Podcast appearances and mentions of Robert Lowell

A poem about a map opens North and South, the first collection of the great twentieth century poet Elizabeth Bishop, and since, maps have been associated with her poetic vision—at once telescoping and binocular—and with the polarities and preoccupations of her work. The map's privileged, sweeping, bird's eye view of the earth is also hand-held, man-made, intimate. Depending on its level of minuteness or obsession, it can contain the tiniest details as well as, let's say, the whole enchilada. And though it purports to be scientific and objective, it is representational and therefore subjective, particular, imaginative, and personal. For several episodes, Wes & Erin will be reading a selection of some of Bishop's most anthologized poems, starting with “The Moose” as expressions of, among other things, her map-like imagination. Upcoming Episodes: Nolan’s adaptation of “The Odyssey”; more Elizabeth Bishop poetry: “First Death in Nova Scotia,” “One Art.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Erin: Welcome to part two of our discussion of the poems of Elizabeth Bishop. We are currently about. Oh, I'm okay. I'm proud of us. We're just about halfway through the Moose. That's not bad compared to our usual record. We're not halfway through stanza one. We're going. You know, it's about a bus trip. It's encouraging us to pick up the pace a little bit and get to our next stop. So we were just going to pick up with the woman in stanza 13 climbing into the bus. 0:41 Wes: Before you say that, I just want to make one little observation. 0:44 Erin: Oh, sure. 0:45 Wes: Just that we get right as soon as the light goes out, it's then that we get the barking of a dog and the smell of salt. First it's the smell of salt hay and then it's the barking of a dog. So smell is introduced. And is that the first time sound is really introduced in any. You know, we get the bus starting and all that, but I think that's right. It's very visual up to that point, I think. And then as soon as we lose the light, we get these new sensory modalities. The collie just supervised this dog, gives us a nice bark, and presumably we can't even see him. We just hear him. So I just love that. I just. I love the transition into darkness. It's so. 1:26 Erin: Yeah. 1:26 Wes: I don't know how else to say it. 1:28 Erin: Yeah. 1:28 Wes: And it's then that we. This really is the midpoint of the poem because now we're going to make this transition into the world of the bus, I guess. As the woman climbs in, we have 1:41 Erin: the ship's port lantern, as you said, being an indication that it's now nearly or fully dark outside. 1:47 Wes: She says red light swims through the dark. 1:50 Erin: Yeah. I'm assuming that at this point a bus would have some form of illumination, at least for when it's stopped and the doors open for people getting on and off the bus. Right. It would. It would light up on the inside interior. Yeah. 2:03 Wes: Yeah. 2:03 Erin: Or at least maybe it would stop, certainly if it were stopping at a station or a little, you know, whatever those things are called. Those little. Yeah, there's a word for it. 2:14 Wes: We need something to see the freckles by. 2:16 Erin: Right. We need something. Exactly. But wherever they would be stopping would have some form of street light illumination or something of that order. Anyway. 2:26 Wes: But it's interesting you say this, because I didn't picture a bus station at any point in this. And I just imagine people along the side of the road. 2:34 Erin: Right. But if it were a course, it 2:38 Wes: couldn't be that way. 2:39 Erin: Well, I don't think it's a station. I think it would be a stop with a. You know, like a lean to. You know, what are those things that just. 2:44 Wes: Yeah, sure. 2:45 Erin: That just protect you from the elements. 2:47 Wes: Yeah. Bust down. 2:48 Erin: Right. 2:48 Wes: Yeah. 2:49 Erin: And that would probably have at least a street light. But anyway, then we get the moonlight. Maybe my favorite. Oh, it's so hard to say, but maybe my favorite image in the poem is the hairy, scratchy, splintery moonlight and mist caught in them like lambswool on bushes in a pasture. Just. There's nothing. There's no image greater than that. That's unbelievable. 3:13 Wes: There's kind of a more wildness to this. Right. The image now, the hairiness and scratchiness and splinteriness. It's a bit less Domesticated, I guess, than the previous part of the poem. 3:27 Erin: That's a really good point. I hadn't thought of that. Even a suggestion of danger, like the lamb running. 3:34 Wes: I just thought, this is where the hobbits are entering Fangorn Forest. 3:39 Erin: Yes. Yeah, yeah, the New Brunswick. 3:41 Wes: But you go a little bit more. It's a little wilder and more primal. I think once you. Even if you're on a bus, once you get into the woods, there's something different about it. 3:52 Erin: That's right. 