Podcasts about Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur was born in New York City on March 1, 1921 and studied at Amherst College before serving in the U.S. Army during World War II. He later attended Harvard University.Wilbur's first book of poems, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (Reynal & Hitchcock) was published in 1947. Since then, he has published several books of poems, including Anterooms: New Poems and Translations (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010); Collected Poems, 1943–2004 (Harvest Books, 2004); Mayflies: New Poems and Translations (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000); New and Collected Poems (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), which won the Pulitzer Prize; The Mind-Reader: New Poems (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976); Walking to Sleep: New Poems and Translations (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969); Advice to a Prophet and Other Poems (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961); Things of This World (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; and Ceremony and Other Poems (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1950).Wilbur also published numerous translations of French plays—specifically those of the seventeenth century French dramatists Molière and Jean Racine—as well as poetry by Paul Valéry, François Villon, Charles Baudelaire, Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky, and others. Wilbur is also the author of several books for children and a few collections of prose pieces, and has edited such books as Poems of Shakespeare (Penguin Books, 1966) and The Complete Poems of Poe (Dell Publishing Company, 1959).About Wilbur's poems, one reviewer for the Washington Post said, “Throughout his career Wilbur has shown, within the compass of his classicism, enviable variety. His poems describe fountains and fire trucks, grasshoppers and toads, European cities and country pleasures. All of them are easy to read, while being suffused with an astonishing verbal music and a compacted thoughtfulness that invite sustained reflection.”Among Wilbur's honors are the Wallace Stevens Award, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Frost Medal, the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two Bollingen Prizes, the T. S. Eliot Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Ford Foundation Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Memorial Award, the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award, the National Arts Club medal of honor for literature, two PEN translation awards, the Prix de Rome Fellowship, and the Shelley Memorial Award. He was elected a chevalier of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques and is a former poet laureate of the United States.Wilbur served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1961 to 1995. He died on October 15, 2017 in Belmont, Massachusetts.-bio via Academy of American Poets Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Join me in welcoming Hélène Cardona, poet, actor, translator, dream analyst, and linguist. Today's episode is a conversation and a beautiful reading from her Life in Suspension (Salmon Poetry), “a vivid self-portrait as scholar, seer and muse” as John Ashbery, tells us. Cardona is author of Dreaming My Animal Selves (Salmon Poetry), described by David Mason as “liminal, mystical and other-worldly,” adding, “this is a poet who writes in a rare light.” Hailed as visionary by Richard Wilbur, Cardona's luminous poetry explores consciousness, the power of place,and ancestral roots. It is poetry of alchemy and healing, a gateway to the unconscious and the dream world. For today's podcast, we look at Life In Suspension, but she has promised to be back and we will enjoy her reading from Dreaming My Animal Selves. Hélène has authored the translations The Abduction (Maram Al-Masri, White Pine Press), Birnam Wood (José Manuel Cardona, Salmon Poetry), Beyond Elsewhere (Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac, White Pine Press), Ce que nous portons (Dorianne Laux, Éditions du Cygne), and Walt Whitman's Civil War Writings (University of Iowa). She is the recipient of over 20 awards & honors, including the Independent Press Award, a Hemingway Grant and an Albertine and FACE Foundation Prize. Her work has been translated into 19 languages. She wrote her thesis on Henry James for her MA in American Literature from the Sorbonne, received fellowships from the Goethe-Institut and Universidad Internacional de Andalucía, worked as a translator/interpreter for the Canadian Embassy, and taught at Hamilton College and Loyola Marymount University. She is a member of the Parlement des écrivaines francophones. Enjoy!

In this episode, home care nurse and educator BethAnn Freed Cohen discusses the bimbo, or ditz, character in Sondheim musicals. We also talk about the song "Glitter and Be Gay" from the 1956 Leonard Bernstein, Richard Wilbur, and Lillian Hellman musical Candide. You can write to scenetosong@gmail.com with a comment or question about an episode or about musical theater, or if you'd like to be a podcast guest. Follow on Instagram at @ScenetoSong, on X/Twitter at @SceneSong, and on Facebook at “Scene to Song with Shoshana Greenberg Podcast.” And be sure to sign up for the new monthly e-newsletter at scenetosong.substack.com. Contribute to the Patreon. The theme music is by Julia Meinwald. Music played in this episode: "Could I Leave You" from Follies "Lovely" from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum "That'll Show Him" from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum "Barcelona" from Company "Everybody Loves Louis" from Sunday in the Park with George "Glitter and Be Gay" from Candide

In February 1952, Barbara (Cohen) Holdridge and Marianne (Roney) Mantell, two recent graduates of Hunter college, founded Caedmon records, the first label devoted to recording spoken word. In this episode, producers Michelle Levy and Maya Schwartz revisit the early history of Caedmon records. They pay tribute to Holdridge and Mantell by re-listening to two poems from the Caedmon Treasury of Modern Poets Reading, first released in 1957 from and now held in SFU's Special Collections. Michelle discusses Robert Frost's recording of “After Apple Picking” with Professor Susan Wolfson, of Princeton University, and Maya chats with Professor Stephen Collis, of SFU's English department, about William Carlos Williams' reading of “The Seafarer.” As they listen to the poems together, they debate what it means to listen to as opposed to read these poems, with the recordings providing what Holdridge described as a “third-dimensional depth, that a two-dimensional book lacked.”Featured graphic credit: photographs by Phillip A. Harrington, courtesy of Evan HarringtonWorks CitedOnion, Charlie. “Caedmon Spoken-Word Recordings go Digital.” Wag: a magazine for decadent readers, June 2002, http://www.thewag.net/books/caedmon.htm. Accessed 14 Nov. 2023.“Caedmon: Recreating the Moment of Inspiration.” NPR, December 2002, https://www.npr.org/2002/12/05/866406/caedmon-recreating-the-moment-of-inspiration. Accessed 14 Nov. 2023.“Caedmon.” HarperCollins.com. https://www.harpercollins.com/pages/caedmon. Accessed 14 Nov. 2023.“Caedmon Treasury of Modern Poets Reading: Gertrude Stein, Archibald MacLeish, E.E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, William Empson, Stephen Spender, Conrad Aiken, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Richard Eberhart, Ezra Pound, and Richard Wilbur reading #604.” n.d. Sound recording. MSC199 #604.. Simon Fraser University Sound Recordings Collection, Simon Fraser University Archives, Burnaby, B.C. November, 2023.“Mattiwilda Dobbs – Bizet: FAIR MAIDEN OF PERTH, HIgh F, 1956 ” Youtube, uploaded by Songbirdwatcher, June 14, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/clip/UgkxZZtxM8ykam-Rml9Q7ij4J2OIWLrx3lUB. Etude 8 Dimitri by Blue Dot SessionsFrost, Robert. “After Apple-Picking.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44259/after-apple-picking. Accessed 30 January 2024.“File:Mattiwilda Dobbs 1957.JPEG.” Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mattiwilda_Dobbs_1957.JPG. Accessed 14 February 2024.Harrington, Philip A. “[Marianne Roney and Barbara Cohen of Caedmon Publishing Company pushing a wheelbarrow full of boxes of their recordings of modern literature in New York City]”. December, 1953.“How two young women captured the voices of literary greats and became audiobook pioneers.” Writers and Company. CBC, July, 2023. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/writersandcompany/how-two-young-women-captured-the-voices-of-literary-greats-1.6912133. Accessed 14 Nov. 2023.“January 20, 1961 - Poet Robert Frost Reads Poem at John F. Kennedy's Inauguration.” Youtube, uploaded by Helmer Reenberg, January 15, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AILGO3gVlTU.“Oread.” H.D. Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48186/oread. Accessed 30, January 2024.“The Caedmon Treasury of Modern Poets Reading 2LP Caedmon TC 2006 Vinyl Record.” Boundless Goodz, https://www.ebay.com/itm/374791681072?itmmeta=01HPJMRA2M8G311HNSS83Q5Z2G&hash=item5743533430:g:ESgAAOSwdLVkomcL&itmprp=enc%3AAQAIAAAA8OcrOX8GrjGcCKd73gETrLCg9HgtTomQcdBFQsfuKIbZJCerwOPQAP8v95zLuLDTLfzKCEpHr6ciRZXXlKA1iJKJQIZBNBP68Ru6LBfSoa%2FfPEP7%2Fa%2BIRslUZ5i2RDM4SZwOC2l6XlwBx5qb9ihywjJIDK71WKdGDo8mhOnddK0NPBgnn26N5JH6N9DSuSkFkjy7BoQeE7hzXcLV76vAmN2Q6IKkpjLN5l%2B4M36eDSYpXhiFfxsmyok%2Bn1aYfEds46k8%2FfPX0doDJv7qXPKwVi5g99nrSnyZ95AdrCWpR3Tj3%2FkxYp0wlrb2dQ%2F%2FuEaktQ%3D%3D%7Ctkp%3ABFBMwHh1LRj. Accessed 14 February 2024.Williams, Williams Carlos. “The Seafarer.” University of Washington, http://www.visions05.washington.edu/poetry/details.jsp?id=18. Accessed 30 January, 2024.

Today's poem comes from one of America's most beloved and decorated poets, Richard Wilbur. Don't be put off by the title; no matter the subject, Wilbur's poetry is always so marvelously companionable–desert island reading if ever there was. Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to Season 03 Episode 11 - the "Winter Winds" edition - of Notes from the Aisle Seat, the podcast featuring news and information about the arts in northern Chautauqua County NY, sponsored by the 1891 Fredonia Opera House. Your host is Tom Loughlin, SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor and Chair Emeritus of Theatre and Dance at SUNY Fredonia. Guests on this episode include: Lucas Cochran, James Harrington and Ashley Zielizinski from Opera Scenes, produced by the SUNY Fredonia Student Opera Theatre Association; Cameron Bonanno, Delaney Gruber and Dylan Janish from Edges: A Song Cycle, produced by the Department of Theatre and Dance at SUNY Fredonia; and Drs. Vernon Huff and Stephen Gusukuma from Fredonia Choral Festival. Notes from the Aisle Seat is available from most of your favorite podcast sites, including Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, Spotify, and Amazon Prime Music, as well as on the Opera House YouTube Channel. If you enjoy this podcast, please spread the word through your social media feeds, give us a link on your website, and consider becoming a follower by clicking the "Follow" button in the upper right-hand corner of our home page. If you have an arts event you'd like to publicize, hit us up at operahouse@fredopera.org and let us know what you have! Please give us at least one month's notice to facilitate timely scheduling. Thanks for listening! Time Stamps Opera Scenes 02:48 Edges  19:55 Arts Calendar 40:48 Drs. Vernon Huff and Stephen Gusukuma/Choral Festival  43:19 Media "Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind (When Icicles Hang)"; John Rutter, composer; performed by The Chamber Singers, John Rutter, conductor; from the album Fancies, March 14, 2019 "With Drooping Wings", from the opera Dido and Aeneas, H. Purcell, composer (July 1668), performed by Ricercar Consort & Collegium Vocale Gent, Philippe Pierlot, conductor; July 2010 "Lying There" from the musical Edges: A Song Cycle; B. Pasik and J. Paul, composers; performed by Rachel Krah, Oct. 2019 Etude Op. 25 No. 11 (Winter Wind); Frédérick Chopin, composer; performed by Tae-Seung Park, Nov. 2018 At The Spring Dawn; Andrea Ramsey, composer; text by Angelina Weld Grimké; performed by Hal Leonard Choral, June 2023 "Make Our Garden Grow," from the operetta Candide; Leonard Bernstein, composer, with book by Lillian Hellman and Hugh Wheeler; lyrics by Richard Wilbur et.al; performed by the NY Philharmonic Orchestra, featuring Aaron Tveit as Candide, Laura Osnes as Cunegonde, and the Westminster Festival Chorus; December 31, 2017 Artist Links Student Opera Theatre Association Facebook Department of Theatre and Dance SUNY Fredonia Dr. Vernon Huff and Dr. Stephen Gusukuma BECOME AN OPERA HOUSE MEMBER!      

Ring out the old year with one of The Daily Poem's favorite poets–Richard Wilbur. Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

For Demi. ‘And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating / Of dark habits, / keeping their difficult balance.' This week, Sally has been living with Richard Wilbur's ‘Love Calls Us to the Things of the World', and reflecting on living with pain. Balance with her on the precipices we all exist on… The poem can be read here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43048/love-calls-us-to-the-things-of-this-world This episode was edited and produced by James Bowen. Special thanks to Andrew Smith, Violet Henderson, Kris Dyer, and Maeve Magnus.

