesn't? Some of these things that are probably pretty basic for fiction writers were all very new to me. That was a big part of my process. Then, of course, poets don't usually have agents. So once it was done, I began to query agents. It was the normal sort of 39 rejections and then one agent who really understood what I was trying to do. She's incredible, and she was able to sell the book. The longevity of just working on something for that long—I have a lot of joy in that longevity—but it does sometimes feel like, is this ever going to happen, or am I on a fool's errand? Joanna: I guess, again, the difference with performance is you have a date for the performance and it's done then. I suppose once you get a contract, then for sure it has to be done. But memoir in particular, you do have to set boundaries, because of course your life continues, doesn't it? So what were the challenges in curating what went into the book? Because many people listening know memoir is very challenging in terms of how personal it can be. Alicia: Yes, and one thing I think is so fascinating about memoir is choosing which lens to put on your story, on your own story. I heard early on that the difference between autobiography and memoir is that autobiography tries to give a really comprehensive view of a life, and memoir is choosing one lens and telling the story of a life through that lens, which is such a beautiful creative concept. I knew early on that I wanted this to be primarily a spiritual memoir, and also somewhat of an artistic memoir, because my creativity and my spirituality are so intertwined. It started off being spiritual, and also about my musical life, and also about my writing life. In the end, I edited out the part about my writing life, because writing about writing was just too navel-gazing. So there's nothing in there about me coming of age as a writer, which used to be in there, but that whole thing got taken out. Now it's spiritual and musical. For me, it really helped to start with those focuses, because I knew there may be things that were hugely important in my life, absolutely foundational, that were not really going to be either mentioned or gone deeply into in the book. For example, my husband teases me a lot about how few pages and words he gets. He's very important in my life, but I actually met him when I was 29, and this book really mainly takes place in the years leading up to that. There's a little bit of winding down in the first few years of my thirties, but this is not a book about my life with him. He is mentioned in it. That story is in there. Having those kinds of limitations around the canvas—there's a quote, I forget if it was Miranda July, but somebody said something like, basically when you put a limitation on your project, that's when it starts to be a work of art. Whatever it is, if you say, “I'm taking this canvas and I'm using these colours,” that's when it really begins, that initial limitation. That was very helpful. Joanna: It's also the beauty of memoir, because of course you can write different memoirs at different times. You can write something about your writing life. You can write something else about your marriage and your family later on. That doesn't all have to be in one book. I think that's actually something I found interesting. And I would also say in my memoir, Pilgrimage, my husband is barely mentioned either. Alicia: Does he tease you too? Joanna: No, I think he's grateful. He is grateful for the privacy. Alicia: That's why I keep saying, you should be grateful! Joanna: Yes. You really should. Like, maybe stop talking now. Alicia: Yes, exactly. I know. Marriage, memoir—those words should strike fear into his heart. Joanna: They definitely should. But let's just come back. When I look at your career— You just seem such an independent creative, and so I wondered why you decided to work with a traditional publisher instead of being an independent. How are you finding it as someone who's not in charge of everything? Alicia: It's a great question. The origin story for this memoir is that I was actually reading poetry at a writing conference called Bread Loaf in the States. This was 16 years ago or something. I was giving a poetry reading and afterwards an agent, not my agent, came up to me and said, you know, you have a voice. You should try writing nonfiction because you could probably sell it. Back to your question about how I support myself, I am always really hustling to make a living. It's not like I have some separate well-paying job and the writing has no pressure on it. So my ears kind of perked up. I thought, wait, getting paid for writing? Because poetry is literally not in the world. It's just not a concept for poets. That's not why we write and it's not a possibility. So a little light turned on in my brain. I thought, wow, that could be a really interesting element to add to my income stream, and it would be flexible and it would be meaningful. For a few years I thought, what nonfiction could I write? And I came up with the idea of writing a book about biblical women from a more scholarly perspective, because I teach that material and I've studied it. I went to speak to another agent and she said, well, you could do that, but if you actually want to sell a book, it's going to have to be more of a trade book. So if you don't want an academic press, which wouldn't pay very much, you would have to have some kind of memoir-like stories in there to just sweeten it so it doesn't feel academic. So then I began writing a little bit of spiritual memoir. I thought, okay, well, I'll write about a few moments. Then once I started writing, I couldn't stop. The floodgates really opened. That's how it ended up being a spiritual memoir with interwoven stories of biblical women. It became a hybrid in that sense. I knew from the beginning that this project—for all my saying earlier that I never plan anything and only work on instinct, I was thinking as I said that, that cannot be true. This time, I actually thought, what if, instead of coming from this pure, heart-focused place of poetry, I began writing with the intention of potentially selling a book? The way my fiction writer friends talked about selling their books. So that was always in my mind. I knew I would continue writing poetry, continue publishing with small presses, continue putting my own music out there independently, but this was a bit of an experiment. What if I try to interface with the publishing world, in part for financial sustainability? And because I had a full draft before I queried, I never felt like anyone was telling me what to write. I can't imagine personally selling a book on proposal, because I do need that full capacity to just swerve, change directions, be responsive to what the project is teaching me. I can't imagine promising that I'll write something, because I never know what I'll write. But writing at least a very solid draft first, I'm always delighted to get notes and make polish and rewrite and make things better. I took care of that freedom in the first seven years of writing and then I interfaced with the agent and publisher. Joanna: I was going to say, given that it's taken you seven to ten years to do this and I can't imagine that you're suddenly a multimillionaire from this book. It probably hasn't fulfilled the hourly rate that perhaps you were thinking of in terms of being paid for your work. I think some people think that everyone's going to end up with the massive book deal that pays for the rest of their life. I guess this book does just fit into the rest of your portfolio career. Alicia: Yes. One of the benefits of these long arcs that I like to work on is, one of them—and probably the primary one—is that the project gets to unfold on its own time. I don't think I could have rushed it if I wanted. The other is that it never really stopped me from doing any of my other work. Joanna: Mm-hmm. Alicia: So it's not like, oh, I gave up months of my life and all I got was this advance or something. It's like, I was living my life and then when I had a little bit of writing time—and I will say, it impacted my poetry. I haven't written as much poetry because I was working on this. So it wasn't like I just added it on top of everything I was already doing, but it was a pleasure to just switch to prose for a while. It was just woven into my life. I appreciated having this side project where no one was waiting for it. There were no deadlines, there was no stress around it, because I always have performances to promote and due dates for all kinds of work. It was just this really lovely arena of slow growth and play. When I wanted a reader, I could do a swap with a writer friend, but no one was ever waiting for it on deadline. So there's actually a lot of pleasure in that. Then I will say, I think I've made more from selling this than my poetry. Probably close to ten times more than I've ever made from any of my poetry. So on a poetry scale, it's certainly not going to pay for my life, but it actually does make a true financial difference in a way that much of my other work is a little more bit by bit by bit. It's actually a different scale. Joanna: Well, that's really good. I'm glad to hear that. I also want to ask you, because you've done so many things, and— I'm fascinated by your independent film, A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff. I have only watched the trailer. You are in it, you wrote it, directed it, and it's also obviously got other people in, and it's fascinating. It's about this particular point in history. I've written quite a lot of screenplay adaptations of my novels, and I've had some various amounts of interest, but the whole film industry to me is just a complete nightmare, far bigger nightmare than the book industry. So I wonder if you could maybe talk about this, because it just seems like you made a film, which is so cool. Alicia: Oh yes, thank you. Joanna: And it won awards, yes, we should say. Alicia: Did we win awards? Yes. It really, for an extremely low-budget indie film, went far further than my team and I could ever have imagined. I will say I never intended to make a film. Like most of the best things in my life, it really happened by accident. When I was living in New York— I lived there for many years—the 2008 financial collapse happened and I happened to have an arts grant that gave a bunch of artists workspace, studio space, in essentially an abandoned building in the financial district. It was an empty floor of a building. The floor had been left by the previous tenant, and there's a nonprofit that takes unused real estate in the financial district and lets artists work in it for a while. So I was on Wall Street, which was very rare for me, but for this year I was working on Wall Street. Even though I was working on poems, the financial collapse happened around me, and I did get inspired by that to create a one-woman show, which was more of a theatre show. That was already a huge leap for me because I had no real theatre experience, but it was experimental and growing out of my poetry practice and my music. It was a musical one-woman show about the financial collapse from a spiritual perspective, apparently. So I performed that. I documented it, and then a friend who lives in Portland, Oregon, where I now live, said, “I'm a theatre producer, I'd like to produce it here.” So then I rewrote it and did a run here in Portland of that show. Essentially, I started to tour it a little bit, but I got tired of it. It was too much work and it never really paid very much, and I thought, this is impacting my life negatively. I just want to do a really good documentation of the show. So I wanted to hire a theatre documentarian to just document the show so that it didn't disappear, like you were saying before about live performance. But one of the people I talked to actually ended up being an artistic filmmaker, as opposed to a documentarian. She watched the archival footage, just a single camera of the show, and said, “I don't think you should do this again and film it with three cameras. I think you should make it into a feature film. And in fact, I think maybe I should direct it, because there's all this music in it and I also direct music videos.” We had this kind of mind meld. Joanna: Mm. Alicia: I never intended to make a film, but she is a visionary director and I had this piece of IP essentially, and all the music and the writing. We adapted it together. We did it here in Portland. We did all the fundraising ourselves. We did not interface with Hollywood really. I think that would be, I just can't imagine. I love Hollywood, but I'm not really connected, and I can't imagine waiting for someone to give us permission or a green light to make this. It was experimental and indie, so we just really did it on the cheap. We had an amazing producer who helped us figure out how to do it with the budget that we had. We worked really hard fundraising, crowdfunding, asking for donations, having parties to raise money, and then we just did it and put it out there. I think my main advice—and I hear this a lot on screenwriting podcasts—is just make the thing. Make something, as opposed to trying to get permission to make something. Because unless you're already in that system, it's going to be really hard to get permission to make it. Once you make something, that leads to something else, which leads to something else. So even if it's a very short thing, or even if it's filmed on your phone, just actually make the thing. That turned out to be the right thing for us. Joanna: Yes, I mean, I feel like that is what underpins us as independent creatives in general. As an independent author, I feel the same way. I'm never asking permission to put a book in the world. No, thank you. Alicia: Exactly. We have a vision and we do it. It's harder in some ways, but that liberation of being able to really fully create our vision without having to compromise it or wait for permission, I think it's such a beautiful thing. Joanna: Well, we're almost out of time, but I do want to ask you about creative confidence. Alicia: Hmm. Joanna: I feel I'm getting a lot of sense about this at the moment, with all the AI stuff that's happening. When you've been creating a long time, like you and I have, we know our voice and we can lean into our voice. We are creatively confident. We'll fail a lot, but we'll just push on and try things and see what happens. Newer creators are struggling with this kind of confidence. How do I know what is my voice? How do I know what I like? How do I lean into this? So give us some thoughts about how to find your voice and how to find that creative confidence if you don't feel you have it. Alicia: I love that. One thing I will say is that I always think whatever is arising is powerful material to create from. So if a lack of confidence is arising, that's a really powerful feeling to directly explore and not just try to ignore. Although sometimes one has to just ignore those feelings. But to actually explore that feeling, because AI can't have that, right? AI can't really feel a crisis of confidence, and humans can. So that's a gift that we have, those kinds of sensitivities. I think to go really deep into whatever is arising, including the sense that we don't have the right to be creating, or we're not good enough, or whatever it is. Then I always do come back to a quote. I think it might have been John Berryman, but I'm forgetting which poet said it. A younger poet said, “How will I ever know if I'm any good?” And this famous poet said something like—I'm paraphrasing—”You'll never know if you're any good. If you have to know, don't write.” That has been really liberating to me, actually. It sounds a little harsh, but it's been really liberating to just let go of a sense of “good enough.” There is no good enough. The great writers never know if they're good enough. Coming back to this idea of just making without permission—the practice of doing the thing is being a writer. Caring and trying to improve our craft, that's the best that we can have. There's never going to be a moment where we're like, yes, I've nailed this. I am truly a hundred per cent a writer and I have found my voice. Everything's always changing anyway. I would say, either go into those feelings or let those feelings be there. Give them a little tea. Tell them, okay, you're welcome to be here, but you don't get to drive the boat. And then return to the practice of making. Joanna: Absolutely. Great. So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online? Alicia: Everything is on my website, which is AliciaJo.com, and also on Instagram at @ohaliciajo. I'd love to say hello to anyone who's interested in similar topics. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Alicia. That was great. Alicia: Thank you. I love your podcast. I'm so grateful for all that you've given the writing world, Jo.The post Creative Confidence, Portfolio Careers, And Making Without Permission with Alicia Jo Rabins first appeared on The Creative Penn.