3:53 Wes: But yeah, you're right. The idea that the moonlight could get caught in that. That's a great image. 3:59 Erin: Something giving chase to the lamb would cause it potentially to get a little ensnared in the chase. 4:06 Wes: It's as if Lambswool has, you know, a lamb is brushed up on the bramble or whatever and left its will so that. So the moonlight, instead of making this cosmic journey and landing on articulating the environment, has been subordinated to the environment. Right. It's become. It's been captured by these hairy woods. It's caught on it and, you know, a piece of it has come off from being caught on something that's scratchy and splintery. So that. That. Yeah, this is the great reversal. And that's the place where you can really get some good sleeping. Yes, right. 4:44 Erin: Yes. And where dreamy things can happen. 4:47 Wes: Divagation. Yeah, wanderings. 4:51 Erin: I looked that up. Wandering, straying or digressing from a main course, path or topic. So like a digression as long as 4:59 Wes: the bus stays on track. 5:00 Erin: Yeah, that's right. 5:01 Wes: You do whatever you want with your mind. 5:02 Erin: That's right. And the night. I just looked on Google Maps while I was writing my little notes in the margins. And if you were to take a bus today from Great Village to Boston, it would take like 10 hours. So it definitely is a, yikes, full course of the night on this night bus. So I love what happens in stanza 16, which begins in the creakings and noises, an old conversation not concerning us, but recognizable somewhere back in the bus. So I really love that it's grandparents voices, she says, uninterrupted talking. This is where the I becomes an us. And this is a characteristic of a bishop. I think she's rather reluctant to use an I, capital I in a poem. She's more likely to use a we or an us. And here it's as if they're all part of the same family now in the bus and the adults. It's almost like everybody on the bus who isn't a grandparent is a child and the adults in the back are talking and we are all, oh, that doesn't concern us. Just go to sleep. It's none of your business. Just stop eavesdropping on us. Right, so there's some community that's been formed already by the people who are not the grandparents talking. Do you get that impression? 6:20 Wes: Yeah, it's a bit confusing. So, yeah, let's try to figure it out. Because it. So it begins. A dreamy navigation begins in the night. She doesn't say, I started dreaming or they started dreaming or we started dreaming. Although it seems almost like it's collective. Right. So that the bus is dreaming or everyone on the bus is dreaming together, which kind of lines up with the not concerning us later on, the gentle auditory slow hallucination. So that's a very interesting idea. Right. The dream is usually associated with subjectivity. Right. The cogito and Descartes. Right. The dream tells us that we might have trouble distinguishing reality from what's in our own minds. And we in our own minds are very potentially cut off from reality. But it's a. It's an alienated individual position here. The dream is. Seems to be collective. And perhaps it's collective because it's partly real. Right. Is that the conversation? I thought, okay, there's a conversation going on in the back of the bus and it is old people talking. But as you're lying back, you could sort of. You can't hear exactly what they're saying. And you might have that kind of half dream, Right. Where you're. The dream is kind of lined up with or intertwined with what's going on in reality. So she's hearing in the conversation of the old people, her grandparents voices. Is that the way you took this? Or. Or they, they're hearing the grandparents voices or. Yeah. How do we, how do we interpret this? 7:54 Erin: I interpreted it as, you know, people of the age of grandparents having a real conversation. But the idea that one could be having an auditory. I mean, we are given the word auditory slow hallucination. So the idea that there could be an auditory hallucination or kind of half dream of one's own grandparents having a conversation, or it may be superimposed on a real conversation kind of inaudible going on on the bus. I never noticed this before. The G in grandparents is capitalized. So it does seem to sit to suggest the speaker's particular grandparents rather than. 8:30 Wes: Oh, I was going to. I thought you were going to say archetypal grandparents. 8:34 Erin: Oh, yeah, I suppose it could be yeah, it could be read that way, too. I think all of these things are true, right? 8:40 Wes: Yeah. 8:40 Erin: I mean, the image works because of the, shall we say, universal particularity of this experience. 8:47 Wes: The ordinary way to write the poem would be to. And a much simpler way would be to put this in her point of view and not try to put it into a collective point of view. But that seems to be what she's doing. 