Read by Terry Casburn

Episode 164 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "White Light/White Heat" and the career of the Velvet Underground. This is a long one, lasting three hours and twenty minutes. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, on "Why Don't You Smile Now?" by the Downliners Sect. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I say the Velvet Underground didn't play New York for the rest of the sixties after 1966. They played at least one gig there in 1967, but did generally avoid the city. Also, I refer to Cale and Conrad as the other surviving members of the Theater of Eternal Music. Sadly Conrad died in 2016. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Velvet Underground, and some of the avant-garde pieces excerpted run to six hours or more. I used a lot of resources for this one. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story by Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga is the best book on the group as a group. I also used Joe Harvard's 33 1/3 book on The Velvet Underground and Nico. Bockris also wrote one of the two biographies of Reed I referred to, Transformer. The other was Lou Reed by Anthony DeCurtis. Information on Cale mostly came from Sedition and Alchemy by Tim Mitchell. Information on Nico came from Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon by Richard Witts. I used Draw a Straight Line and Follow it by Jeremy Grimshaw as my main source for La Monte Young, The Roaring Silence by David Revill for John Cage, and Warhol: A Life as Art by Blake Gopnik for Warhol. I also referred to the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of the 2021 documentary The Velvet Underground.  The definitive collection of the Velvet Underground's music is the sadly out-of-print box set Peel Slowly and See, which contains the four albums the group made with Reed in full, plus demos, outtakes, and live recordings. Note that the digital version of the album as sold by Amazon for some reason doesn't include the last disc -- if you want the full box set you have to buy a physical copy. All four studio albums have also been released and rereleased many times over in different configurations with different numbers of CDs at different price points -- I have used the "45th Anniversary Super-Deluxe" versions for this episode, but for most people the standard CD versions will be fine. Sadly there are no good shorter compilation overviews of the group -- they tend to emphasise either the group's "pop" mode or its "avant-garde" mode to the exclusion of the other. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I begin this episode, there are a few things to say. This introductory section is going to be longer than normal because, as you will hear, this episode is also going to be longer than normal. Firstly, I try to warn people about potentially upsetting material in these episodes. But this is the first episode for 1968, and as you will see there is a *profound* increase in the amount of upsetting and disturbing material covered as we go through 1968 and 1969. The story is going to be in a much darker place for the next twenty or thirty episodes. And this episode is no exception. As always, I try to deal with everything as sensitively as possible, but you should be aware that the list of warnings for this one is so long I am very likely to have missed some. Among the topics touched on in this episode are mental illness, drug addiction, gun violence, racism, societal and medical homophobia, medical mistreatment of mental illness, domestic abuse, rape, and more. If you find discussion of any of those subjects upsetting, you might want to read the transcript. Also, I use the term "queer" freely in this episode. In the past I have received some pushback for this, because of a belief among some that "queer" is a slur. The following explanation will seem redundant to many of my listeners, but as with many of the things I discuss in the podcast I am dealing with multiple different audiences with different levels of awareness and understanding of issues, so I'd like to beg those people's indulgence a moment. The term "queer" has certainly been used as a slur in the past, but so have terms like "lesbian", "gay", "homosexual" and others. In all those cases, the term has gone from a term used as a self-identifier, to a slur, to a reclaimed slur, and back again many times. The reason for using that word, specifically, here is because the vast majority of people in this story have sexualities or genders that don't match the societal norms of their times, but used labels for themselves that have shifted in meaning over the years. There are at least two men in the story, for example, who are now dead and referred to themselves as "homosexual", but were in multiple long-term sexually-active relationships with women. Would those men now refer to themselves as "bisexual" or "pansexual" -- terms not in widespread use at the time -- or would they, in the relatively more tolerant society we live in now, only have been in same-gender relationships? We can't know. But in our current context using the word "homosexual" for those men would lead to incorrect assumptions about their behaviour. The labels people use change over time, and the definitions of them blur and shift. I have discussed this issue with many, many, friends who fall under the queer umbrella, and while not all of them are comfortable with "queer" as a personal label because of how it's been used against them in the past, there is near-unanimity from them that it's the correct word to use in this situation. Anyway, now that that rather lengthy set of disclaimers is over, let's get into the story proper, as we look at "White Light, White Heat" by the Velvet Underground: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "White Light, White Heat"] And that look will start with... a disclaimer about length. This episode is going to be a long one. Not as long as episode one hundred and fifty, but almost certainly the longest episode I'll do this year, by some way. And there's a reason for that. One of the questions I've been asked repeatedly over the years about the podcast is why almost all the acts I've covered have been extremely commercially successful ones. "Where are the underground bands? The alternative bands? The little niche acts?" The answer to that is simple. Until the mid-sixties, the idea of an underground or alternative band made no sense at all in rock, pop, rock and roll, R&B, or soul. The idea would have been completely counterintuitive to the vast majority of the people we've discussed in the podcast. Those musics were commercial musics, made by people who wanted to make money and to  get the largest audiences possible. That doesn't mean that they had no artistic merit, or that there was no artistic intent behind them, but the artists making that music were *commercial* artists. They knew if they wanted to make another record, they had to sell enough copies of the last record for the record company to make another, and that if they wanted to keep eating, they had to draw enough of an audience to their gigs for promoters to keep booking them. There was no space in this worldview for what we might think of as cult success. If your record only sold a thousand copies, then you had failed in your goal, even if the thousand people who bought your record really loved it. Even less commercially successful artists we've covered to this point, like the Mothers of Invention or Love, were *trying* for commercial success, even if they made the decision not to compromise as much as others do. This started to change a tiny bit in the mid-sixties as the influence of jazz and folk in the US, and the British blues scene, started to be felt in rock music. But this influence, at first, was a one-way thing -- people who had been in the folk and jazz worlds deciding to modify their music to be more commercial. And that was followed by already massively commercial musicians, like the Beatles, taking on some of those influences and bringing their audience with them. But that started to change around the time that "rock" started to differentiate itself from "rock and roll" and "pop", in mid 1967. So in this episode and the next, we're going to look at two bands who in different ways provided a model for how to be an alternative band. Both of them still *wanted* commercial success, but neither achieved it, at least not at first and not in the conventional way. And both, when they started out, went by the name The Warlocks. But we have to take a rather circuitous route to get to this week's band, because we're now properly introducing a strand of music that has been there in the background for a while -- avant-garde art music. So before we go any further, let's have a listen to a thirty-second clip of the most famous piece of avant-garde music ever, and I'll be performing it myself: [Excerpt, Andrew Hickey "4'33 (Cage)"] Obviously that won't give the full effect, you have to listen to the whole piece to get that. That is of course a section of "4'33" by John Cage, a piece of music that is often incorrectly described as being four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. As I've mentioned before, though, in the episode on "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", it isn't that at all. The whole point of the piece is that there is no such thing as silence, and it's intended to make the listener appreciate all the normal ambient sounds as music, every bit as much as any piece by Bach or Beethoven. John Cage, the composer of "4'33", is possibly the single most influential avant-garde artist of the mid twentieth century, so as we're properly introducing the ideas of avant-garde music into the story here, we need to talk about him a little. Cage was, from an early age, torn between three great vocations, all of which in some fashion would shape his work for decades to come. One of these was architecture, and for a time he intended to become an architect. Another was the religious ministry, and he very seriously considered becoming a minister as a young man, and religion -- though not the religious faith of his youth -- was to be a massive factor in his work as he grew older. He started studying music from an early age, though he never had any facility as a performer -- though he did, when he discovered the work of Grieg, think that might change. He later said “For a while I played nothing else. I even imagined devoting my life to the performance of his works alone, for they did not seem to me to be too difficult, and I loved them.” [Excerpt: Grieg piano concerto in A minor] But he soon realised that he didn't have some of the basic skills that would be required to be a performer -- he never actually thought of himself as very musical -- and so he decided to move into composition, and he later talked about putting his musical limits to good use in being more inventive. From his very first pieces, Cage was trying to expand the definition of what a performance of a piece of music actually was. One of his friends, Harry Hay, who took part in the first documented performance of a piece by Cage, described how Cage's father, an inventor, had "devised a fluorescent light source over which Sample" -- Don Sample, Cage's boyfriend at the time -- "laid a piece of vellum painted with designs in oils. The blankets I was wearing were white, and a sort of lampshade shone coloured patterns onto me. It looked very good. The thing got so hot the designs began to run, but that only made it better.” Apparently the audience for this light show -- one that predated the light shows used by rock bands by a good thirty years -- were not impressed, though that may be more because the Santa Monica Women's Club in the early 1930s was not the vanguard of the avant-garde. Or maybe it was. Certainly the housewives of Santa Monica seemed more willing than one might expect to sign up for another of Cage's ideas. In 1933 he went door to door asking women if they would be interested in signing up to a lecture course from him on modern art and music. He told them that if they signed up for $2.50, he would give them ten lectures, and somewhere between twenty and forty of them signed up, even though, as he said later, “I explained to the housewives that I didn't know anything about either subject but that I was enthusiastic about both of them. I promised to learn faithfully enough about each subject so as to be able to give a talk an hour long each week.” And he did just that, going to the library every day and spending all week preparing an hour-long talk for them. History does not relate whether he ended these lectures by telling the housewives to tell just one friend about them. He said later “I came out of these lectures, with a devotion to the painting of Mondrian, on the one hand, and the music of Schoenberg on the other.” [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte"] Schoenberg was one of the two most widely-respected composers in the world at that point, the other being Stravinsky, but the two had very different attitudes to composition. Schoenberg's great innovation was the creation and popularisation of the twelve-tone technique, and I should probably explain that a little before I go any further. Most Western music is based on an eight-note scale -- do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do -- with the eighth note being an octave up from the first. So in the key of C major that would be C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C: [demonstrates] And when you hear notes from that scale, if your ears are accustomed to basically any Western music written before about 1920, or any Western popular music written since then, you expect the melody to lead back to C, and you know to expect that because it only uses those notes -- there are differing intervals between them, some having a tone between them and some having a semitone, and you recognise the pattern. But of course there are other notes between the notes of that scale. There are actually an infinite number of these, but in conventional Western music we only look at a few more -- C# (or D flat), D# (or E flat), F# (or G flat), G# (or A flat) and A# (or B flat). If you add in all those notes you get this: [demonstrates] There's no clear beginning or end, no do for it to come back to. And Schoenberg's great innovation, which he was only starting to promote widely around this time, was to insist that all twelve notes should be equal -- his melodies would use all twelve of the notes the exact same number of times, and so if he used say a B flat, he would have to use all eleven other notes before he used B flat again in the piece. This was a radical new idea, but Schoenberg had only started advancing it after first winning great acclaim for earlier pieces, like his "Three Pieces for Piano", a work which wasn't properly twelve-tone, but did try to do without the idea of having any one note be more important than any other: [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Three Pieces for Piano"] At this point, that work had only been performed in the US by one performer, Richard Buhlig, and hadn't been released as a recording yet. Cage was so eager to hear it that he'd found Buhlig's phone number and called him, asking him to play the piece, but Buhlig put the phone down on him. Now he was doing these lectures, though, he had to do one on Schoenberg, and he wasn't a competent enough pianist to play Schoenberg's pieces himself, and there were still no recordings of them. Cage hitch-hiked from Santa Monica to LA, where Buhlig lived, to try to get him to come and visit his class and play some of Schoenberg's pieces for them. Buhlig wasn't in, and Cage hung around in his garden hoping for him to come back -- he pulled the leaves off a bough from one of Buhlig's trees, going "He'll come back, he won't come back, he'll come back..." and the leaves said he'd be back. Buhlig arrived back at midnight, and quite understandably told the strange twenty-one-year-old who'd spent twelve hours in his garden pulling the leaves off his trees that no, he would not come to Santa Monica and give a free performance. But he did agree that if Cage brought some of his own compositions he'd give them a look over. Buhlig started giving Cage some proper lessons in composition, although he stressed that he was a performer, not a composer. Around this time Cage wrote his Sonata for Clarinet: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Sonata For Clarinet"] Buhlig suggested that Cage send that to Henry Cowell, the composer we heard about in the episode on "Good Vibrations" who was friends with Lev Termen and who created music by playing the strings inside a piano: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] Cowell offered to take Cage on as an assistant, in return for which Cowell would teach him for a semester, as would Adolph Weiss, a pupil of Schoenberg's. But the goal, which Cowell suggested, was always to have Cage study with Schoenberg himself. Schoenberg at first refused, saying that Cage couldn't afford his price, but eventually took Cage on as a student having been assured that he would devote his entire life to music -- a promise Cage kept. Cage started writing pieces for percussion, something that had been very rare up to that point -- only a handful of composers, most notably Edgard Varese, had written pieces for percussion alone, but Cage was: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Trio"] This is often portrayed as a break from the ideals of his teacher Schoenberg, but in fact there's a clear continuity there, once you see what Cage was taking from Schoenberg. Schoenberg's work is, in some senses, about equality, about all notes being equal. Or to put it another way, it's about fairness. About erasing arbitrary distinctions. What Cage was doing was erasing the arbitrary distinction between the more and less prominent instruments. Why should there be pieces for solo violin or string quartet, but not for multiple percussion players? That said, Schoenberg was not exactly the most encouraging of teachers. When Cage invited Schoenberg to go to a concert of Cage's percussion work, Schoenberg told him he was busy that night. When Cage offered to arrange another concert for a date Schoenberg wasn't busy, the reply came "No, I will not be free at any time". Despite this, Cage later said “Schoenberg was a magnificent teacher, who always gave the impression that he was putting us in touch with musical principles,” and said "I literally worshipped him" -- a strong statement from someone who took religious matters as seriously as Cage. Cage was so devoted to Schoenberg's music that when a concert of music by Stravinsky was promoted as "music of the world's greatest living composer", Cage stormed into the promoter's office angrily, confronting the promoter and making it very clear that such things should not be said in the city where Schoenberg lived. Schoenberg clearly didn't think much of Cage's attempts at composition, thinking -- correctly -- that Cage had no ear for harmony. And his reportedly aggressive and confrontational teaching style didn't sit well with Cage -- though it seems very similar to a lot of the teaching techniques of the Zen masters he would later go on to respect. The two eventually parted ways, although Cage always spoke highly of Schoenberg. Schoenberg later gave Cage a compliment of sorts, when asked if any of his students had gone on to do anything interesting. At first he replied that none had, but then he mentioned Cage and said “Of course he's not a composer, but an inventor—of genius.” Cage was at this point very worried if there was any point to being a composer at all. He said later “I'd read Cowell's New Musical Resources and . . . The Theory of Rhythm. I had also read Chavez's Towards a New Music. Both works gave me the feeling that everything that was possible in music had already happened. So I thought I could never compose socially important music. Only if I could invent something new, then would I be useful to society. But that seemed unlikely then.” [Excerpt: John Cage, "Totem Ancestor"] Part of the solution came when he was asked to compose music for an abstract animation by the filmmaker Oskar Fischinger, and also to work as Fischinger's assistant when making the film. He was fascinated by the stop-motion process, and by the results of the film, which he described as "a beautiful film in which these squares, triangles and circles and other things moved and changed colour.” But more than that he was overwhelmed by a comment by Fischinger, who told him “Everything in the world has its own spirit, and this spirit becomes audible by setting it into vibration.” Cage later said “That set me on fire. He started me on a path of exploration of the world around me which has never stopped—of hitting and stretching and scraping and rubbing everything.” Cage now took his ideas further. His compositions for percussion had been about, if you like, giving the underdog a chance -- percussion was always in the background, why should it not be in the spotlight? Now he realised that there were other things getting excluded in conventional music -- the sounds that we characterise as noise. Why should composers work to exclude those sounds, but work to *include* other sounds? Surely that was... well, a little unfair? Eventually this would lead to pieces like his 1952 piece "Water Music", later expanded and retitled "Water Walk", which can be heard here in his 1959 appearance on the TV show "I've Got a Secret".  