SLEERICKETS is a podcast about poetry and other intractable problems. My book Midlife now exists. Buy it here, or leave it a rating here or hereFor more SLEERICKETS, subscribe to SECRET SHOW, join the group chat, and send me a poem for Listener Crit!Leave the show a rating here (actually, just do it on your phone, it's easier). Thanks!Wear SLEERICKETS t-shirts and hoodies. They look good!SLEERICKETS is now on YouTube!For a frank, anonymous critique on SLEERICKETS, subscribe to the SECRET SHOW and send a poem of no more 25 lines to sleerickets [at] gmail [dot] com Some of the topics mentioned in this episode:– Pre-order Brian's book The Optimists! It's so good!– Let me know if you'd like a review copy of my forthcoming chapbook The Soft Black Stars: sleerickets [at] gmail [dot] com– Only Sing by John Berryman, ed. Shane McCrae– New and Collected Hell by Shane McCrae– Dream Song 26 by John Berryman– Dream Song 14 by John Berryman– Dream Song 29 by John Berryman– Dream Song: For Louis MacNeice by John Berryman– A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck by Greg Williamson– Cynara by Ernest Dowson– Shadow of the Colossus– Fallout– Fallout (TV series)– Robert Frost's original inaugural poem, Dedication– Democracy and Poetry by Robert Penn Warren– Fall of the Star High School Running Back by The Mountain GoatsFrequently mentioned names:– Joshua Mehigan– Shane McCrae– A. E. Stallings– Ryan Wilson– Morri Creech– Austin Allen– Jonathan Farmer– Zara Raab– Amit Majmudar– Ethan McGuire– Coleman Glenn– Chris Childers– Alexis Sears– JP Gritton– Alex Pepple– Ernie Hilbert– Joanna Pearson– Matt Wall– Steve Knepper – Helena Feder– David Yezzi– Victoria Moul– Katie Dozier & Tim Green– Tristram Fane SaundersOther Ratbag Poetry Pods:Poetry Says by Alice AllanI Hate Matt Wall by Matt WallVersecraft by Elijah Perseus BlumovRatbag Poetics By David Jalal MotamedAlice: In Future PostsBrian: @BPlatzerCameron: Minor TiresiasMatthew: sleerickets [at] gmail [dot] comMusic by ETRNLArt by Daniel Alexander Smith