8:59 Erin: Yes. The effectiveness, though, I think is the. And it could just be the speaker's perception of it, but the atmospheric quality, because everyone on the bus is going to share an experience shortly, but already they are sharing an experience and a kind of atmosphere that they're all listening to the hum and having that. You know, when you're in the car and you. Maybe when you're a kid and you put your ear up against, like, the. The car door or the window or something, and you hear orchestral music. I don't know if you ever had that. I used to always hear classical music when I would put my head up. 9:38 Wes: Yeah, I don't think I have that. 9:40 Erin: All kinds of. And I always think, like, I should write this down. But you always have, like, a hallucination of an orchestra playing songs. Different songs. Sometimes like fantastical songs. Yeah. You know, my particular experience maybe doesn't quite get at the. Yeah. The sense that this is shared. 9:57 Wes: Well, you're put into a kind of dreamy state, and yet you're getting at the auditory hallucination part. I mean, for me, I think, as a child, and this, I think, is very evocative of childhood. It's something about being half asleep or falling asleep. You're on a journey and there are adults in the car and there's some. Maybe some sense of safety, I think is very relevant to this poem. But being ensconced in the world of adults and not quite alone when you do this thing, which is potentially very lonely, which is go to sleep. And of course, a lot of kids don't want to go to sleep because that loneliness factor. But it's a much different experience if you're traveling. You're all on the way to something together. And of course, you're with people who are awake and, you know, are going 10:45 Erin: to be awake, maybe because the kids are falling asleep. Their. Their voices are lowered and softer. And maybe that also contributes Right. To the. The way in which. That lulls the children in the back simply because they're aware of not wanting to talk too loudly. Certainly that would be the case on a bus like this, where they're Having a conversation where they're talking in. In lower voices and maybe actually inducing that calm and hum for sleep in the people, the other people in the bus who aren't talking. 11:15 Wes: And the question is, what are the adults doing with their talk? Right. It's not going to work if your parents are just fighting. In this case, it's the grandparents. Voices are clearing things up and I guess bringing certain things to resolution, coming to terms with these losses. But a lot of it does sound a bit gossipy and not necessarily like the most comforting. 11:39 Erin: Yes. Yeah. 11:39 Wes: Sort of talk we could imagine. Yeah. 11:41 Erin: Well, you know, in a situation like this where you might be a child in this car, could be that you're coming back from whatever, like a, like a late night and then the adults in the car are working through whatever has just happened over the course of the night. And. Oh no, she was the one who had that long. Yeah. Who had the criminal record because of that thing, remember where they. Oh, yeah, yeah. That was like 20 years ago. So you sort of get that. But for an entire family history going back ages and ages, talking in eternity. Deaths, deaths and sicknesses. The year he remarried, the year something happened. Oh, yeah, what year was that? Right. Something about the journey afterwards or maybe away from home. If these people are also. If their home is Nova Scotia and they're departing it, you know, then there's that backwards looking quality where something about the idea of the journey and moving away from the place is giving the opportunity to then take stock and look back. So there's this sort of like dual action happening in the poem where the further the bus goes, the further back they're kind of looking from deaths and sicknesses to then remarriage and then childbirth. Son lost when the schooner found her. 12:58 Wes: These are all very blue collar tragedies, right? 13:00 Erin: Yes. 13:01 Wes: He was arrested for insider trading. 13:04 Erin: No, but I mean, you know, there's a reverse order to what's happening, you know, so we get. We have death, then sickness, then remarriage, then dying in childbirth. So there's a rewind is what I mean. Yeah. 13:17 Wes: Well, we come back in the end to death. The way it's all summed up. 13:20 Erin: Insider trading. Sorry. 13:23 Wes: Huh? 13:24 Erin: Sorry, Just insider trading. That really is funny. 