It's a piece for, amongst other things, a flowerpot full of flowers, a bathtub, a watering can, a pipe, a duck call, a blender full of ice cubes, and five unplugged radios: [Excerpt: John Cage "Water Walk"] As he was now avoiding pitch and harmony as organising principles for his music, he turned to time. But note -- not to rhythm. He said “There's none of this boom, boom, boom, business in my music . . . a measure is taken as a strict measure of time—not a one two three four—which I fill with various sounds.” He came up with a system he referred to as “micro-macrocosmic rhythmic structure,” what we would now call fractals, though that word hadn't yet been invented, where the structure of the whole piece was reflected in the smallest part of it. For a time he started moving away from the term music, preferring to refer to the "art of noise" or to "organised sound" -- though he later received a telegram from Edgard Varese, one of his musical heroes and one of the few other people writing works purely for percussion, asking him not to use that phrase, which Varese used for his own work. After meeting with Varese and his wife, he later became convinced that it was Varese's wife who had initiated the telegram, as she explained to Cage's wife "we didn't want your husband's work confused with my husband's work, any more than you'd want some . . . any artist's work confused with that of a cartoonist.” While there is a humour to Cage's work, I don't really hear much qualitative difference between a Cage piece like the one we just heard and a Varese piece like Ionisation: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] But it was in 1952, the year of "Water Music" that John Cage made his two biggest impacts on the cultural world, though the full force of those impacts wasn't felt for some years. To understand Cage's 1952 work, you first have to understand that he had become heavily influenced by Zen, which at that time was very little known in the Western world. Indeed he had studied with Daisetsu Suzuki, who is credited with introducing Zen to the West, and said later “I didn't study music with just anybody; I studied with Schoenberg, I didn't study Zen with just anybody; I studied with Suzuki. I've always gone, insofar as I could, to the president of the company.” Cage's whole worldview was profoundly affected by Zen, but he was also naturally sympathetic to it, and his work after learning about Zen is mostly a continuation of trends we can already see. In particular, he became convinced that the point of music isn't to communicate anything between two people, rather its point is merely to be experienced. I'm far from an expert on Buddhism, but one way of thinking about its central lessons is that one should experience things as they are, experiencing the thing itself rather than one's thoughts or preconceptions about it. And so at Black Mountain college came Theatre Piece Number 1: [Excerpt: Edith Piaf, "La Vie En Rose" ] In this piece, Cage had set the audience on all sides, so they'd be facing each other. He stood on a stepladder, as colleagues danced in and around the audience, another colleague played the piano, two more took turns to stand on another stepladder to recite poetry, different films and slides were projected, seemingly at random, onto the walls, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg played scratchy Edith Piaf records on a wind-up gramophone. The audience were included in the performance, and it was meant to be experienced as a gestalt, as a whole, to be what we would now call an immersive experience. One of Cage's students around this time was the artist Allan Kaprow, and he would be inspired by Theatre Piece Number 1 to put on several similar events in the late fifties. Those events he called "happenings", because the point of them was that you were meant to experience an event as it was happening rather than bring preconceptions of form and structure to them. Those happenings were the inspiration for events like The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, and the term "happening" became such an integral part of the counterculture that by 1967 there were comedy films being released about them, including one just called The Happening with a title track by the Supremes that made number one: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "The Happening"] Theatre Piece Number 1 was retrospectively considered the first happening, and as such its influence is incalculable. But one part I didn't mention about Theatre Piece Number 1 is that as well as Rauschenberg playing Edith Piaf's records, he also displayed some of his paintings. These paintings were totally white -- at a glance, they looked like blank canvases, but as one inspected them more clearly, it became apparent that Rauschenberg had painted them with white paint, with visible brushstrokes. These paintings, along with a visit to an anechoic chamber in which Cage discovered that even in total silence one can still hear one's own blood and nervous system, so will never experience total silence, were the final key to something Cage had been working towards -- if music had minimised percussion, and excluded noise, how much more had it excluded silence? As Cage said in 1958 “Curiously enough, the twelve-tone system has no zero in it.” And so came 4'33, the piece that we heard an excerpt of near the start of this episode. That piece was the something new he'd been looking for that could be useful to society. It took the sounds the audience could already hear, and without changing them even slightly gave them a new context and made the audience hear them as they were. Simply by saying "this is music", it caused the ambient noise to be perceived as music. This idea, of recontextualising existing material, was one that had already been done in the art world -- Marcel Duchamp, in 1917, had exhibited a urinal as a sculpture titled "Fountain" -- but even Duchamp had talked about his work as "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice". The artist was *raising* the object to art. What Cage was saying was "the object is already art". This was all massively influential to a young painter who had seen Cage give lectures many times, and while at art school had with friends prepared a piano in the same way Cage did for his own experimental compositions, dampening the strings with different objects. [Excerpt: Dana Gillespie, "Andy Warhol (live)"] Duchamp and Rauschenberg were both big influences on Andy Warhol, but he would say in the early sixties "John Cage is really so responsible for so much that's going on," and would for the rest of his life cite Cage as one of the two or three prime influences of his career. Warhol is a difficult figure to discuss, because his work is very intellectual but he was not very articulate -- which is one reason I've led up to him by discussing Cage in such detail, because Cage was always eager to talk at great length about the theoretical basis of his work, while Warhol would say very few words about anything at all. Probably the person who knew him best was his business partner and collaborator Paul Morrissey, and Morrissey's descriptions of Warhol have shaped my own view of his life, but it's very worth noting that Morrissey is an extremely right-wing moralist who wishes to see a Catholic theocracy imposed to do away with the scourges of sexual immorality, drug use, hedonism, and liberalism, so his view of Warhol, a queer drug using progressive whose worldview seems to have been totally opposed to Morrissey's in every way, might be a little distorted. Warhol came from an impoverished background, and so, as many people who grew up poor do, he was, throughout his life, very eager to make money. He studied art at university, and got decent but not exceptional grades -- he was a competent draughtsman, but not a great one, and most importantly as far as success in the art world goes he didn't have what is known as his own "line" -- with most successful artists, you can look at a handful of lines they've drawn and see something of their own personality in it. You couldn't with Warhol. His drawings looked like mediocre imitations of other people's work. Perfectly competent, but nothing that stood out. So Warhol came up with a technique to make his drawings stand out -- blotting. He would do a normal drawing, then go over it with a lot of wet ink. He'd lower a piece of paper on to the wet drawing, and the new paper would soak up the ink, and that second piece of paper would become the finished work. The lines would be fractured and smeared, broken in places where the ink didn't get picked up, and thick in others where it had pooled. With this mechanical process, Warhol had managed to create an individual style, and he became an extremely successful commercial artist. In the early 1950s photography was still seen as a somewhat low-class way of advertising things. If you wanted to sell to a rich audience, you needed to use drawings or paintings. By 1955 Warhol was making about twelve thousand dollars a year -- somewhere close to a hundred and thirty thousand a year in today's money -- drawing shoes for advertisements. He also had a sideline in doing record covers for people like Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Seventh Avenue Express"] For most of the 1950s he also tried to put on shows of his more serious artistic work -- often with homoerotic themes -- but to little success. The dominant art style of the time was the abstract expressionism of people like Jackson Pollock, whose art was visceral, emotional, and macho. The term "action paintings" which was coined for the work of people like Pollock, sums it up. This was manly art for manly men having manly emotions and expressing them loudly. It was very male and very straight, and even the gay artists who were prominent at the time tended to be very conformist and look down on anything they considered flamboyant or effeminate. Warhol was a rather effeminate, very reserved man, who strongly disliked showing his emotions, and whose tastes ran firmly to the camp. Camp as an aesthetic of finding joy in the flamboyant or trashy, as opposed to merely a descriptive term for men who behaved in a way considered effeminate, was only just starting to be codified at this time -- it wouldn't really become a fully-formed recognisable thing until Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on Camp" in 1964 -- but of course just because something hasn't been recognised doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and Warhol's aesthetic was always very camp, and in the 1950s in the US that was frowned upon even in gay culture, where the mainstream opinion was that the best way to acceptance was through assimilation. Abstract expressionism was all about expressing the self, and that was something Warhol never wanted to do -- in fact he made some pronouncements at times which suggested he didn't think of himself as *having* a self in the conventional sense. The combination of not wanting to express himself and of wanting to work more efficiently as a commercial artist led to some interesting results. For example, he was commissioned in 1957 to do a cover for an album by Moondog, the blind street musician whose name Alan Freed had once stolen: [Excerpt: Moondog, "Gloving It"] For that cover, Warhol got his mother, Julia Warhola, to just write out the liner notes for the album in her rather ornamental cursive script, and that became the front cover, leading to an award for graphic design going that year to "Andy Warhol's mother". (Incidentally, my copy of the current CD issue of that album, complete with Julia Warhola's cover, is put out by Pickwick Records...) But towards the end of the fifties, the work for commercial artists started to dry up. If you wanted to advertise shoes, now, you just took a photo of the shoes rather than get Andy Warhol to draw a picture of them. The money started to disappear, and Warhol started to panic. If there was no room for him in graphic design any more, he had to make his living in the fine arts, which he'd been totally unsuccessful in. But luckily for Warhol, there was a new movement that was starting to form -- Pop Art. Pop Art started in England, and had originally been intended, at least in part, as a critique of American consumerist capitalism. Pieces like "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" by Richard Hamilton (who went on to design the Beatles' White Album cover) are collages of found images, almost all from American sources, recontextualised and juxtaposed in interesting ways, so a bodybuilder poses in a room that's taken from an advert in Ladies' Home Journal, while on the wall, instead of a painting, hangs a blown-up cover of a Jack Kirby romance comic. Pop Art changed slightly when it got taken up in America, and there it became something rather different, something closer to Duchamp, taking those found images and displaying them as art with no juxtaposition. Where Richard Hamilton created collage art which *showed* a comic cover by Jack Kirby as a painting in the background, Roy Lichtenstein would take a panel of comic art by Kirby, or Russ Heath or Irv Novick or a dozen other comic artists, and redraw it at the size of a normal painting. So Warhol took Cage's idea that the object is already art, and brought that into painting, starting by doing paintings of Campbell's soup cans, in which he tried as far as possible to make the cans look exactly like actual soup cans. The paintings were controversial, inciting fury in some and laughter in others and causing almost everyone to question whether they were art. Warhol would embrace an aesthetic in which things considered unimportant or trash or pop culture detritus were the greatest art of all. For example pretty much every profile of him written in the mid sixties talks about him obsessively playing "Sally Go Round the Roses", a girl-group single by the one-hit wonders the Jaynettes: [Excerpt: The Jaynettes, "Sally Go Round the Roses"] After his paintings of Campbell's soup cans, and some rather controversial but less commercially successful paintings of photographs of horrors and catastrophes taken from newspapers, Warhol abandoned painting in the conventional sense altogether, instead creating brightly coloured screen prints -- a form of stencilling -- based on photographs of celebrities like Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and, most famously, Marilyn Monroe. That way he could produce images which could be mass-produced, without his active involvement, and which supposedly had none of his personality in them, though of course his personality pervades the work anyway. He put on exhibitions of wooden boxes, silk-screen printed to look exactly like shipping cartons of Brillo pads. Images we see everywhere -- in newspapers, in supermarkets -- were art. And Warhol even briefly formed a band. The Druds were a garage band formed to play at a show at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the opening night of an exhibition that featured a silkscreen by Warhol of 210 identical bottles of Coca-Cola, as well as paintings by Rauschenberg and others. That opening night featured a happening by Claes Oldenburg, and a performance by Cage -- Cage gave a live lecture while three recordings of his own voice also played. The Druds were also meant to perform, but they fell apart after only a few rehearsals. Some recordings apparently exist, but they don't seem to circulate, but they'd be fascinating to hear as almost the entire band were non-musician artists like Warhol, Jasper Johns, and the sculptor Walter de Maria. Warhol said of the group “It didn't go too well, but if we had just stayed on it it would have been great.” On the other hand, the one actual musician in the group said “It was kind of ridiculous, so I quit after the second rehearsal". That musician was La Monte Young: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] That's an excerpt from what is generally considered Young's masterwork, "The Well-Tuned Piano". It's six and a half hours long. If Warhol is a difficult figure to write about, Young is almost impossible. He's a musician with a career stretching sixty years, who is arguably the most influential musician from the classical tradition in that time period. He's generally considered the father of minimalism, and he's also been called by Brian Eno "the daddy of us all" -- without Young you simply *do not* get art rock at all. Without Young there is no Velvet Underground, no David Bowie, no Eno, no New York punk scene, no Yoko Ono. Anywhere that the fine arts or conceptual art have intersected with popular music in the last fifty or more years has been influenced in one way or another by Young's work. BUT... he only rarely publishes his scores. He very, very rarely allows recordings of his work to be released -- there are four recordings on his bandcamp, plus a handful of recordings of his older, published, pieces, and very little else. He doesn't allow his music to be performed live without his supervision. There *are* bootleg recordings of his music, but even those are not easily obtainable -- Young is vigorous in enforcing his copyrights and issues takedown notices against anywhere that hosts them. So other than that handful of legitimately available recordings -- plus a recording by Young's Theater of Eternal Music, the legality of which is still disputed, and an off-air recording of a 1971 radio programme I've managed to track down, the only way to experience Young's music unless you're willing to travel to one of his rare live performances or installations is second-hand, by reading about it. Except that the one book that deals solely with Young and his music is not only a dense and difficult book to read, it's also one that Young vehemently disagreed with and considered extremely inaccurate, to the point he refused to allow permissions to quote his work in the book. Young did apparently prepare a list of corrections for the book, but he wouldn't tell the author what they were without payment. So please assume that anything I say about Young is wrong, but also accept that the short section of this episode about Young has required more work to *try* to get it right than pretty much anything else this year. Young's musical career actually started out in a relatively straightforward manner. He didn't grow up in the most loving of homes -- he's talked about his father beating him as a child because he had been told that young La Monte was clever -- but his father did buy him a saxophone and teach him the rudiments of the instrument, and as a child he was most influenced by the music of the big band saxophone player Jimmy Dorsey: [Excerpt: Jimmy Dorsey, “It's the Dreamer in Me”] The family, who were Mormon farmers, relocated several times in Young's childhood, from Idaho first to California and then to Utah, but everywhere they went La Monte seemed to find musical inspiration, whether from an uncle who had been part of the Kansas City jazz scene, a classmate who was a musical prodigy who had played with Perez Prado in his early teens, or a teacher who took the class to see a performance of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra: [Excerpt: Bartok, "Concerto for Orchestra"] After leaving high school, Young went to Los Angeles City College to study music under Leonard Stein, who had been Schoenberg's assistant when Schoenberg had taught at UCLA, and there he became part of the thriving jazz scene based around Central Avenue, studying and performing with musicians like Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, and Eric Dolphy -- Young once beat Dolphy in an audition for a place in the City College dance band, and the two would apparently substitute for each other on their regular gigs when one couldn't make it. During this time, Young's musical tastes became much more adventurous. He was a particular fan of the work of John Coltrane, and also got inspired by City of Glass, an album by Stan Kenton that attempted to combine jazz and modern classical music: [Excerpt: Stan Kenton's Innovations Orchestra, "City of Glass: The Structures"] His other major musical discovery in the mid-fifties was one we've talked about on several previous occasions -- the album Music of India, Morning and Evening Ragas by Ali Akhbar Khan: [Excerpt: Ali Akhbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] Young's music at this point was becoming increasingly modal, and equally influenced by the blues and Indian music. But he was also becoming interested in serialism. Serialism is an extension and generalisation of twelve-tone music, inspired by mathematical set theory. In serialism, you choose a set of musical elements -- in twelve-tone music that's the twelve notes in the twelve-tone scale, but it can also be a set of tonal relations, a chord, or any other set of elements. You then define all the possible ways you can permute those elements, a defined set of operations you can perform on them -- so you could play a scale forwards, play it backwards, play all the notes in the scale simultaneously, and so on. You then go through all the possible permutations, exactly once, and that's your piece of music. Young was particularly influenced by the works of Anton Webern, one of the earliest serialists: [Excerpt: Anton Webern, "Cantata number 1 for Soprano, Mixed Chorus, and Orchestra"] That piece we just heard, Webern's "Cantata number 1", was the subject of some of the earliest theoretical discussion of serialism, and in particular led to some discussion of the next step on from serialism. If serialism was all about going through every single permutation of a