Immerse yourself in captivating science fiction short stories, delivered daily! Explore futuristic worlds, time travel, alien encounters, and mind-bending adventures. Perfect for sci-fi lovers looking for a quick and engaging listen each day.

The best way to build a horrible search product? Don't ever measure anything against what a user wants.Search veterans Doug Turnbull (Led Search at Reddit + Shopify; Wrote Relevant Search + AI Powered Search) and John Berryman (Early Engineer on Github Copilot; Author of Relevant Search + Prompt Engineering for LLMs), join Hugo to talk about how to build Agentic Search Applications.We Discuss:* The evolution of information retrieval as it moves from traditional keyword search toward “agentic search“ and what this means for builders.* John's five-level maturity model (you can prototype today!) for AI adoption, moving from Trad Search to conversational AI to asynchronous research assistants that reason about result quality.* The Agentic Search Builders Playbook, including why and how you should “hand-roll” your own agentic loops to maintain control;* The importance of “revealed preferences” that LLM-judges often miss (evaluations must use real clickstream data to capture “revealed preferences” that semantic relevance alone cannot infer)* Patterns and Anti-Patterns for Agentic Search Applications* Learning and teaching Search in the Age of AgentsYou can find the full episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.You can also interact directly with the transcript here in NotebookLM: If you do so, let us know anything you find in the comments!

Immerse yourself in captivating science fiction short stories, delivered daily! Explore futuristic worlds, time travel, alien encounters, and mind-bending adventures. Perfect for sci-fi lovers looking for a quick and engaging listen each day.

We're really moving from a world where humans are authoring search queries and humans are executing those queries and humans are digesting the results to a world where AI is doing that for us.Jeff Huber, CEO and co-founder of Chroma, joins Hugo to talk about how agentic search and retrieval are changing the very nature of search and software for builders and users alike.We Discuss:* “Context engineering”, the strategic design and engineering of what context gets fed to the LLM (data, tools, memory, and more), which is now essential for building reliable, agentic AI systems;* Why simply stuffing large context windows is no longer feasible due to “context rot” as AI applications become more goal-oriented and capable of multi-step tasks* A framework for precisely curating and providing only the most relevant, high-precision information to ensure accurate and dependable AI systems;* The “agent harness”, the collection of tools and capabilities an agent can access, and how to construct these advanced systems;* Emerging best practices for builders, including hybrid search as a robust default, creating “golden datasets” for evaluation, and leveraging sub-agents to break down complex tasks* The major unsolved challenge of agent evaluation, emphasizing a shift towards iterative, data-centric approaches.You can also find the full episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.You can also interact directly with the transcript here in NotebookLM: If you do so, let us know anything you find in the comments!