13:31 Wes: And he had an affair. No. A sharp indrawn breath. Half grown, half acceptance. That means life's like that. We know it. Also death, you know, and then the question, what does also death mean there? Death knows it, we also know death. But it, you know, it made me wonder at various points I wondered. Well, Is this an element here of a journey to the underworld or to the afterlife? Maybe it's a job not claiming that that's strong thematic part of this, but maybe a hint of that type of thing. Because the journey, I mean, and it does seem like journeys are good places for this or like when I travel, it produces in me a very different state of mind. And I do find it very calming in a way, you know, especially actually being on the train or something like that, because you're in between two different locations and you maybe you're not caught up in the expectations or the constricting qualities of any particular location. If I'm at home, I have to do this and that work, or if I'm at a destination, then I'm dealing with relatives or I have to be a tourist or something like that. But there's something liberating about being in between two locations. So it does seem like a place for this type of dreamy hallucination or this reflection or this clearing of things up. It's almost like therapy. Right? That's what all of this sounds like. People are talking through their problems, but where is it that they get to in the end here? The half grown, half acceptance. So it's not fully acceptance. It sums things up with this, maybe a degree of resignation. So yeah, I don't know. What do you make of the stanza? 15:15 Erin: Well, they're traveling west significantly. Right. I do take a lot of this to be a kind of, say, pre figurement of death, even though at the same time the fact that they're in the woods, the fact that not to jump ahead too much, the fact that the moose will come out of the woods and appear notably in the middle of the road, there is a suggestion of middle age or middleness, or midway in the journey of our life, I found myself within a dark forest. So I think it works both ways, or perhaps it's working in several ways simultaneously for the various passengers. So maybe the speaker is experiencing something more akin to the Dante esque middle of the journey on the bus. And something about the bus journey is also, symbolically speaking, a kind of final bus journey for some of the other passengers. And that intersection seems significant, but I don't know how, just in the sense that there's a retrospective quality happening or maybe even a reversion to childhood that goes on for the speaker and the other people in the bus by virtue of the propinquity to these old people at the end of their life's journey. Because there is very little about middleness Here, come to think of it, other than the moose appearing in the middle of the road. Right. It seems that the other people on the bus are like children and the grandparents are the adults. 16:50 Wes: I mean, I think part of what's comforting when we're children is that feeling that adults know the answers and that adults know how to cope with all the dangers and have experience doing that and therefore can protect us. The reality, of course, as we realize as we get older, is that that's not true. So what they may have is more of this acceptance that's sort of highlighted in this stanza, which is potentially a good thing, but maybe a double edged sword because it does seem to be a form of dying. It does seem to be a form of the very thing that we want to be protected from. 17:30 Erin: There's also, though, that. What I used to call my mom, the external hard drive. I used to say back before she. 17:42 Wes: She liked that. 17:44 Erin: I think now it would make her sad because she'll say, you know, very openly that she. Her memory is gone. But it used to be that she knew all the, you know, you could ask her who said that at that one. You know, there's that kind of. I mean, that's a sort of jokey, gossipy scorekeeping thing that she would keep tabs on. But there's also just the idea of long memory being the history keeper, the record keeper, the, you know, and there's sort of settling accounts over the course of this conversation. Oh, right, it was that year. Okay. And then this happened and then, then that happened. And that's important too, I think, for, you know, it situates children in a context. Not just say this idea of death that you're referring to, but also how to situate oneself in a life. 18:34 Wes: Right. 18:34 Erin: There's a. There's a sort of frame that the grandparents or the elder relatives have that whole history up until you enter the narrative and where you fit within that. We mentioned in part one a little bit about Bishop's family history just to kind of prefigure the types of story that she inserts, I think very significantly into the poem, particularly about poor Amos who just wouldn't stop praying in the store and had to be. Had to be put away. Right. Of course she does a gender swap, but yeah, we all have family stories like this, of this kind of unruly behavior or madness of some kind or other or some sort of family drama. 