set, what if you *didn't* permute every element? There was a lot of discussion in the late fifties in music-theoretical circles about the idea of invariance. Normally in music, the interesting thing is what gets changed. To use a very simple example, you might change a melody from a major key to a minor one to make it sound sadder. What theorists at this point were starting to discuss is what happens if you leave something the same, but change the surrounding context, so the thing you *don't* vary sounds different because of the changed context. And going further, what if you don't change the context at all, and merely *imply* a changed context? These ideas were some of those which inspired Young's first major work, his Trio For Strings from 1958, a complex, palindromic, serial piece which is now credited as the first work of minimalism, because the notes in it change so infrequently: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Trio for Strings"] Though I should point out that Young never considers his works truly finished, and constantly rewrites them, and what we just heard is an excerpt from the only recording of the trio ever officially released, which is of the 2015 version. So I can't state for certain how close what we just heard is to the piece he wrote in 1958, except that it sounds very like the written descriptions of it I've read. After writing the Trio For Strings, Young moved to Germany to study with the modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. While studying with Stockhausen, he became interested in the work of John Cage, and started up a correspondence with Cage. On his return to New York he studied with Cage and started writing pieces inspired by Cage, of which the most musical is probably Composition 1960 #7: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Composition 1960 #7"] The score for that piece is a stave on which is drawn a treble clef, the notes B and F#, and the words "To be held for a long Time". Other of his compositions from 1960 -- which are among the few of his compositions which have been published -- include composition 1960 #10 ("To Bob Morris"), the score for which is just the instruction "Draw a straight line and follow it.", and Piano Piece for David  Tudor #1, the score for which reads "Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. The performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself. If the former, the piece is over after the piano has been fed. If the latter, it is over after the piano eats or decides not to". Most of these compositions were performed as part of a loose New York art collective called Fluxus, all of whom were influenced by Cage and the Dadaists. This collective, led by George Maciunas, sometimes involved Cage himself, but also involved people like Henry Flynt, the inventor of conceptual art, who later became a campaigner against art itself, and who also much to Young's bemusement abandoned abstract music in the mid-sixties to form a garage band with Walter de Maria (who had played drums with the Druds): [Excerpt: Henry Flynt and the Insurrections, "I Don't Wanna"] Much of Young's work was performed at Fluxus concerts given in a New York loft belonging to another member of the collective, Yoko Ono, who co-curated the concerts with Young. One of Ono's mid-sixties pieces, her "Four Pieces for Orchestra" is dedicated to Young, and consists of such instructions as "Count all the stars of that night by heart. The piece ends when all the orchestra members finish counting the stars, or when it dawns. This can be done with windows instead of stars." But while these conceptual ideas remained a huge part of Young's thinking, he soon became interested in two other ideas. The first was the idea of just intonation -- tuning instruments and voices to perfect harmonics, rather than using the subtly-off tuning that is used in Western music. I'm sure I've explained that before in a previous episode, but to put it simply when you're tuning an instrument with fixed pitches like a piano, you have a choice -- you can either tune it so that the notes in one key are perfectly in tune with each other, but then when you change key things go very out of tune, or you can choose to make *everything* a tiny bit, almost unnoticeably, out of tune, but equally so. For the last several hundred years, musicians as a community have chosen the latter course, which was among other things promoted by Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, a collection of compositions which shows how the different keys work together: [Excerpt: Bach (Glenn Gould), "The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II: Fugue in F-sharp minor, BWV 883"] Young, by contrast, has his own esoteric tuning system, which he uses in his own work The Well-Tuned Piano: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] The other idea that Young took on was from Indian music, the idea of the drone. One of the four recordings of Young's music that is available from his Bandcamp, a 1982 recording titled The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath, consists of one hour, thirteen minutes, and fifty-eight seconds of this: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath"] Yes, I have listened to the whole piece. No, nothing else happens. The minimalist composer Terry Riley describes the recording as "a singularly rare contribution that far outshines any other attempts to capture this instrument in recorded media". In 1962, Young started writing pieces based on what he called the "dream chord", a chord consisting of a root, fourth, sharpened fourth, and fifth: [dream chord] That chord had already appeared in his Trio for Strings, but now it would become the focus of much of his work, in pieces like his 1962 piece The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, heard here in a 1982 revision: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer"] That was part of a series of works titled The Four Dreams of China, and Young began to plan an installation work titled Dream House, which would eventually be created, and which currently exists in Tribeca, New York, where it's been in continuous "performance" for thirty years -- and which consists of thirty-two different pure sine wave tones all played continuously, plus purple lighting by Young's wife Marian Zazeela. But as an initial step towards creating this, Young formed a collective called Theatre of Eternal Music, which some of the members -- though never Young himself -- always claim also went by the alternative name The Dream Syndicate. According to John Cale, a member of the group, that name came about because the group tuned their instruments to the 60hz hum of the fridge in Young's apartment, which Cale called "the key of Western civilisation". According to Cale, that meant the fundamental of the chords they played was 10hz, the frequency of alpha waves when dreaming -- hence the name. The group initially consisted of Young, Zazeela, the photographer Billy Name, and percussionist Angus MacLise, but by this recording in 1964 the lineup was Young, Zazeela, MacLise, Tony Conrad and John Cale: [Excerpt: "Cale, Conrad, Maclise, Young, Zazeela - The Dream Syndicate 2 IV 64-4"] That recording, like any others that have leaked by the 1960s version of the Theatre of Eternal Music or Dream Syndicate, is of disputed legality, because Young and Zazeela claim to this day that what the group performed were La Monte Young's compositions, while the other two surviving members, Cale and Conrad, claim that their performances were improvisational collaborations and should be equally credited to all the members, and so there have been lawsuits and countersuits any time anyone has released the recordings. John Cale, the youngest member of the group, was also the only one who wasn't American. He'd been born in Wales in 1942, and had had the kind of childhood that, in retrospect, seems guaranteed to lead to eccentricity. He was the product of a mixed-language marriage -- his father, William, was an English speaker while his mother, Margaret, spoke Welsh, but the couple had moved in on their marriage with Margaret's mother, who insisted that only Welsh could be spoken in her house. William didn't speak Welsh, and while he eventually picked up the basics from spending all his life surrounded by Welsh-speakers, he refused on principle to capitulate to his mother-in-law, and so remained silent in the house. John, meanwhile, grew up a monolingual Welsh speaker, and didn't start to learn English until he went to school when he was seven, and so couldn't speak to his father until then even though they lived together. Young John was extremely unwell for most of his childhood, both physically -- he had bronchial problems for which he had to take a cough mixture that was largely opium to help him sleep at night -- and mentally. He was hospitalised when he was sixteen with what was at first thought to be meningitis, but turned out to be a psychosomatic condition, the result of what he has described as a nervous breakdown. That breakdown is probably connected to the fact that during his teenage years he was sexually assaulted by two adults in positions of authority -- a vicar and a music teacher -- and felt unable to talk to anyone about this. He was, though, a child prodigy and was playing viola with the National Youth Orchestra of Wales from the age of thirteen, and listening to music by Schoenberg, Webern, and Stravinsky. He was so talented a multi-instrumentalist that at school he was the only person other than one of the music teachers and the headmaster who was allowed to use the piano -- which led to a prank on his very last day at school. The headmaster would, on the last day, hit a low G on the piano to cue the assembly to stand up, and Cale had placed a comb on the string, muting it and stopping the note from sounding -- in much the same way that his near-namesake John Cage was "preparing" pianos for his own compositions in the USA. Cale went on to Goldsmith's College to study music and composition, under Humphrey Searle, one of Britain's greatest proponents of serialism who had himself studied under Webern. Cale's main instrument was the viola, but he insisted on also playing pieces written for the violin, because they required more technical skill. For his final exam he chose to play Hindemith's notoriously difficult Viola Sonata: [Excerpt: Hindemith Viola Sonata] While at Goldsmith's, Cale became friendly with Cornelius Cardew, a composer and cellist who had studied with Stockhausen and at the time was a great admirer of and advocate for the works of Cage and Young (though by the mid-seventies Cardew rejected their work as counter-revolutionary bourgeois imperialism). Through Cardew, Cale started to correspond with Cage, and with George Maciunas and other members of Fluxus. In July 1963, just after he'd finished his studies at Goldsmith's, Cale presented a festival there consisting of an afternoon and an evening show. These shows included the first British performances of several works including Cardew's Autumn '60 for Orchestra -- a piece in which the musicians were given blank staves on which to write whatever part they wanted to play, but a separate set of instructions in *how* to play the parts they'd written. Another piece Cale presented in its British premiere at that show was Cage's "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra": [Excerpt: John Cage, "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra"] In the evening show, they performed Two Pieces For String Quartet by George Brecht (in which the musicians polish their instruments with dusters, making scraping sounds as they clean them),  and two new pieces by Cale, one of which involved a plant being put on the stage, and then the performer, Robin Page, screaming from the balcony at the plant that it would die, then running down, through the audience, and onto the stage, screaming abuse and threats at the plant. The final piece in the show was a performance by Cale (the first one in Britain) of La Monte Young's "X For Henry Flynt". For this piece, Cale put his hands together and then smashed both his arms onto the keyboard as hard as he could, over and over. After five minutes some of the audience stormed the stage and tried to drag the piano away from him. Cale followed the piano on his knees, continuing to bang the keys, and eventually the audience gave up in defeat and Cale the performer won. After this Cale moved to the USA, to further study composition, this time with Iannis Xenakis, the modernist composer who had also taught Mickey Baker orchestration after Baker left Mickey and Sylvia, and who composed such works as "Orient Occident": [Excerpt: Iannis Xenakis, "Orient Occident"] Cale had been recommended to Xenakis as a student by Aaron Copland, who thought the young man was probably a genius. But Cale's musical ambitions were rather too great for Tanglewood, Massachusetts -- he discovered that the institute had eighty-eight pianos, the same number as there are keys on a piano keyboard, and thought it would be great if for a piece he could take all eighty-eight pianos, put them all on different boats, sail the boats out onto a lake, and have eighty-eight different musicians each play one note on each piano, while the boats sank with the pianos on board. For some reason, Cale wasn't allowed to perform this composition, and instead had to make do with one where he pulled an axe out of a single piano and slammed it down on a table. Hardly the same, I'm sure you'll agree. From Tanglewood, Cale moved on to New York, where he soon became part of the artistic circles surrounding John Cage and La Monte Young. It was at this time that he joined Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, and also took part in a performance with Cage that would get Cale his first television exposure: [Excerpt: John Cale playing Erik Satie's "Vexations" on "I've Got a Secret"] That's Cale playing through "Vexations", a piece by Erik Satie that wasn't published until after Satie's death, and that remained in obscurity until Cage popularised -- if that's the word -- the piece. The piece, which Cage had found while studying Satie's notes, seems to be written as an exercise and has the inscription (in French) "In order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." Cage interpreted that, possibly correctly, as an instruction that the piece should be played eight hundred and forty times straight through, and so he put together a performance of the piece, the first one ever, by a group he called the Pocket Theatre Piano Relay Team, which included Cage himself, Cale, Joshua Rifkin, and several other notable musical figures, who took it in turns playing the piece. For that performance, which ended up lasting eighteen hours, there was an entry fee of five dollars, and there was a time-clock in the lobby. Audience members punched in and punched out, and got a refund of five cents for every twenty minutes they'd spent listening to the music. Supposedly, at the end, one audience member yelled "Encore!" A week later, Cale appeared on "I've Got a Secret", a popular game-show in which celebrities tried to guess people's secrets (and which is where that performance of Cage's "Water Walk" we heard earlier comes from): [Excerpt: John Cale on I've Got a Secret] For a while, Cale lived with a friend of La Monte Young's, Terry Jennings, before moving in to a flat with Tony Conrad, one of the other members of the Theatre of Eternal Music. Angus MacLise lived in another flat in the same building. As there was not much money to be made in avant-garde music, Cale also worked in a bookshop -- a job Cage had found him -- and had a sideline in dealing drugs. But rents were so cheap at this time that Cale and Conrad only had to work part-time, and could spend much of their time working on the music they were making with Young. Both were string players -- Conrad violin, Cale viola -- and they soon modified their instruments. Conrad merely attached pickups to his so it could be amplified, but Cale went much further. He filed down the viola's bridge so he could play three strings at once, and he replaced the normal viola strings with thicker, heavier, guitar and mandolin strings. This created a sound so loud that it sounded like a distorted electric guitar -- though in late 1963 and early 1964 there were very few people who even knew what a distorted guitar sounded like. Cale and Conrad were also starting to become interested in rock and roll music, to which neither of them had previously paid much attention, because John Cage's music had taught them to listen for music in sounds they previously dismissed. In particular, Cale became fascinated with the harmonies of the Everly Brothers, hearing in them the same just intonation that Young advocated for: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "All I Have to Do is Dream"] And it was with this newfound interest in rock and roll that Cale and Conrad suddenly found themselves members of a manufactured pop band. The two men had been invited to a party on the Lower East Side, and there they'd been introduced to Terry Phillips of Pickwick Records. Phillips had seen their long hair and asked if they were musicians, so they'd answered "yes". He asked if they were in a band, and they said yes. He asked if that band had a drummer, and again they said yes. By this point they realised that he had assumed they were rock guitarists, rather than experimental avant-garde string players, but they decided to play along and see where this was going. Phillips told them that if they brought along their drummer to Pickwick's studios the next day, he had a job for them. The two of them went along with Walter de Maria, who did play the drums a little in between his conceptual art work, and there they were played a record: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] It was explained to them that Pickwick made knock-off records -- soundalikes of big hits, and their own records in the style of those hits, all played by a bunch of session musicians and put out under different band names. This one, by "the Primitives", they thought had a shot at being an actual hit, even though it was a dance-craze song about a dance where one partner lays on the floor and the other stamps on their head. But if it was going to be a hit, they needed an actual band to go out and perform it, backing the singer. How would Cale, Conrad, and de Maria like to be three quarters of the Primitives? It sounded fun, but of course they weren't actually guitarists. But as it turned out, that wasn't going to be a problem. They were told that the guitars on the track had all been tuned to one note -- not even to an open chord, like we talked about Steve Cropper doing last episode, but all the strings to one note. Cale and Conrad were astonished -- that was exactly the kind of thing they'd been doing in their drone experiments with La Monte Young. Who was this person who was independently inventing the most advanced ideas in experimental music but applying them to pop songs? And that was how they met Lou Reed: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] Where Cale and Conrad were avant-gardeists who had only just started paying attention to rock and roll music, rock and roll was in Lou Reed's blood, but there were a few striking similarities between him and Cale, even though at a glance their backgrounds could not have seemed more different. Reed had been brought up in a comfortably middle-class home in Long Island, but despised the suburban conformity that surrounded him from a very early age, and by his teens was starting to rebel against it very strongly. According to one classmate “Lou was always more advanced than the rest of us. The drinking age was eighteen back then, so we all started drinking at around sixteen. We were drinking quarts of beer, but Lou was smoking joints. He didn't do that in front of many people, but I knew he was doing it. While we were looking at girls in Playboy, Lou was reading Story of O. He was reading the Marquis de Sade, stuff that I wouldn't even have thought about or known how to find.” But one way in which Reed was a typical teenager of the period was his love for rock and roll, especially doo-wop. He'd got himself a guitar, but only had one lesson -- according to the story he would tell on numerous occasions, he turned up with a copy of "Blue Suede Shoes" and told the teacher he only wanted to know how to play the chords for that, and he'd work out the rest himself. Reed and two schoolfriends, Alan Walters and Phil Harris, put together a doo-wop trio they called The Shades, because they wore sunglasses, and a neighbour introduced them to Bob Shad, who had been an A&R man for Mercury Records and was starting his own new label. He renamed them the Jades and took them into the studio with some of the best New York session players, and at fourteen years old Lou Reed was writing songs and singing them backed by Mickey Baker and King Curtis: [Excerpt: The Jades, "Leave Her For Me"] Sadly the Jades' single was a flop -- the closest it came to success was being played on Murray the K's radio show, but on a day when Murray the K was off ill and someone else was filling in for him, much to Reed's disappointment. Phil Harris, the lead singer of the group, got to record some solo sessions after that, but the Jades split up and it would be several years before Reed made any more records. Partly this was because of Reed's mental health, and here's where things get disputed and rather messy. What we know is that in his late teens, just after he'd gone off to New