Recorded by Shane McCrae for Poem-a-Day, a series produced by the Academy of American Poets. Published on December 7, 2025. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.poets.org⁠

Before Shakespeare became a literary icon, he was a working writer trying to earn a living in an emerging and often precarious new industry. In The Dream Factory: London's First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare, Daniel Swift explores the dream of making money from creating art, a dream shared by James Burbage, who built The Theatre, the first purpose-built commercial playhouse in London, and a young Shakespeare. Nobody had ever really done that before, with playwrights at the time notoriously poor. Swift shows that Shakespeare's creativity unfolded in a rapidly changing London where commercial theater was just beginning to take shape. The Theatre offered Shakespeare the stability, a close team of actors and cowriters, and the professional home that he needed to develop his craft. Swift reveals a playwright who was learning on the job and becoming the Shakespeare we know today. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published November 18, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. We had technical help from Hamish Brown in Stirling, Scotland, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services are provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc. Daniel Swift is an associate professor of English at Northeastern University, London. He is the author of books on Ezra Pound, William Shakespeare, and the poetry of the Second World War, and editor of John Berryman's The Heart Is Strange: New Selected Poems. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, New Statesman, and Harper's.

Recorded by staff of the Academy of American Poets for Poem-a-Day, a series produced by the Academy of American Poets. Published on June 14, 2025. ⁠⁠www.poets.org

Lewis Hyde is one of those contemporary authors whose work I think about a lot. He’s spent years reflecting on and writing about topics of great interest to me, like forgetting and forgiveness, but the true trademark of his work is how he processes concepts and describes them. He approaches his work like chasing a butterfly (a lifelong hobby of his), following the dips and curves of an idea until he’s satisfied. We talk about his revered books The Gift and A Primer for Forgetting, and what artists do or do not owe the world. And now that I know he took undergrad classes with John Berryman — the first favorite poet I ever had — I’m going to be thinking about his work, and his beautiful writing, even more. Follow me on Instagram at @davidduchovny. Stay up to date with Lemonada on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at @LemonadaMedia. Joining Lemonada Premium is a great way to support our shows and get bonus content. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. For a list of current sponsors and discount codes for this and every other Lemonada show, go to lemonadamedia.com/sponsors.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The confessional poets of the mid-20th century considered themselves a ‘doomed' generation, with a cohesive identity and destiny. Their intertwining personal lives were laid bare in their work, and Robert Lowell, John Berryman and Elizabeth Bishop returned repeatedly to the elegy to commemorate old friends and settle old scores.In this episode, Mark and Seamus turn to elegies for poets by poets, tracing the intricate connections between them. Lowell, Berryman and Bishop's work was offset by a deep commitment to the literary tradition, and Mark and Seamus identify their shared influences and anxieties.Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrldIn other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsldFind further reading in the LRB:Mark Ford: No One Else Can Take a Bath for Youhttps://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n07/mark-ford/no-one-else-can-take-a-bath-for-youKarl Miller: Some Names for Robert Lowellhttps://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n09/karl-miller/some-names-for-robert-lowellNicholas Everett: Two Americas and a Scotlandhttps://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v12/n18/nicholas-everett/two-americas-and-a-scotlandHelen Vendler: The Numinous Moosehttps://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v15/n05/helen-vendler/the-numinous-mooseGet the books: https://lrb.me/crbooklistNext episode: Self-elegies by Hardy, Larkin and Plath. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The panel reads John Berryman's "Eleven Addresses to the Lord" and considers the poems within the context of the author's biography and Judeo-Christian theology, with special emphasis on the distinction between God as abstraction and as embodied being.Continue reading

In this episode of Stories From The Hackery, we chat with Spencer Sharpe and Jack Parsons, two NSS graduates and lead software developers. We catch up on their journeys of transitioning from music to tech and explore the impact and utilization of generative AI tools in their current roles. They also share their insights on the evolving landscape of software development. Listen in for their advice on leveraging AI tools, maintaining code quality, and shaping a career in tech today. SHOW NOTES 00:00 Introduction to Stories from the Hackery 00:37 Meet the Guests: Spencer Sharpe and Jack Parsons 02:34 Musical Backgrounds and Career Shifts 9:52 Generative AI Tools and Productivity 17:31 Generative AI for Unit Testing 19:21 Quality and Context in AI-Generated Code 29:12 AI in Code Review 29:29 The Required Human Element 31:53 Training and Assessing Junior Developers 37:52 Resources for Learning to Use Generative AI 42:18 Advice for Aspiring Tech Professionals 44:06 The Future of Software Engineering 50:33 Technology Guilty Pleasures 52:19 Final Thoughts Links from the show: Nashville Software School: https://nashvillesoftwareschool.com How are NSS Alumni Using Generative AI Tools on the Job (Survey 2024): https://learn.nashvillesoftwareschool.com/blog/2024/06/26/how-are-nss-alumni-using-generative-ai-tools-on-the-job Ethan Mollick: 15 times to Use AI and 5 Not to https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/15-times-to-use-ai-and-5-not-to Prompt Engineering LLMs by John Berryman and Albert Ziegler https://www.amazon.com/Prompt-Engineering-LLMs-Model-Based-Applications/dp/1098156153/

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Poet, writer, and podcaster Andrew Wittstadt joins the pod to discuss the troubled life of the brilliant American poet John Berryman. Get the After Dark episode and more at patreon.com/artofdarkpod or substack.com/@artofdarkpod. x.com/AndrewWittstadt x.com/artofdarkpod x.com/bradkelly x.com/kautzmania […]

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"Out for a walk with Robert Lowell, Just me and him and my Bell & Howell" — John Berryman

It all goes around and around --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/jacob-davies2/support

It all goes around and around --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/jacob-davies2/support