19:19 Wes: Yeah. So it's universal. But the way she captures it is very clever with this talk that we don't quite know whether it's just the conversation of the people, the old people at the back of the bus, or whether it's her dream or whether it's both or somewhere in between. They're interlaced, those two things. And that. That interlacing gets at this aspect of universality. Although I think by the time we get to the stanza where she's fantasizing about the grandparents and the featherbed, this, it start. Seems to become inescapably personal, which is why I think of the. The point of view is getting more and more focused. Right. With. With time. Yeah. And potentially it's still universal, but it seems almost like a personal memory. Right. So talking the way they talked in the old feather bed. Right. The way they. Her. Her grandparents presumably in the old feather bed, peacefully on and on. Dim lamp light in the hall, down in the kitchen, the dog tucked in her shaw. Shawl. Yeah, get another. And get another dog here. 20:28 Erin: I love this. 20:29 Wes: The collie, the barking dog. And. Yeah, so this, this stanza is wonderful. And it gets at exactly this thing that you've been talking about, which is the, like, comfort of being a kid overhearing adults talking. It really, despite this talk of death. Right. A reconciliation with death. This is the point. Seems to be the point of view of a child who finds this very comforting. And. Right. She'll say in the next stanza, now it's all right now even to fall asleep, just as on all those nights, the way in which the adult world and the safety of protective figures can make sleep okay to do. And then suddenly that's interrupted. 21:07 Erin: But I love too. I mean, yes, it's so particular, but it also just in this one stanza does so many things in miniature that the poem is doing all along, this telescoping in again to a scene which. Which even as a child, if it were her childhood in particular that she's referencing, she couldn't possibly know or see. She wouldn't be able to see the grandparents in their featherbed. She would have to be picturing them in the featherbed and she wouldn't be able to see the dog in the hall. And also I wonder if this. If the stanza in its operation is kind of doing. I mean, this is just occurring to me now, but maybe it's doing that kind of hallucinatory work that has prior been described where we actually get a remix of, you know, this is the third dog in the poem. But it's also the elements in the stanza are a kind of recapitulation of the light, the red light swimming, the port Lantern becomes the lamp light in the hall. We get the dog barking now becomes the dog curled up in the shawl. And then maybe even because we also get kitchen, maybe the shawl is even a kind of transposition of the table, tablecloth shook out. Right. So there's something actually in the stanza which has that hallucinatory quality that she's describing where these three elements swim in the imagination and then become the lamplight and the dog and the shawl in this half asleep kind of dream space. Maybe that's pushing things too far, but it does seem to be. It's the dreamiest stanza perhaps in the whole poem. Maybe the following one. Now it's all right now even to fall asleep. But this gets interrupted that next stanza. So this one, I think is the real depth of the dreamy or borderline dreamy or hallucinatory moment. 23:00 Wes: Yeah, this is great because it really underlines the way deviation creates the capacity for stasis or for comfort. So the deviation of a bus trip or of the dreaming. Right. Which is movement, which is dynamic and has that momentum, forward momentum that we were talking about, sort of underwrites or grounds this ability to. For stasis, for stopping, for going to sleep, for feeling comforted as a child and safe, I think. And I keep repeating that word because of the. What's going to happen. The use of the word that's going to happen in this poem later. But yeah, I'm not sure if you were saying that explicitly, but that's what came to mind my mind as you were talking. This. The way in which this journey, devigation, motion can ground something that's going to be more static or stationary, which is what we're going to get in the moose. Because it interrupts the. It explicitly interrupts the motion of the bus and the external line of the poem in a way that parallels the comfort that's produced by the dreaming. 24:08 Erin: Yeah. In stanza 22 is where we have that break that you're describing. The moose finally appears. Well, the moose doesn't appear until stanza 23 finally appears. 24:21 Wes: We've been waiting for you. 24:22 Erin: We've been waiting for you. The title has promised that you would come and then here you are. It is foretold of your coming. 24:29 Wes: Comes through the curtains, takes his bow. Right. 