This week, American poet, Richard Wilbur, explains why stones aren't very ambitious. The poems referenced are ‘A Dubious Night' and ‘Two Voices in A Meadow'.

Welcome back to the Convivial Society. In this installment, you'll find the audio version of the latest essay, “What You Get Is the World.” I try to record an audio version of most installments, but I send them out separately from the text version for reasons I won't bore you with here. Incidentally, you can also subscribe to the newsletter's podcast feed on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Just look up The Convivial Society. Aside from the audio essay, you'll find an assortment of year-end miscellany below. I trust you are all well as we enter a new year. All the best to you and yours! A Few Notable PostsHere are six installments from this past year that seemed to garner a bit of interest. Especially if you've just signed up in recent weeks, you might appreciate some of these earlier posts. Incidentally, if you have appreciated the writing and would like to become a paid supporter at a discounted rate, here's the last call for this offer. To be clear, the model here is that all the writing is public but I welcome the patronage of those who are able and willing. Cheers!Podcast AppearancesI've not done the best job of keeping you all in loop on these, but I did show up in a few podcasts this year. Here are some of those: With Sean Illing on attentionWith Charlie Warzel on how being online traps us in the pastWith Georgie Powell on reframing our experience Year's EndIt is something of a tradition at the end of the year for me to share Richard Wilbur's poem, “Year's End.” So, once again I'll leave you with it.Now winter downs the dying of the year,   And night is all a settlement of snow;From the soft street the rooms of houses show   A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,   Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin   And still allows some stirring down within.I've known the wind by water banks to shakeThe late leaves down, which frozen where they fell   And held in ice as dancers in a spell   Fluttered all winter long into a lake;   Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,   They seemed their own most perfect monument.There was perfection in the death of ferns   Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone   A million years. Great mammoths overthrown   Composedly have made their long sojourns,   Like palaces of patience, in the grayAnd changeless lands of ice. And at PompeiiThe little dog lay curled and did not rise   But slept the deeper as the ashes roseAnd found the people incomplete, and froze   The random hands, the loose unready eyes   Of men expecting yet another sunTo do the shapely thing they had not done.These sudden ends of time must give us pause.   We fray into the future, rarely wroughtSave in the tapestries of afterthought.More time, more time. Barrages of applause   Come muffled from a buried radio.The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.Thank you all for reading along in 2022. We survived, and I'm looking forward to another year of the Convivial Society in 2023. Cheers, Michael Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

This week, the panel begins by talking about Elon Musk taking over Twitter. Then, a discussion about the new film Aftersun. Finally, Angelica Jade Bastién joins to talk about her recent article about Brangelina.  In Slate Plus, the panel takes on a listener question and talks about swap casting.  Email us at culturefest@slate.com. Endorsements Dana: I know I'm constantly endorsing things on the Criterion Channel! They are streaming the noir films of 20th Century Fox all month long. I don't know why noir has become associated with November. Maybe it goes with the shortening days and the gloomy shadows of November. Julia: A slightly odd endorsement today. People really seem to think they can disrupt underwear. I don't really know why. But, I have been a skeptic until now. Finally the platonic underwear has been designed. Knickey high-rise briefs. It's just too good.  Steve: The thing that's given me the most joy is the Richard Wilbur poem Castles and Distances from 1950. I was in the mood for Wilbur and I found one I had never read before. It's so cool. So sadly apposite to modern experience, especially with Elon Musk in the news and tech barons.  Podcast production by Cameron Drews. Production assistance by Yesica Balderrama. Outro music is "Lonely Calling" by Arc De Soleil. If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get an ad-free experience across the network and exclusive content on many shows. You'll also be supporting the work we do here on the Culture Gabfest. Sign up now at Slate.com/cultureplus to help support our work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, the panel begins by talking about Elon Musk taking over Twitter. Then, a discussion about the new film Aftersun. Finally, Angelica Jade Bastién joins to talk about her recent article about Brangelina.  In Slate Plus, the panel takes on a listener question and talks about swap casting.  Email us at culturefest@slate.com. Endorsements Dana: I know I'm constantly endorsing things on the Criterion Channel! They are streaming the noir films of 20th Century Fox all month long. I don't know why noir has become associated with November. Maybe it goes with the shortening days and the gloomy shadows of November. Julia: A slightly odd endorsement today. People really seem to think they can disrupt underwear. I don't really know why. But, I have been a skeptic until now. Finally the platonic underwear has been designed. Knickey high-rise briefs. It's just too good.  Steve: The thing that's given me the most joy is the Richard Wilbur poem Castles and Distances from 1950. I was in the mood for Wilbur and I found one I had never read before. It's so cool. So sadly apposite to modern experience, especially with Elon Musk in the news and tech barons.  Podcast production by Cameron Drews. Production assistance by Yesica Balderrama. Outro music is "Lonely Calling" by Arc De Soleil. If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get an ad-free experience across the network and exclusive content on many shows. You'll also be supporting the work we do here on the Culture Gabfest. Sign up now at Slate.com/cultureplus to help support our work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We talk with theoretical physicist Antonio Padilla about FANTASTIC NUMBERS. And we replay our 2009 interview with poet Richard Wilbur. The post Antonio Padilla, FANTASTIC NUMBERS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM & Poet Richard Wilbur (Encore) appeared first on Writer's Voice.

Among his many talents, Irish writer Frank O'Connor had a particular gift for showing the world through the eyes of young, precocious, often naive protagonists, like Larry Delaney of his 1957 story "The Genius." Larry wants to be the town's first proper genius and win the affections of Una Dwyer -- first, he just has to find out where babies come from. We revisit this timeless story, originally featured in an early episode of the podcast, along with musings from Jack Handey, poetry by Richard Wilbur, and lots of great music.

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

Today we celebrate the birth of two poets, Robert Lowell (1917) and Richard Wilbur (1921), both two-time winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

John and John end the 2022 edition of February Flops with a show that they genuinely want to love - Leonard Bernstein's Candide. The pair talk about the show's existence in both the Broadway and Opera worlds, their love for the music (especially the overture), and how sometimes the revision process doesn't make anything much better. Music by Leonard Bernstein Lyrics by Richard Wilbur, John Latouche, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, Leonard Bernstein, Felicia Bernstein, and Stephen Sondheim Book by Lillian Helman, revised by Richard Wilbur Based on the novella “Candide” by Voltaire Find the episode on your favorite podcast app or by going to https://anchor.fm/musicalminutes Intro and outro music ("BeBop 25") provided under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License by Jason Shaw on Audionautix.com Have a question for John or John? Want to leave feedback or tell us how wrong we are? Email us at musicalminutespodcast@gmail.com For more info on our hosts - please visit https://norine62.wixsite.com/musicalminutes

Richard Purdy Wilbur (March 1, 1921 – October 14, 2017) was an American poet and literary translator. One of the foremost poets of his generation, Wilbur's work, composed primarily in traditional forms, was marked by its wit, charm, and gentlemanly elegance. He was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987 and received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice, in 1957 and 1989.[1]Bio via Wikipedia See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The panel reads four poems by Richard Wilbur, "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World", "A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra", "Mind", and "Year's End", particularly examining the intricacy of their details and their formal attributes.

I continue my late summer hiatus and now present a few programs that were the least listened to during the past two and a half years, with the hope that I might inspire some additional interest in them. My program today -- originally broadcast -- is the second program in which I focused on New England urban poets and the complex range of human issues unfolding in urban settings.  I read poems by Julia Alvarez, Ocean Vuong, Richard Wilbur, Martin Espada, and Maya Williams.

In this episode, prose writer Dan Wakefield talks about the importance of poetry in his own life and in his writing. This is a wide-ranging conversation that touches on many poets, writers, and musicians: including the teacher who gave him the Carl Sandburg poem that gave him permission to leave Indiana for New York; memories from his deep friendships with poets May Swenson, Anne Sexton, and Maxine Kumin; brief encounters with Robert Frost, Richard Wilbur, George Starbuck, and Kerouac; to the importance of lyrics in pop music.

The legendary comedy duo of Brooks and Reiner teach us the secrets of longevity, poet Richard Wilbur whimsically explores the nature of shame, and Stan Grossman tells Jerry Lundegaard, "We're not a bank, Jerry."