The queens love to love you--but it didn't always start out like that. Stick around for our game: "Pulitzer Prize Winning Titles from an Alternate Universe."Please Support Breaking Form!Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.Buy our books:     Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.     James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.If you have library access, Ena Jung's 2015 article "The Breath of Emily Dickinson's Dashes" is worth the time.Watch Bill Murray read two of the more obscure Wallace Stevens poems here. Watch Jonathan Pryce read Wordsworth's "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge"Watch James Wright read some of his iconic poems, including "A Blessing" (at 33:15--he calls the poem "a description") here.John Ashbery's Flow Chart is a book-length poem comprising 4,794 lines, divided into six numbered chapters, each of which is further divided into sections or verse-paragraphs, varying in number from seven to 42. The sections vary in length from one or two lines, to seven pages. It includes at least one double-sestina (and one of them references oral sex between men).Hear Linda Gregg read and be interviewed in 1986 (~25 mins).Here's a quick book-trailer of C. Dale Young's The Halo, including a reading of one of the poems by Young.Listen to a few minutes of Archibald Macleish's Conquistador here.We can recommend Peter Maber's 2008 article about John Berryman's Dream Songs, "'So-called black': Reassessing John Berryman's Blackface Minstrelsy" as a good starting place to think about the racism in that book.Jazz Age poet, translator, and Poetry editor George Dillon was born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1906.At 24, Audrey Wurdemann is the youngest person to win the poetry Pulitzer (for Bright Ambush). Read a few poems here.Read Robert P. Tristram Coffin's poem "Messages"Here's Mark Strand reading "Sleeping With One Eye Open"We reference  Stevie Nicks (a Gemini) singing her iconic song "Landslide"Winner of the 1973 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, Robert Lowell's The Dolphin controversially  included letters from Elizabeth Hardwick (Lowell's former wife). The letters were sent to him after he left her for the English socialite and writer Caroline Blackwood. He was warned by many, among them Elizabeth Bishop, that “art just isn't worth that much.”

Poet, editor, translator, and critic Louis Simpson was born in Jamaica to Scottish and Russian parents. He moved to the United States when he was 17 to study at Columbia University. After his time in the army, and a brief period in France, Simpson worked as an editor in New York City before completing his PhD at Columbia. He taught at colleges such as Columbia University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.A contemporary of confessional poets like Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Sylvia Plath, Simpson's early work followed a familiar arc. In the New York Times Book Review, critic David Orr noted its highlights: “Simpson has followed a path lined with signposts sunk so deep in our nation's poetic terra firma that they've practically become part of the landscape. Those signposts declare that a poet born in or around the 1920s should (1) begin his career writing witty, ironic formal poems bearing the stamp of Eliot and Auden; then (2) abandon that formalism for a more 'natural' free verse approach, while (3) dabbling in surrealism; until (4) finally settling on social, conversational poems in the manner of a man speaking to men.” While Simpson's early books like The Arrivistes (1949) and A Dream of Governors (1959) show the influence of Auden, they also speak to his horrific experiences in World War II, where he served in the 101st Airborne Division and saw active duty in France, Belgium, and Germany. Simpson's intense formal control, at odds with the visceral details of soldiering, also earned him comparisons to Wilfred Owen. At the End of the Open Road (1963) won the Pulitzer Prize and marked a shift in Simpson's poetry as well. In this and later volumes, like Searching for the Ox (1976) and The Best Hour of the Night (1983), Simpson's simple diction and formally controlled verses reveal hidden layers of meaning.Simpson's lifelong expatriate status influenced his poetry, and he often uses the lives of ordinary Americans in order to critically investigate the myths the country tells itself. Though he occasionally revisits the West Indies of his childhood, he always keeps one foot in his adopted country. The outsider's perspective allows him to confront “the terror and beauty of life with a wry sense of humor and a mysterious sense of fate,” wrote Edward Hirsch of the Washington Post. Elsewhere Hirsch described Simpson's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, At the End of the Open Road (1963), as “a sustained meditation on the American character,” noting, “The moral genius of this book is that it traverses the open road of American mythology and brings us back to ourselves; it sees us not as we wish to be but as we are.” Collected Poems (1988) and There You Are (1995) focus on the lives of everyday citizens, using simple diction and narratives to expose the bewildering reality of the American dream. Poet Mark Jarman hailed Simpson as “a poet of the American character and vernacular.”A noted scholar and critic, Simpson published a number of literary studies, including Ships Going Into the Blue: Essays and Notes on Poetry (1994), The Character of the Poet (1986), and Three on the Tower: The Lives and Works of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams (1975). Simpson also penned a novel, Riverside Drive (1962), and the autobiographies The King My Father's Wreck (1994) and North of Jamaica (1972).Simpson's later work included The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems (2003), a collection that spans his 60-year career, and Struggling Times (2009). In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Simpson received numerous awards and accolades, including the Prix de Rome, the Columbia Medal for Excellence, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation. He was a finalist for the prestigious Griffin International Poetry Award, and his translation of Modern Poets of France: A Bilingual Anthology (1997) won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award.Simposon died in Setauket, New York in 2012.-bio via Poetry Foundation Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Today's poem is Dream Song 14 by John Berryman. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “I miss being bored. I miss idly sitting in a chair, looking out a window, wondering what next to do with myself. I want the feeling of time as an endless desert — nothing in sight, nothing on the horizon.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Revenge is best served at the end of a katana sword that your wife bought for you at the mall. Time to make some floured eggs. Suit up, ninja enthusiasts, because "New York Ninja" is a wild ride that takes us back to the glory days of 80s action cinema. This 2021 hidden gem, rescued from obscurity, brings us a delightful mix of a ridiculous plot, unintentionally funny fight scenes, an incredibly awesome music score, and an insane villain known as "The Plutonium Killer." Let's start with the plot – it's so over-the-top and absurd that you can't help but be entertained. From a vigilante ninja patrolling the mean streets of New York City to thwarting a nefarious plot involving plutonium man, the movie embraces every ninja cliché with open arms. The narrative is a rollercoaster of unexpected twists and turns, making it a nostalgic joy for fans of the genre. Now, let's talk about the unintentionally funny fight scenes. The choreography might not be as polished as modern martial arts films, but that's part of the charm. The exaggerated kicks, flips, and cheesy one-liners deliver a hefty dose of nostalgia, evoking memories of the martial arts classics we all secretly adore. It's as if the filmmakers decided to embrace the quirks of the 80s ninja genre, resulting in scenes that will leave you simultaneously cringing and laughing. The real star of "New York Ninja" is undoubtedly its incredible music score from Voyag3r. It's a synth-heavy, pulse-pounding masterpiece that perfectly complements the on-screen action. The music not only captures the essence of 80s cinema but elevates the overall viewing experience. Every ninja kick and punch is accentuated by a catchy beat, making you want to jump off your couch and join the action. And let's not forget about "The Plutonium Killer." Played with maniacal glee by the villain (and voiced by John Berryman), this character embodies everything we love about over-the-top antagonists from the 80s. From the flamboyant acting to the crazy makeup, The Plutonium Killer is a true highlight, leaving an indelible mark on the film's absurdity. "New York Ninja" is a delightful throwback that embraces its roots and unapologetically revels in the absurdity of 80s ninja cinema. It's a perfect blend of nostalgia and unintentional humor, with a killer soundtrack to boot. If you're in the mood for a film that doesn't take itself too seriously and transports you back to the golden era of ninja flicks, "New York Ninja" is a must-watch. Grab your popcorn, buckle your ninja headband, and prepare for a hilarious trip down memory lane.