This episode is also available as a blog post: http://quiteaquote.in/2021/03/01/richard-wilbur-opposite-of-two-2/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/quiteaquote/message

Director Jim Milton says he was attracted to theater because, being raised as a Cathoic, he found this Biblical phrase profound: “The Word was made flesh.”“To me, words are sacred,” Milton says in this week's podcast. “Words are almost living things.”Milton, who lives in Tannersville in the Catskills, has adapted Charles Dickens's “A Christmas Carol” and Henry James's “The Turn of the Screw” for the stage. He shortened Richard Wilbur's translation of Molière's “Tartuffe,” in iambic pentameter, by one-fifth, writing it in tetrameter instead.Milton is currently directing Jack Cunningham's “Women and War” — a collection of fictional stories based on historical fact. Online performances are at 7 p.m. on July 1 and 2 with a live performance at Conkling Hall in Rensselaerville on July 3, also at 7 p.m. Three couples — with the men fighting in Europe during World War II, in Korea, and in Vietnam — correspond through letters. Milton directs the actors to focus on the words and the emotions carried on those words.“They call theater the fabulous invalid,” says Milton, noting the impending death of theater has been proclaimed with the advent of movies, then of television, and now of the internet. “We are a species for which stories are important,” says Milton, whether they are told through religion, in newspapers, in novels or on stage.“Theater is one of the major ways in which a community can come together,” he said. A play is not etched in stone like a movie. “It can't react when you laugh; it can react when you cry. You are part of the play,” he said.Asked who should watch “Women and War,” Milton said, “The audience is anyone who is curious about our history, which of course should be everyone.” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The year was 1602. Today we remember William Lilly, Christian Astrologist? The last word for this second season is from the final stanza to Richard Wilbur’s “A Stable Lamp is Lighted.” — FULL TRANSCRIPTS 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).

What happens during and after interviews with subjects ranging from Walter Matthau to Ellen Burstyn to Richard Wilbur.

In today's episode, David shares three poems by the great Richard Wilbur, who was born 100 years ago today. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

We present a special feature of art and poetry, exploring themes of love and desire. Artworks discussed are by Michelangelo, Ana Benaroya, Chris Ofili, and Leonor Fini. Poetry featured in the episode was written by Rainer Maria Rilke, Audre Lorde, John Donne, and Richard Wilbur. Links to the artworks discussed: The Rape of Ganymede by Michelangelo Mother May I by Ana Benaroya Annunciation by Chris Ofili (More Photos here and here) Cthonian Deity Watching Over the Sleep of a Young Man by Leonor Fini All music in the episode is by Kevin MacLeod. "In Your Arms" "George Street Shuffle" "Gymnopedia No. 1" "Bittersweet" and "Windswept" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/the-artist-confluence/support

My program today considers how poetry uses rhyme to reinforce theme and how rhyme can be an important part of the aesthetic experience of reading a poem.  I read poems by Chaucer, Robert Frost, Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wilbur, Howard Nemerov, Mona van Duyn, and Rachel Hadas. I end the program with one of my own poems.

In this episode, Will Begley, Josh Herring, and Travis Copeland discuss the poetry of Richard Wilbur. They focus on the poems "A Wood" and "4C," which are available for you to read here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mJYY27pCAbK4SFqCpbs1w5mOvuI0dcd-hvhUto03pDk/edit?ts=601c197c Richard Wilbur (1921-2017) was an American poet and literary translator who is often associated with a movement known as New Formalism. In his poetry, Wilbur used traditional and nonce forms to explore the universals visible in everyday experiences. This episode will focus on two of Wilbur’s poems, both of which highlight and recast things that are overlooked or underrated. More information about Richard Wilbur can be found here at the Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/richard-wilburIn this episode, Travis, Will, and Josh referenced dogwood trees, maltese crosses, and the Romantic poet John Keats. Here are links to photos of these items. Dogwood Trees: https://www.thespruce.com/thmb/EwwBIhCoH2lMfvyyMB2BtS4i-UA=/2667x2000/smart/filters:no_upscale()/pink-dogwood-172784414-b9cc9ba1f47d46b9950abcf91c1b14b9.jpgMaltese Crosses: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/31/Malteserkreuz.svg/1200px-Malteserkreuz.svg.pngJohn Keats’ “When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44488/when-i-have-fears-that-i-may-cease-to-be

My program today considers the relationship between poetry and prophecy.  I read poems about prophecy, prophets, and poets as prophets by H.D., Louise Bogan, Robinson Jeffers, Richard Wilbur, Dana Gioia, Camille Rankine, and Bob Dylan.  I end the program with one of my own poems.

A poem a day keeps the sadness at bay.

A sermon by Jamie Howison preached on the First Sunday in Christmastide, December 27, 2020, on Galatians 4:4-7 and John 1:1-14. This sermon concludes with Steve Bell's recording of the song "Every Stone Shall Cry," taken from Richard Wilbur's poem, "A Christmas Hymn." For more information on the album this song appears on - A Feast of Seasons - and on Steve's second album of music for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany - Keening for the Dawn - please click here. Subscribe to the show wherever you listen to audio and recommend this episode to your friends. We invite you to rate us or write a review of what we are doing on Apple Podcasts. Reviews help others join the conversation.* * *This podcast is created at saint benedict's table, a congregation of the Anglican Church of Canada in Winnipeg, where we've been making great audio since 2006. Listen to other recent episodes on our website and see our entire catalogue of well over 500 shows on our hosting page.Our MissionTo provide rich and stimulating audio resources to the wider church and engage topics and issues relevant to the concerns and questions of the larger culture in which we live.

Richard Wilbur was born March 1, 1921, New York, New York, U.S. and died October 14, 2017, Belmont, Massachusetts), American poet associated with the New Formalist movement. - Bio via Brittanica.com. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

On today’s date in 1956, “Candide,” a 20th century musical based on an 18th century satire by the French writer Voltaire, opened on Broadway in New York City. The libretto was by the successful playwright Lillian Hellman. The song lyrics were crafted by Richard Wilbur, one of America’s finest poets. The stage direction was by Sir Tyrone Guthrie, a legendary name in British theater. The music was by Leonard Bernstein. Maybe it was a case of too much of a good thing: “Candide” closed after just two months. Some said the show’s satire went over the heads of the audience, others that the poor box office was due to the lack of a big Broadway star in the original cast. Early in 1957, shortly before the initial run of “Candide” closed, Bernstein conducted its overture at Carnegie Hall as part of a New York Philharmonic concert—and that bit of the show, at least, became an instant and lasting success. Bernstein tinkered with the rest of “Candide” right up to his death in 1990, generating several performing versions of his problematic musical. With the benefit of hindsight, many critics now regard “Candide” as Bernstein’s masterpiece.

On today’s date in 1956, “Candide,” a 20th century musical based on an 18th century satire by the French writer Voltaire, opened on Broadway in New York City. The libretto was by the successful playwright Lillian Hellman. The song lyrics were crafted by Richard Wilbur, one of America’s finest poets. The stage direction was by Sir Tyrone Guthrie, a legendary name in British theater. The music was by Leonard Bernstein. Maybe it was a case of too much of a good thing: “Candide” closed after just two months. Some said the show’s satire went over the heads of the audience, others that the poor box office was due to the lack of a big Broadway star in the original cast. Early in 1957, shortly before the initial run of “Candide” closed, Bernstein conducted its overture at Carnegie Hall as part of a New York Philharmonic concert—and that bit of the show, at least, became an instant and lasting success. Bernstein tinkered with the rest of “Candide” right up to his death in 1990, generating several performing versions of his problematic musical. With the benefit of hindsight, many critics now regard “Candide” as Bernstein’s masterpiece.

Today on Boston Public Radio: NBC “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd discussed President Trump’s deluge of lawsuits attempting to delegitimize his election loss, and gave his take President-elect Biden’s leveled reaction. We opened lines to hear your takes on what exactly President Trump is planning, as he spreads false claims about voter fraud and refuses to concede his loss to Present-elect Biden.  Former Suffolk County sheriff and secretary of public safety Andrea Cabral discussed members of the legal community who are actively distancing themselves from President Trump’s effort to litigate his way into a second term. She also reflected on why white American voters have so reliably swung Republican. Sen. Ed Markey talked about the surge of coronavirus throughout the U.S., and why he’s worried about it getting worse in the final months of the Trump administration. He also weighed in on Trump’s refusal to concede defeat, and the actions he hopes President-elect Biden will make to move the U.S. forward on the environment during in his first weeks in office.  Former Mass. education secretary Paul Reville explained why he believes Mass. ought to be better prioritizing in-person learning, and discussed the moves President-elect Joe Biden can make to boost public education in a post-Betsy Devos era. Mike Astrue discussed President Trump’s unprecedented refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, and reflected on some past presidential transitions that he helped facilitate. He also read a Vietnam War-era poem Richard Wilbur that's relevant for today, called "For the Student Strikers." Astrue served as counsel in both the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, and as commissioner of the Social Security Administration in both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. He also writes and translates poetry under the alias A.M. Juster, and his latest book of poetry is "Wonder and Wrath.” We closed out Thursday’s show by returning to listeners, to hear your thoughts and concerns about traveling college students and this year’s Thanksgiving.

Heather reads "The Undead" by Richard Wilbur. More info on Instagram @thethoughtofhighwindows

Some Words Inside of Words by Richard Wilbur, US Poet Laureate 1987-88.

Rhina P. Espaillat has published ten full-length books and three chapbooks, comprising poetry, essays, and short stories, in both English and her native Spanish, and translations from and into both languages. Her work appears in many journals, anthologies, and websites, and has earned national and international awards, including the T. S. Eliot Prize in Poetry, the Richard Wilbur Award, the Howard Nemerov Prize, the May Sarton Award, the Robert Frost “Tree at My Window” Prize for translation, several honors from the New England Poetry Club, the Poetry Society of America, the Ministry of Culture of the Dominican Republic, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Salem State College.Espaillat’s most recent publications are two poetry collection in English titled Playing at Stillness and Her Place in These Designs; a book of Spanish translations titled Oscura fruta/Dark Berries: Forty-Two Poems by Richard Wilbur; and a book of Spanish translations titled Algo hay que no es amigo de los muros/Something There Is That Doesn’t Love a Wall: Forty Poems by Robert Frost. She is a frequent reader, speaker and workshop leader, and is active with the Powow River Poets, a literary group she cofounded in 1992. -Bio via rhinaespaillat.com. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Join Chris Petter, Dr. Kevin Kambo and Fr. Jonah Teller for a discussion about Poetry and Creation. These three friends share a love of literature and philosophy.  We thought we’d be a fly on the wall as they talk about the ultimate purpose of poetry, with a deeper focus on Richard Wilbur’s masterful poem, Mayflies.  Chris is a PhD candidate in English Literature at Catholic University of America.Kevin is a professor of Philosophy at Hope College.Fr. Jonah is a newly ordained priest in the Dominican Order.

The Beautiful Changes by Richard Wilbur

Bookwaves/Artwaves is produced and hosted by Richard Wolinsky. Announcements. Central Works Script Club, where you read the script of a new play and send comments to the playwright. The July script is The Lady Matador's Hotel by Christina Garcia. A podcast with the playwright, hosted by Patricial Milton, will be posted to the Central Works website on July 28. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is launching a new streaming service featuring full length videos of recent plays. The Copper Children plays through July 15, followed by A Midsummer Night's Dream through July 22. Tickets through the website. Theatreworks Silicon Valley is presenting another live solo performance from Florence, Italy with Hershey Felder, Beethoven, A play with Music on Sunday July 12 at 5 pm Pacific. Tickets through the website. Moliere in the Park presents Richard Wilbur's translation of Tartuffe, starring Raul Esparza and Samira Wiley, recorded live with actors superimposed on a set, through July 12. Book Passage's Conversations with Authors features Tim Cahill, Saturday July 11 at 4 pm Pacific time and Ann Patchett Sunday July 12 also at 4 pm Pacific. And David Mitchell in conversation with Michael Chabon, hosted by Tom Barbash airs on Thursday, July 16, again at 4 pm Pacific time. Aurora Theatre's yearly fundraising event, Supernova, is open and free, on Monday July 13th. Registration required. Bay Area Book Festival. Various Unbound conversations available streaming. The Booksmith lists its entire July on-line schedule of interviews and readings on their website, which includes Lockdown Lit every Tuesday at 11 am Theatre Rhino Thursday play at 8 pm July 9, 2020 on Facebook Live is Modjeska, San Francisco's First Superstar, conceived and performed by John Fisher. The Death of Ruby Slippers by Stuart Bousel, available streaming. Shotgun Players. Streaming, the folk opera Iron Shoes. Recorded in spring 2018, continuing through July 17, and The Claim, workshop production. The Niceties by Eleanor Burgess, July 9-12, 7 pm. Registration required. San Francisco Playhouse. Every Monday, SF Playhouse presents Zoomlets, a series of short play table reads. 42nd Street Moon. A live evening of Sondheim songs, Friday July 10th on Facebook Live, featuring an array of local theatrical talent. Kepler's Books presents Refresh the Page, on line interviews and talks. Registration required. Lincoln Center Live July 10 – September 8, 2020: Carousel, with Kelli O'Hara and Nathan Gunn. National Theater At Home on You Tube: The Deep Blue Sea.   Bookwaves Barry Lopez, whose latest book is “Horizon”, now out in trade paperback, in conversation with Richard Wolinsky. From Barry Lopez's website: From the National Book Award-winning author of the now-classic Arctic Dreams, a vivid, poetic, capacious work that recollects the travels around the world and the encounters–human, animal, and natural–that have shaped an extraordinary life. Taking us nearly from pole to pole–from modern megacities to some of the most remote regions on the earth–and across decades of lived experience, Barry Lopez, hailed by the Los Angeles Times Book Review as “one of our finest writers,” gives us his most far-ranging yet personal work to date, in a book that moves indelibly, immersively, through his travels to six regions of the world: from Western Oregon to the High Arctic; from the Galápagos to the Kenyan desert; from Botany Bay in Australia to finally, unforgettably, the ice shelves of Antarctica. Extended 45-minute Radio Wolinsky podcast. Special thanks to the Bay Area Book Festival and Cherilyn Parsons.   Arts-Waves Margaret Atwood, discussing her novel “The Robber Bride,” recorded in San Francisco on November 24, 1993 with Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff, from the “Probabilities” archive. The second of eight interviews with Margaret Atwood, author of such novels as The Handmaid's Tale, Alias Graceand the Oryx and Crake trilogy. In this interview, she discusses her novel “The Robber Bride,” as well as what it feels like to be a Canadian author, her views on Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. LeGuin and science fiction and genres in general, and some of the thought processes behind writing her books.     The post Bookwaves/Artwaves – July 9, 2020: Barry Lopez – Margaret Atwood appeared first on KPFA.

My program today is the second program to focus on New England urban poets and the complex range of human issues unfolding in urban settings. I read poems by Julia Alvarez, Ocean Vuong, Richard Wilbur, Martin Espada, and Maya Williams.

"So far, our town hadn't had a proper genius, and I intended to supply the deficiency." So says Larry, the precocious young narrator of Frank O'Connor's 1957 short story "The Genius." It is one of several of O'Connor's stories told from the perspective of a child, and follows our genius Larry navigating the lesser minds around him, questioning where babies come from, and trying not to look dumb in front of his new crush Una. This episode features Joe reading this classic story, along with some musings from another of our favorite deep thinkers, humorist Jack Handey. We also feature Richard Wilbur reading his poem, "The Last One," and as always, some wonderful music. We hope you enjoy it!

Today's poem is a late Richard Wilbur poem called "The Reader." Remember to rate and review if you like this episode. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

To learn more about Anna Akhmatova, you should read Clive James' essays, which are extremely convincing about her stature. This poem of hers was translated by one of my favorite poets of all time, Richard Wilbur.

Jorie Graham on Linda Gregg: Reading Linda Gregg’s poems is a unique experience because not only does one hear Linda’s voice in one’s head—if one ever heard her read it was unforgettable—but the voice is actually inscribed into the lines, the syntax, the rhythm, tone, tempo. This is the sign of tremendous formal skill—that one controls the audible voice of the poem right down to its minutest modulations. This is also the signature of a poem which is a lived experience—not the record of one, or the report of one. If there ever were, as Stevens puts it in “On Modern Poetry,” those urgent poems “of the mind in the act of finding/ What will suffice” they are the adamant, fierce, brave, poems of Linda Gregg. It is hard to describe poems which appear to carry true visionary experience in their marrow. They are, to a certain extent, disincarnate, icy, terse, as-if-dictated. Vision uses abstraction as if it were its natural integument. Vision would seem to use the poet, the poet’s body and voice, as a vessel to get itself expressed, forcibly pressed from the invisible into the visible, from the unknowable into the knowable or the transmittable. And these are certainly characteristics of Gregg’s poems. And yet they are also so deeply poems of the body’s unique knowledge—its intimations, forebodings, fears, lusts and loves. Her poems seem to do it all. It would appear quite impossible for the incarnate to shine so visibly carnate before us—and in so few words. But there she is, as Gregg would say, seeing the vision stand before her. Finally her poems exhibit a fearlessness, a recklessness which seems to be shared by both a way of living and a way of writing—a numinous incandescence, which has to do with searching for the limits of not just what life can be, but also of what language can hold—which might indeed be Too Bright To See. Not any self-indulgent or thrill-seeking recklessness, but recklessness in the name of a deeper reckoning. Until indeed, here she is, always blazing, always alive, Linda Gregg. Robert Hass on Linda Gregg: The first poem of Linda's that I read was "We Manage Most When We Manage Small." I think I read it twice. A couple of days later I realized that I had it more or less memorized, from that startling first line—"What things are steadfast? Not the birds." Her music certainly had to do with the way she used questions and declarative sentences and her feel for the relation of sentence to line, which is very strong and very often very simple. She wanted to make poems that were plain and radiant like the chunks of thousand-year-old marble she would occasionally turn up on the island of Santorini when, as a young woman, she was living there with Jack Gilbert and learning to write. Her aesthetic, I noticed, when I came to know her, was frugal and like the way she lived the practical parts of life. I remember her describing her relation to shopping and to the objects of desire in a consumer culture. She said she liked to go downtown, to Union Square in San Francisco or uptown to Madison Avenue in New York and hunt down the very best and most beautiful version of the thing she had desired and study it for a while and walk away. It reminded me of Richard Wilbur's wonderful phrase about Emily Dickinson's poetry. He said she traded in "sumptuous destitution." Something like that seems to account for the light Linda's poems give off. "We Manage Most When We Manage Small" "The Poet Goes About Her Business"  "Eurydice" "The Girl I Call Alma" "Too Bright to See" "The Apparent" "There She Is"

A Storm in April by Richard Wilbur

"A stable lamp is lighted" (Hymn 104) from Suzanne Daniel, originally aired Wednesday in the Fifth Week of Lent in 2018. Download this episode (mp3). Songs in the Desert is an audio Lenten devotional exploring Christian hymns. Every weekday in Lent, listen to a reflection from a different contributor on a hymn that they find meaningful. Hymn numbers, when given, refer to the Episcopal Hymnal 1982. But most hymns can be found in many different hymnals. The 2018 listener survey has concluded. Subscribe to our podcast in Apple podcasts, Stitcher, TuneIn, or use our feed. For more, visit SongsInTheDesert.org. Theme music is "Reflections" by Lee Rosevere, distributed under a Creative Commons license. A Sinden Production of Anglican Media (SPAM)

On this day, we recognize St. David's Day and the founding of Unitas Fratrum in 1457. The reading is from Richard Wilbur, "Matthew VIII, 28ff." We’re a part of 1517 Podcasts, a network of shows dedicated to delivering Christ-centered content. Our podcasts cover a multitude of content, from Christian doctrine, apologetics, cultural engagement, and powerful preaching. Support the work of 1517 today.

Maitreyabandhu draws out the deeper meaning and finer detail of the poem entitled A Measuring Worm, by Richard Wilbur. In the full talk entitled A New Knowledge of Reality-Buddhism and Poetry, Maitreyabandhu discusses five different poems, each around the theme of death, with the final poem focusing on spiritual rebirth. By discussing the background of the poems and poets, the intricacies of their structure, and bringing in a Buddhist interpretation of the themes raised in the poems, Maitreyabandhu shows us the importance and profundity of poetry and how it can help us to explore Dharmic themes more deeply. Talk given on a special evening at Padmaloka Retreat Centre during the System of Dharma Training retreat in December 2018. a measuring worm :: richard wilbur This yellow striped green Caterpillar, climbing up The steep window screen, Constantly (for lack Of a full set of legs) keeps Humping up his back. It’s as if he sent By a sort of semaphore Dark omegas meant To warn of Last Things. Although he doesn’t know it, He will soon have wings, And I, too, don’t know Toward what undreamt condition Inch by inch I go. *** Subscribe to our Free Buddhist Audio podcast - a full Dharma talk every week! Follow our blog for news and new Dharma FBA on Twitter FBA on Facebook FBA on Soundcloud

Today we celebrate an eighteenth-century man who was a friend of many famous gardeners. And, the Danish surgeon associated with many wonderful plants from the Himalayas. We'll learn about the Swedish botanist who had a thing for algae and the man who started the only arboretum between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. Today’s Unearthed Words feature poems and prose about winter's cold. We Grow That Garden Library™ with a wonderful book about weird plants. I'll talk about a beautiful item that would make the perfect Valentine's gift for a gardener or a special gift for a loved one, And, then we’ll wrap things up with the story of the man who made the poinsettia a harbinger of Christmas. But first, let's catch up on a few recent events.   Subscribe Apple | Google | Spotify | Stitcher | iHeart   Curated Articles Hidden women of history: Maria Sibylla Merian, 17th-century entomologist and scientific adventurer Here's a great post about Maria Sibylla Merian. Click to read all about her.   Brassica Oleracea ‘January King’ From @GWmag 'January King' is a fantastic variety of savoy cabbage. Here's how to grow it.   Now, if you'd like to check out these curated articles for yourself, you're in luck, because I share all of it with the Listener Community in the Free Facebook Group - The Daily Gardener Community. There’s no need to take notes or search for links - the next time you're on Facebook, search for Daily Gardener Community and request to join. I'd love to meet you in the group.   Important Events 1694 Today is the birthday of a Fellow of the Royal Society, an avid gardener, and a friend to many scientific leaders in the mid-18th century in the city of London, Peter Collinson. Peter Collinson introduced nearly 200 species of plants to British horticulture - importing many from his friend John Bartram in America. When the American gardener John Custis learned that Collinson was looking for the mountain cowslip (Primula auricula), he happily sent him a sample. Auricula means ear-shaped, and the mountain cowslip is Commonly known as a bear's ear from the shape of its leaves. The cowslip is a spring-flowering plant, and it is native to the mountainous areas of Europe. Custis also sent Collinson a Virginia Bluebell Or Virginia cowslip ( Mertensia virginica). This plant is another Spring Beauty I can be found in Woodlands. The blue about Virginia Bluebell is so striking, and it's an old fashioned favorite for many gardeners. The Virginia Bluebell is also known as lungwort or oyster wort. The plant was believed to have medicinal properties for treating lung disorders, and the leaves taste like oysters. Virginia bluebells bloom alongside daffodils, so you end up with a beautiful yellow and blue combination together in the garden - something highly coveted and absolutely gorgeous. Collinson was not the only gardener in search of Virginia bluebells. Thomas Jefferson grew them at Monticello and loved them so much that they were often referred to as Jefferson's blue funnel flowers. Monticello ("MontiCHELLo”) Collinson once wrote, "Forget not me & my garden." Given Peter’s influence on English gardens, he would be pleased to know that, after all these years, he has not been forgotten. In 2010, the author Andrea Wulf popularized Collinson in the book The Brother Gardeners: A Generation of Gentlemen Naturalists and the Birth of an Obsession- one of my favorite books, by one of my favorite authors.    1786 Today is the birthday of the Danish surgeon and botanist Nathaniel Wallich. Nathaniel served as the Superintendent of East India Company's Botanical Garden in Calcutta, India. Wallich's early work involved writing a Flora of Asia. The palm Wallichia disticha (“wall-IK-ee-uh DIS-tik-uh”) was named in Wallich’s honor. The name of the species - disticha - comes from the Greek “distichos” (“dis” means two and “stichos” means line). Distichos refers to the leaves of this palm, which emerge in two rows on opposite sides of the stem. The Wallinchia disticha is a very special palm, and it is native to the base of the Himalayas. The trunk is quite beautiful because it is covered in a trellis of fiber mat - simply gorgeous. This palm can grow to 30 feet tall, but it is a short-lived palm with a life span of just 15 years. In 1824, Wallich was the first to describe the giant Himalayan Lily (Cardiocrinum giganteum) - the largest species of Lily. It is hardy in USDA Zones 7-9. The giant Himalayan Lily can grow up to 12 feet tall. Once it is finished blooming, the mother Lily bulb dies, but luckily, numerous offsets develop from the parent bulb. This dying off is common among plants that push a bloom many feet into the air. It takes enormous energy to create a towering and flowering stalk. If you decide you’d like to grow giant Himalayan Lilies, (and who wouldn’t?) expect blooms anytime after year four. Today, the Nathaniel Wallich Memorial Lecture takes place every year at the Indian Museum in Kolkata on Foundation Day. Wallich founded the museum in 1814. Wallich is buried in Kensal Green cemetery in London alongside many prominent botanists - like James Edward Smith (a founder of the Linnean Society London), John Claudius Loudon (Scottish writer), Sir James McGrigor (Scottish botanist), Archibald Menzies (surgeon), Robert Brown (discoverer of Brownian motion), and David Don (the Linnaean Society Librarian and 1st Professor of Botany Kings College London).   1859 Today is the anniversary of the death of a Swedish botanist who specialized in algae - Carl Adolph Agardh (“AW-guard”). In 1817, Carl published his masterpiece - a book on the algae of Scandinavia. Carl’s work studying algae was a major endeavor from the time he was a young man until his mid-fifties. At that time, he became the bishop of Karlstad. The position was all-consuming, and Carl put his botanical studies behind him.   1870 Today is the birthday of the physician, naturalist, and civic leader of the south-central Kansas town of Belle Plaine - Dr. Walter E. Bartlett. In 1910, Bartlett started the Bartlett Arboretum By purchasing 15 acres of land on the edge of a town called Belle Plaine - about 20 miles south of Wichita. The property had good soil, and it also had a little creek. One of Bartlett's initial moves was too dam up the creek and create a lake for waterfowl. In the flat expanse of Kansas, Bartlett was tree obsessed. He planted them everywhere - lining walkways, drives, and Riverbanks. Bartlett was all so civic-minded, and he added a baseball diamond complete with a grandstand to the arboretum and a running track and a place for trap shooting as well. After Walter died, the park was managed by his son Glenn who was a landscape architect. Glenn had studied the Gardens at Versailles - noting that they were transformed out of sand dunes and marshes. Back home, the Bartlett Arboretum had similar challenges. Glenn married Margaret Myers, who was an artist, a magazine fashion designer, a floral designer, a Garden Club organizer, and an instructor. Combining their fantastic skillsets, Glenn and Margaret turned the Arboretum into something quite beautiful. Together, they Incorporated tree specimens from all over the world. Using dredged dirt from the lake, they created Islands. At one point, the Bartlett Arboretum was the only Arboretum between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. Known for its beautiful spring tradition called Tulip Time, the Arboretum featured a tulip bed with over 40,000 bulbs. In 1997, the Arboretum was sold to Robin Macy. Macy was one of the founding members of the Dixie Chicks, and she is the current steward of the Bartlett Arboretum. Naturally, Robin incorporated music into the Arb. The Facebook Group for the Arboretum recently shared a register page from April 7th, 1929, and across the top of the register, Bartlett had quoted Wordsworth, “He is the happiest who has the power to gather wisdom from a flower.” The folks who tend the flowers and trees at the Bartlett Arboretum make people happy all year long.   Unearthed Words Here are some poems about the winter’s cold. (As I read this, it’s 2 degrees in lovely Maple Grove, Minnesota.) The birds are gone, The ground is white, The winds are wild, They chill and bite;  The ground is thick with slush and sleet,  And I barely feel my feet." It's not the case, though some might wish it so Who from a window watch the blizzard blow White riot through their branches vague and stark, That they keep snug beneath their pelted bark. They take affliction in until it jells To crystal ice between their frozen cells ... — Richard Wilbur, American Poet, Orchard Trees - January  Snow and sleet, and sleet and snow. Will the Winter never go? What do beggar children do With no fire to cuddle to, Perhaps with nowhere warm to go? Snow and sleet, and sleet and snow. Hail and ice, and ice and hail, Water frozen in the pail. See the robins, brown and red, They are waiting to be fed. Poor dears, battling in the gale! Hail and ice, and ice and hail. — Katherine Mansfield, New Zealand Poet & Writer, Winter Song    Blow, blow, thou winter wind, thou art not so unkind as man's ingratitude. — William Shakespeare, English Poet, Playwright, & Actor   The Winter’s cheek flushed as if he had drained Spring, Summer, and Autumn at a draught... — Edward Thomas, British Poet, Essayist & Novelist, "The Manor Farm"   Someone painted pictures on my Windowpane last night -- Willow trees with trailing boughs And flowers, frosty white, And lovely crystal butterflies; But when the morning sun Touched them with its golden beams, They vanished one by one. — Helen Bayley Davis, Baltimore Poet, Maryland Federation of Women’s Clubs Poet Laureate, Jack Frost (Written in 1929 and sold to the Christian Science Monitor)   Grow That Garden Library Weird Plants by Chris Thorogood Chris is a botanist at Oxford Botanic Garden. The cover of Chris's book is captivating - it shows a very weird plant - it almost looks like a claw - and its grasp is the title of the book weird plants. In this book published by Kew Gardens, Chris shares all of the weird and wacky plants that he's encountered during his travels. There are orchids that look like a female insect, and there are giant pitcher plants as well as other carnivorous plants that take down all kinds of prey. One thing's for certain, the weirdness factor of all of these plants has helped them survive for centuries. Gardeners will get a kick out of the seven categories that Chris uses to organize these strange species: Vampires, Killers, Fraudsters, Jailers, Accomplices, Survivors, and Hitchhikers. Chris's writing is complemented by his incredibly detailed oil paintings and his fascinating range of botanical expertise. As someone who works with student gardeners regularly, I appreciate botanists who are able to make plants interesting - taking topics and subjects that may otherwise prove boring and making them utterly captivating. Chris is that kind of garden communicator. In addition to Weird Plants, Chris is the author of Field Guide to the Wild Flowers of the Western Mediterranean and co-author of Field Guide to the Wild Flowers of the Algarve; bothare published by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. You can get a used copy of Weird Plants by Chris Thorogood and support the show, using the Amazon Link in today's Show Notes for under $9.   Great Gifts for Gardeners Good Directions 0113VB Heart Fly-Thru Bird Feeder Birdfeeder, Copper Finish $68.64 The Heart Fly-Thru™ Bird Feeder by Good Directions combines simplicity with elegance. Designed to show birds you love to feed them from the bottom of your heart! The heart fly-thru bird feeder by Good Directions invites birds in for a snack, & helps birders' Favorite activity last All day long! Featuring a charming heart shape & a LONG-LASTING Copper Finish, This bird feeder is the perfect addition to any garden setting. The feeder is easy to hang, Easy to love, & because it's also see-through, it's easy-to-know-when-to-fill! Measuring 15"H x 13"W x 3" D, it's sized to hold a generous 4-1/2 lb. Of seed! A beautiful piece for Valentine’s day or for a special birthday. If you know someone who loves to watch the birds from their house or deck, this will make a nice addition to any bird feeder or birdhouse collection. This gift will always remind them how much they are loved; thus, the heart design. Unique fly-thru design with durable, long-lasting copper finish Charming heart shape with Plexiglass panels for added strength and durability Generous 4-1/2 pound seed capacity Drainage holes help keep seed dry Measures 15"H x 13”w x 3” D Easy to hang and easy-to-know-when-to fill   Today’s Botanic Spark 1895 Today is the birthday of the nurseryman known as “Mr. Poinsettia,” Paul Ecke ("Eck-EE"), Sr. He was born in Magdeburg, Germany. Paul and his family immigrated to the United States in 1906. When Paul took over his father's nursery business located on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood in the early 1920s, the poinsettia(Euphorbia pulcherrima) was a fragile outdoor wild plant. Paul fell in love with the Poinsettia and immediately felt that the plant was a perfect fit for the holiday season because the bloom time occurred naturally during that time. By 1924, Paul was forced out of Hollywood by the movie business, and he brought his family and the nursery to San Diego County. He and his wife Magdalena had four children, and they purchased 40 acres of land in Encinitas("en-sin-EE-tis"). It was here that Paul would turn his passion for Poinsettias into a powerhouse - at one point, his nursery controlled 90% of the Poinsettia market in the United States. At first, Paul raised poinsettias in the fields on the ranch. Each spring, the plants were harvested and then loaded on two railroad cars and sent to Greenhouse Growers all along the east coast. When Paul wasn't growing poinsettias, he was talking poinsettias. He started calling it "The Christmas Flower"; Paul was endlessly marketing poinsettias and praising their attributes as a harbinger of Christmas Initially, Paul worked to decrease the growing time of the Poinsettia. By getting the time to bloom down from 18 months to 8 months, Paul made it possible for the Poinsettia to be grown indoors. After figuring out how to propagate the plant through cuttings indoors, Paul was soon able to ship poinsettias around the world by plane. Paul’s son, Paul Jr., took over the business in the 1960s. He cleverly sent poinsettias to TV shows. When the holiday programs aired, there were the poinsettias - in their glory - decorating the sets and stages of all the major programs. When Paul Junior learned that women's magazines did their photoshoots for the holidays over the summer, he began growing a poinsettia crop that piqued in July. Magazines like Women's Day and Sunset were thrilled to feature the poinsettia in their Christmas magazines alongside Christmas trees and mistletoe. This venture was regarded as the Ecke family's biggest marketing success and made the Poinsettia synonymous with Christmas. And gardeners will be fascinated to learn that the Ecke family was able to distinguish themselves as a superior grower of poinsettias by using a secret technique to keep their plants compact and hardy. Their solution was simple. They grafted two varieties of Poinsettias together, causing every seedling to branch and become bushy. Competitor Poinsettias were leggy and prone to falling open. Not so, with the Ecke Poinsettia. By the 1990s, the Ecke growing secret was out of the bag, and competitors began grafting poinsettias together in order to compete. Today the Ecke family does not grow any poinsettias on their farm in San Diego County. Finally, one of Paul's Poinsettia pet peeves is the commonly-held belief that Poinsettias are poisonous. Sometimes that fear would prevent a pet owner or a young mother from buying the plant. Paul Ecke recognized the threat posed by this false belief. He fought to reveal the truth one interview at a time. It turns out that a 50-pound child would have to eat roughly 500 poinsettia leaves before they would even begin to have a stomach ache. Furthermore, the plant is not dangerous to pets. To prove this point, Paul would regularly eat Poinsettia leaves on camera during interviews over the holiday season. When the Ecke nursery was sold in 2012, it still controlled over half the poinsettia market worldwide. During the holiday season, roughly seventy-five million poinsettia plants are sold - most to women over the age of 40.