Hosts Rob Starr and Chris Davey celebrate the Water Zone being named FeedSpot's #1 podcast on water with a review of highlights from 2023 including segments with Reese Tisdale and John Berryman from Bluefield Research who addressed national water trends; Innovyze President, David Totman regarding the challenges facing water utilities; and a range of fabulous guests representing climate science, irrigation technology, legislation, water supply, meteorology, education, manufacturing and more. Podcast Recorded on January 11, 2024

John Orley Allen Tate (November 19, 1899 – February 9, 1979) was a poet, critic, biographer, and novelist. Born and raised in Kentucky, he earned his BA from Vanderbilt University, where he was the only undergraduate to be admitted to the Fugitives, an informal group of Southern intellectuals that included John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Merrill Moore, and Robert Penn Warren. Tate is now remembered for his association with the Fugitives and Southern Agrarians, writers who critiqued modern industrial life by invoking romanticized versions of Southern history and culture. Tate's best-known poems, including “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” confronted the relationship between an idealized past and a present he believed was deficient in both faith and tradition. Despite his commitment to developing a distinctly Southern literature, Tate's many works frequently made use of classical referents and allusions; his early writing was profoundly influenced by French symbolism and the poetry and criticism of T.S. Eliot. During the 1940s and 1950s, Tate was an important figure in American letters as editor of the Sewanee Review and for his contributions to other midcentury journals such as the Kenyon Review. As a teacher, he influenced poets including Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Theodore Roethke, and he was friends with Hart Crane, writing the introduction to Crane's White Buildings (1926). From 1951 until his retirement in 1968, Tate was a professor of English at the University of Minnesota.In the decades that he was most active, Tate's “influence was prodigious, his circle of acquaintances immense,” noted Jones in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. James Dickey could write that Tate was more than a “Southern writer.” Dickey went on, “[Tate's] situation has certain perhaps profound implications for every man in every place and every time. And they are more than implications; they are the basic questions, the possible solutions to the question of existence. How does each of us wish to live his only life?”Allen Tate won numerous honors and awards during his lifetime, including the Bollingen Prize and a National Medal for Literature. He was the consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress and president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.-bio via Poetry Foundation Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Read by Terry Casburn Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Read by Terry Casburn Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

April 18, 2023 - "Dream Song #14" By John Berryman, Read By Kathryn Rovello by The Desmond-Fish Public Library & The Highlands Current, hosted by Ryan Biracree

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Bluefield Research is a team of analysts exclusively focused on water, wastewater and stormwater across global industrial and municipal sectors. Team members Reese Tisdale and John Berryman, join the show to discuss all the ways industry businesses, utilities and professionals are addressing the challenges and opportunities in water conservation. They also share insight on the future of proposed remedies to address the drought in the western U.S. Podcast recorded on January 5, 2023

On this edition of Radio Guy Reflections, we go back to last year to repeat a show about small market radio. Up first Ken Walker a former radio news director who made the unusual switch to newspaper. We also talk about serving the community. I was reminded that January 9 2023 a great radio tradition starts again. The Helping Hands Radio Auction has been a yearly tradition in Paris Tennessee for as long as I remember raising thousands of dollars each year for public service and charitable organization in Henry County. I talked with last years President John Berryman about the history of the event and how WTPR- AM gives airtime to support this yearly event.

The Catholic Culture Podcast Network sponsored a poetry reading session at the fourth biennial Catholic Imagination Conference, hosted by the University of Dallas. Thomas Mirus moderated this session on Sept. 30, 2022, introducing poets Paul Mariani, Frederick Turner, and James Matthew Wilson. Paul Mariani, University Professor Emeritus at Boston College, is the author of twenty-two books, including biographies of William Carlos Williams, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Hart Crane, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Wallace Stevens. He has published nine volumes of poetry, most recently All that Will be New, from Slant. He has also written two memoirs, Thirty Days and The Mystery of It All: The Vocation of Poetry in the Twilight of Modernism. His awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA and NEH. He is the recipient of the John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry and the Flannery O'Connor Lifetime Achievement Award. His poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, including Image, Poetry, Presence, The Agni Review, First Things, The New England Review, The Hudson Review, Tri-Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, and The New Criterion. Frederick Turner, Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities (emeritus) at the University of Texas at Dallas, was educated at Oxford University. A poet, critic, translator, philosopher, and former editor of The Kenyon Review, he has authored over 40 books, including The Culture of Hope, Genesis: An Epic Poem, Shakespeare's Twenty-First Century Economics, Natural Religion, and most recently Latter Days, with Colosseum Books. He has co-published several volumes of Hungarian and German poetry in translation, including Goethe's Faust, Part One. He has been nominated internationally over 40 times for the Nobel Prize for Literature and translated into over a dozen languages. James Matthew Wilson is Cullen Foundation Chair of English Literature and Founding Director of the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Saint Thomas, in Houston. He serves also as Poet-in-Residence of the Benedict XVI Institute for Sacred Music and Divine Worship, as Editor of Colosseum Books, and Poetry Editor of Modern Age magazine. He is the author of twelve books, including The Strangeness of the Good. His work has won the Hiett Prize, the Parnassus Prize, the Lionel Basney Award (twice), and the Catholic Media Book Award for Poetry.

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In this episode, I speak with the poet, critic, and biographer Paul Mariani, professor emeritus at Boston College. We discuss his new book, All that Will be New and his biography of Robert Lowell, The Lost Puritan. We discuss Lowell's life, poetry, and his struggle with the permanent things: religion, marriage, art, family. Given the influence of Hopkins on his early poems, I think this episode pairs well with episode 38 with Nick Ripatrazone. As always, I hope you enjoy our conversation. Paul Mariani is the University Professor of English emeritus at Boston College. He is the author of twenty books, including biographies of William Carlos Williams, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Hart Crane, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Wallace Stevens. He has published nine volumes of poetry: All That Will New, Ordinary Time, Epitaphs for the Journey, Deaths & Transfigurations, The Great Wheel, Salvage Operations: New & Selected Poems, Prime Mover, Crossing Cocytus, and Timing Devices. He is also the author of the spiritual memoir, Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius and The Mystery of It All: The Vocation of Poetry in the Twilight of Modernity. His awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim and the NEA and NEH. In September 2019, he was awarded the inaugural Flannery O'Connor Lifetime Achievement Award from the Catholic Imagination Conference at Loyola University, Chicago. Jennifer Frey is an associate professor of philosophy and Peter and Bonnie McCausland Faculty Fellow at the University of South Carolina. She is also a fellow of the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America and the Word on Fire Institute. Prior to joining the philosophy faculty at USC, she was a Collegiate Assistant Professor of Humanities at the University of Chicago, where she was a member of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts and an affiliated faculty in the philosophy department. She earned her Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, and her B.A. in Philosophy and Medieval Studies (with a Classics minor) at Indiana University, in Bloomington, Indiana. She has published widely on action, virtue, practical reason, and meta-ethics, and has recently co-edited an interdisciplinary volume, Self-Transcendence and Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Theology, and Psychology. Her writing has also been featured in Breaking Ground, First Things, Fare Forward, Image, Law and Liberty, The Point, and USA Today. She lives in Columbia, SC, with her husband, six children, and chickens. You can follow her on Twitter @ jennfrey. Sacred and Profane Love is a podcast in which philosophers, theologians, and literary critics discuss some of their favorite works of literature, and how these works have shaped their own ideas about love, happiness, and meaning in human life. Host Jennifer A. Frey is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina. The podcast is generously supported by The Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America and produced by Catholics for Hire.

In this episode, I speak with the poet, critic, and biographer Paul Mariani, professor emeritus at Boston College. We discuss his new book, All that Will be New and his biography of Robert Lowell, The Lost Puritan. We discuss Lowell's life, poetry, and his struggle with the permanent things: religion, marriage, art, family. Given the influence of Hopkins on his early poems, I think this episode pairs well with episode 38 with Nick Ripatrazone. As always, I hope you enjoy our conversation. Paul Mariani is the University Professor of English emeritus at Boston College. He is the author of twenty books, including biographies of William Carlos Williams, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Hart Crane, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Wallace Stevens. He has published nine volumes of poetry: All That Will New, Ordinary Time, Epitaphs for the Journey, Deaths & Transfigurations, The Great Wheel, Salvage Operations: New & Selected Poems, Prime Mover, Crossing Cocytus, and Timing Devices. He is also the author of the spiritual memoir, Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius and The Mystery of It All: The Vocation of Poetry in the Twilight of Modernity. His awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim and the NEA and NEH. In September 2019, he was awarded the inaugural Flannery O'Connor Lifetime Achievement Award from the Catholic Imagination Conference at Loyola University, Chicago. Sacred and Profane Love is a podcast in which philosophers, theologians, and literary critics discuss some of their favorite works of literature, and how these works have shaped their own ideas about love, happiness, and meaning in human life. Host Jennifer A. Frey is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina. The podcast is generously supported by The Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America and produced by Catholics for Hire.

Dr. Ben Myers is a poet, a professor, and the director of the Honors Program at Oklahoma Baptist University. Josh and Ben discuss why poetry matters; they read some favorite poems (including the John Berryman poem that forms the title of this episode), and they discuss how the Christian story provides a framework for discerning beauty and good art. Ben Myers is the author of A Poetics of Orthodoxy: Christian Truth as Aesthetic Foundation.

What are we doing when we pray? In the second episode of the second season, John, David, and Simeon venture a few theories (and a bunch of stories). Referenced and recommended resources include: Quotations: Frank Lake's Clinical Theology (https://mbird.com/psychology/frank-lake-and-the-paradox-of-prayer/), The Long Text of Julian of Norwich (Chapter 43), "Eleven Addresses to the Lord" by John Berryman (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48948/eleven-addresses-to-the-lord) Books and Literature: Help Thanks Wow (https://amzn.to/3AwCh3m) by Anne Lamott, The Lord's Prayer (https://amzn.to/3yOlYxH) by Wesley Hill, Lit (https://amzn.to/3am2Ai1) by Mary Karr, Augustine's Confessions (https://amzn.to/3P76Gt6), Showings (https://amzn.to/3PfXKSt) by Julian of Norwich, The Collects of Thomas Cranmer (https://amzn.to/3OSEc6O) by Paul Zahl and Frederick Barbee, "Collect for the Fourth Sunday After Easter" (https://www.churchofengland.org/prayer-and-worship/worship-texts-and-resources/book-common-prayer/collects-epistles-and-gospels-38), "For the Time Being" (https://amzn.to/3OKfHsl) by WH Auden Movies: The Apostle _(1997), _Little Boy (2015) Artwork: Das Vaterunser (https://www.moma.org/collection/works/71662) by Max Pechstein Songs: “10 9 8 7” by Armand Duchies, “Dervish Chant” by African Head Charge, “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want” by The Smiths, “Come Talk to Me” by Peter Gabriel, “Make The Woman Love Me” by Dion, “Cleopatra” (JAZ edit 2), "Acid Rain" by Galaxy II Orchestra, “Talk to the Lord” by Natalie Bergman, “Let Us Pray” by Elvis Presley, “You Are My Dream” by Kamagni, “Lords Prayer” by Marvin Gaye, “Our Prayer” by The Beach Boys, “I Pray” by Blossom Child Click here (https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2ZEDD3kbdFeuBjrMIhWi1V?si=058bfc64dedc426d) to listen to a playlist of the available tracks on Spotify.