Today's poem is Richard Wilbur's "Orchard Trees, January." Remember, rate and review to show some love. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Today's poem is Richard Wilbur's "Crows Nests" -- another great poem for these cooler days. Remember, rate, review, subscribe. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode, we discuss two poems: "The Angel with the Broken Wing" by Dana Gioia and "October Maples" by Richard Wilbur.  --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/poetryforthepeople/message

Today's poem is Richard Wilbur's "October Maples, Portland." Remember: rate, review, spread the word. The leaves, though little time they have to live,Were never so unfallen as today,And seem to yield us through a rustled sieveThe very light from which time fell away.A showered fire we thought forever lostRedeems the air. Where friends in passing meet,They parley in the tongues of Pentecost.Gold ranks of temples flank the dazzled street.It is light of maples, and will go;But not before it washes eye and brainWith such a tincture, such a sanguine glowAs cannot fail to leave a lasting stain.So Mary’s laundered mantle (in the taleWhich, like all pretty tales, may still be true),Spread on the rosemary-bush, so drenched the paleSlight blooms in its irradiated hue,They could not choose but to return in blue. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

On this day, we remember two poets along with a reading from each: e.e. Cummings, born in 1894, and his poem, "I Thank You, God," and Richard Wilbur, who died in 2017, and his poem, "A Lamp is Lighted." We’re a part of 1517 Podcasts, a network of shows dedicated to delivering Christ-centered content. Our podcasts cover a multitude of content, from Christian doctrine, apologetics, cultural engagement, and powerful preaching. Support the work of 1517 today.

Today's poem is Richard Wilbur's "My Father Paints the Summer."Remember to subscribe, rate, and review! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Today's poem is Richard Wilbur's "The Writer."Remember: Subscribe, rate, review. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Today's poem is Richard Wilbur's "A Storm in April."Remember: Subscribe, rate, review. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Welcome back to The Daily Poem. Today's poem is Richard Wilbur's "March," in honor of his birthday, which was today, 99 years ago. Remember: subscribe, rate, review. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Welcome to The Daily Poem. Today's poem is Richard Wilbur's "A Christmas Hymn."Remember: subscribe, rate, review!Follow on Instagram @closereadspodcasts! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Randall Mann remembers a poem by Richard Wilbur and addresses social and spiritual concerns of San Francisco, the city where he has lived for 20 years. Produced by Katie Klocksin.

Welcome to The Daily Poem. Today's poem is Richard Wilbur's "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World."If you like this show remember to subscribe, rate, and review! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Episode 5: "Advice to a Prophet" by Richard Wilbur by WorksCited

In 1953, the renowned playwright Lillian Hellman proposed to Leonard Bernstein that they adapt Voltaire's Candide for the musical theater. Voltaire's 1758 novella satirized the fashionable philosophies of his day and, especially, the Catholic Church whose Inquisition routinely tortured and killed "heretics" in a ghastly event known as an "Auto da Fé" ("act of faith"). Hellman observed a sinister parallel between the Inquisition's church-sponsored purges and the "Washington Witch Trials," fueled by anti-Communist hysteria and waged by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Charged with rage and indignition, she began her adaptation of Voltaire's with lyricist John LaTouche and Bernstein, who wrote numerous musical sketches. Before long, LaTouche was replaced by poet Richard Wilbur. Hellman, Bernstein, and Wilbur worked periodically over the next two years but labored in earnest through 1956, a year when Bernstein was simultaneously composing West Side Story. By October 1956, Candide was ready for performances in Boston, where Dorothy Parker contributed lyrics to "The Venice Gavotte" while Bernstein and Hellman had also added lyrics of their own to other numbers. The lyricist credits were already beginning to mount up. Conducted by Leonard Bernstein

Matthew Bannister on The chef Antonio Carluccio who transformed Italian cooking in the UK. Sima Wali who devoted her life to campaigning for the rights of Afghan women. The Pulitzer Prize winning American poet laureate Richard Wilbur. Mary Reveley, the Yorkshire based race horse trainer who saddled more than two thousand winners. And Dudley Simpson who composed the theme from the TV series Blake's Seven and incidental music for Dr Who. Interviewed guest: William Sitwell Interviewed guest: Suleiman Wali Interviewed guest: Michael Carlson Interviewed guest: Cornelius Lysaght Interviewed guest: Matthew Sweet.

Dr. Timothy E. G. Bartel reads and discusses "The Beautiful Changes," a poem by Richard Wilbur.

Stephen Mitchell joins Paul Muldoon to read and discuss Richard Wilbur's poem "Two Voices in a Meadow," and his own translation of "The Death of Argos," from Homer’s Odyssey.

In this episode of HeightsCast, Headmaster of The Heights School, Alvaro de Vicente talks about his recent letter to parents on the culture of the home. Also, a poem by Richard Wilbur recited and analyzed by drama teacher, Mr. Joseph Bissex.

Larry revisits V-E day on its 70th anniversary. And find out why there are three crushed beer cans under the bed! On Poetry Corner, Larry reads "Boy At The Window" by Richard Wilbur and talks about "The Great Escape" on Magic Movie Moment. Quote of the week: "Faster, stupid, he's going to eat us."Enjoy the show? Tell a friend or share it on Facebook or Twitter!Show CreditsProducer: Colonel Jeff Fox

autorská čtení v Café Fra úterý 21. dubna, 19.30 h. Petr Onufer: Richard Wilbur (a jedna edice v Argu, kterou jsem si vysnil) audio a foto Ondřej Lipár
 https://www.flickr.com/photos/fraflickr/sets/72157652040622536/ Autorská čtení v Café Fra: dramaturgie a produkce Petr Borkovec (tel. 724827499), fotografie, audio a mailing Ondřej Lipár, pořádá Fra s pod­porou Ministerstva kultury ČR, Magistrátu hlavního města Prahy, MČ Praha 2, paní Hany Michalikové, partneři Literature Across Fron­tiers (s podporou Programu Kultura EU), Polský institut v Praze, Literárne infor­mačné centrum, A2, spolupráce iliteratura.cz, Listy, Slovenský institut, Literární aka­demie Josefa Škvoreckého, Totem, revue Souvislosti, literarnyklub.sk a Kruh.

Molière's The Misanthrope is a three-and-a-half centuries old play about something as old as time: dishing on your people behind their back. It's also full of great zingers about man's duplicitous nature, all written by a guy who loved theater so much he ended up nearly dying onstage in his final performance.Join us as Richard Wilbur's delightful translation makes us laugh out loud, as we butcher French, Italian, and any other language we can get our hands on, and as Andrew shares his disconcertingly assured plans for Craig's eventual demise.

Molière's The Misanthrope is a three-and-a-half centuries old play about something as old as time: dishing on your people behind their back. It's also full of great zingers about man's duplicitous nature, all written by a guy who loved theater so much he ended up nearly dying onstage in his final performance.Join us as Richard Wilbur's delightful translation makes us laugh out loud, as we butcher French, Italian, and any other language we can get our hands on, and as Andrew shares his disconcertingly assured plans for Craig's eventual demise.

Today a ditty I like to play on the piano, thoughts on force, and an a cappella arrangement of “Make Our Garden Grow”, written by Richard Wilbur (text) and Leonard Bernstein (music). This arrangement is by Jay Giallombardo, and the recording (for my chorus to learn the song from) is by Ben McDaniel. I cannot … Continue reading "Episode 18: The Force that Makes Your Garden Grow"