NB: Here is the link to the SLEERICKETS Secret Show. Go and see! Thanks.Some of the topics mentioned in this episode:– Terror and Black Sun by Toby Martinez de las Rivas– from “Titan/All Is Well” by Toby Martinez de las Rivas– Black Sun: An Interview with Toby Martinez de las Rivas by Lucy Mercer– On the Pale Sun of Toby Martinez de las Rivas by Dave Coates– The Black Sun Notebooks: 1. Owning the Post-Libs by Giacbelolli– Fishing for Fascists: A Letter to Dave Coates by Chris Edgoose– A Response by Toby Martinez de las Rivas– Poetry and Fascism: Dave Coats v. Toby Martinez de las Rivas by Rob A. Mackenzie– Eleven Addresses to the Lord by John Berryman– 90 North Randall Jarrell– in that the Soul standeth: Randall Jarrell's 90 North and John Berryman's A Prayer for the Self by Toby Martinez de las RivasTwitter: @sleerickets, @BPlatzer, @poetry_saysEmail: sleerickets [at] gmail [dot] comEratosphere: W T ClarkMusic by ETRNLArt by Daniel Alexander Smith

Poet Jason Gallagher goes deep and things get dark as we delve into the life and work of major mid-century American poet John Berryman. And listen to the After Dark episode for Patreon subscribers at: patreon.com/artofdarkpod instagram.com/gallagherjason twitter.com/artofdarkpod twitter.com/bradkelly twitter.com/kevinkautzman https://youtu.be/t2PbaeBGN3s

Consider supporting Human Voices Wake us by clicking here. Another two part episode: In the first part, quotations on creativity come from Toni Morrison, Richard Wilbur, John Berryman, and T. S. Eliot. In the second part (starting at 24:17), I read selections from Walt Whitman's earliest reviewers. The full text of these reviews can be found in Gary Schmidgall's Selected Poems of Walt Whitman. The two pocket books of Whitman's poetry that I mention at the end are The Selected Long Poems and The Selected Short Poems. Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com. I assume that the small amount of work presented in each episode constitutes fair use. Publishers, authors, or other copyright holders who would prefer to not have their work presented here can also email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com, and I will remove the episode immediately. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/support

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Today we are joined by a god friend of mine and a who did mornings with me at WTPR- AM in Pars Tennessee, I was program director and he was the news director. After ten years in radio he made the switch to being a news reporter for the Paris P.I. newspaper. We discuss how writing news is different for radio and newspaper and how social media is changing both. I will also be talking to John Berryman the president of a public service group called the Helping Hands and how they use radio to raise money for service organizations in Henry County Tennessee. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

A sense of Western disunity has existed for quite a long time, ranging from Brexit to the EU's internal divisions and the trans-Atlantic rift created by former US President Donald Trump. After war broke out between Russia and Ukraine, why is there perceived western solidarity? Host Ding Heng is joined by Professor Ronald Grigor Suny at University of Michigan; Dr. John Berryman at Birkbeck, University of London; Chen Shirong, Managing Editor of Foremost 4 Media and China Report magazine.

In another of Succession's trademark bad vacations, "Chiantishire" moves the season's plot, and maybe Kendall, towards an endgame. Anna Golez joins the Fly Guys to discuss the direction of Mark Mylod, new Nicholas Britell cues, the season's theme of historical change, Greek tragedy, deadbeat dads spanning multiple generations, Peter Munion, Kendall's fate, water imagery, John Berryman, podcasts, the Roys as analogues for the Kennedys, Shiv and Tom renegotiating their relationship, Roman's sicko moment, Logan's prejudices, Connor's proposal, Greg's flailing storyline, Lukas Matsson's true motives, and more. Anna Golez is the proprietor of no context Succession (Twitter: @nocontextroyco) who you can find tweeting even more about Succession at @waystarceo. Emily VanDerWerff on the episode's final shot: https://www.vox.com/culture/2021/12/7/22822667/succession-episode-8-season-3-chiantishire-kendall-recap-dead Jesse Armstrong on the season 2 finale and John Berryman: https://www.vulture.com/2019/10/succession-season-2-finale-jesse-armstrong.html RoyCast is a passion project and we incur minor ongoing expenses related to producing and hosting the podcast. However, we have no intention of paywalling the show. For those who would like to support you can do so here: https://roycast.square.site/

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On this episode Katie and her husband Chris dive into the poetry of John Berryman, discussing his famous Dream Songs as well as his beautiful late poetry (11 Addresses to the Lord).    "Master of beauty, craftsman of the snowflake, inimitable contriver, endower of Earth so gorgeous & different from the boring Moon, thank you for such as it is my gift.   I have made up a morning prayer to you containing with precision everything that most matters. ‘According to Thy will' the thing begins. It took me off & on two days. It does not aim at eloquence.   You have come to my rescue again & again in my impassable, sometimes despairing years. You have allowed my brilliant friends to destroy themselves and I am still here, severely damaged, but functioning.   Unknowable, as I am unknown to my guinea pigs: how can I ‘love' you? I only as far as gratitude & awe confidently & absolutely go."   More at: www.bornofwonder.com    11 Addresses to the Lord: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48948/eleven-addresses-to-the-lord    Tonight by Sibylle Baier  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY_F0mPq7ec