24:32 Erin: We get nights, just as on all those nights. And then the moose's appearance, the lights turn on. And that rhyme you get, I mean, it's a very basic, simple rhyme. Right. But there's that sort of sudden jolt which is then also visualized where in the middle of night we have this appearance, this bright because of the headlights on it. Appearance of the moose. And it looms and sniffs at the bus's hot hood, which I'm assuming means that it thinks that the bus might be a boy moose. 25:06 Wes: No. Well, it's a very hot bus, I'll say that. 25:10 Erin: Ow. Ow. 25:14 Wes: That enamel. And it's dented and, you know, depends on if you like bad buses. No, just kidding. 25:21 Erin: Dented from its last encounter with a girl bus. 25:25 Wes: Yeah. It's funny because I wrote in my notes, but was just reading it stanza by stanza. And the previous stanza I'd said, okay to sleep, even with death looming. Looming for all of us, you know, all day one. You know, one day we all die. Blooming in that sense. And then suddenly the moose is looming, standing there, looming. And I thought, whoa, that's really interesting 25:45 Erin: that I. Oh, yes, chose. 25:48 Wes: Chose that word before I even got to the next stanza. Not to give some, you know, obvious rote sort of identification of the moose with death or the experience of the moose as having something to do with that. But obviously they're coming into contact here with something quite primal and important. It's not just, oh, look, there's a nice moose, but is he sniffing or she's sniffing the buses hot hood because she thinks it might be another moon. That hadn't actually occurred to me. 26:21 Erin: I must have been infected with that reading at some point that this was a frisky moose, that it otherwise doesn't seem frisky at all. It seems pretty. Like a pretty staid, respectable moose. 26:34 Wes: But frisky and ditzy. 26:39 Erin: That's right. Hello. 26:41 Wes: What? 26:41 Erin: Oh, look, I seem to be in the middle of the road. Pardon me. 26:46 Wes: So, towering, antlerous, high as a church, homely as a house. We're safe as houses, a man's voice assures us. Perfectly harmless. Which you presume, right, that the. The man making that assurance is. Precedes the idea of it being homely as a house and safe as houses. Even though. So. So she interestingly puts the associations before her associative responses before the actual stimulus. Right. I don't think she's the one who is thinking about how they must be safe and. And he's saying something. I mean, as far as I know. I don't know back then. But you were warned about bison and mooses, right? Or is it mooses or moose? I think we're warned because they don't. They. They seem harmless, but they're not. And so I was quite surprised by this stanza. And I thought this idea, okay, safe as houses. Well, yeah, houses ought to be safe, but they're not always safe. The bus, the moving container of the bus turns out to be, in a way safer and more conducive to reverie and dreaming and all of that. 27:59 Erin: No matter how you slice it, whether you see the moose as harmless, truly, or not so harmless, this has got to be just a little bit of a wink, right? A man's voice assures us. 28:09 Wes: I mean, I think we're definitely meant to be skeptical. 28:12 Erin: Yeah. 28:13 Wes: This perfectly harmless line, it's not there for us to nod our heads in agreement. 28:20 Erin: Oh, yeah, he's right, right, right. I think it's more like, oh, here's another mansplainer. 28:26 Wes: He's moose splaining. 28:28 Erin: Mooseplaining this woman moose to moose splaining. Just out for a good time, having her existence commented upon by another man's voice. Probably a podcaster. One of those male podcasters has a manosphere podcast. 28:45 Wes: Girl mooses are. 28:49 Erin: Then we get these childish again. The passengers are like children and having this childlike response to the appearance of the moose, including. It's awful, plain sad. So much judgment of women's bodies. 29:04 Wes: I mean, they're not good looking creatures. Let's just. They're, you know, put that on the table. Come on. They are in an ugly sort of way. 29:11 Erin: Yeah. I mean, okay, I guess they don't follow, you know, classical proportions. They don't represent the golden mean. 29:21 Wes: They're not into beauty society societal beauty standards. All right. 29:28 Erin: They are like cartoon characters. 29:29 Wes: They're miss Positive is what they are. 29:35 Erin: Well, what I love though, about the description, you know, we get several, I suppose. Yeah. Contradictory descriptions of the moose in a way, because we get homely as a house or safe as houses. We get awful plane. But then she looks the bus over grand otherworldly, so she has some gravitas. She's like a great character actress who. Who may not be beautiful in that leading lady way, but she's Kathy Bates. Yes. Yeah, well, that's maybe a bit insulting to Kathy Bates, who I do think is a very attractive woman, but. 30:19 Wes: Sorry, Kathy. 30:20 Erin: I know, I love her. 30:21 Wes: Come on the show sometime, please. 30:24 Erin: Oh my gosh, I would die. I love Kathy Bates anyway. And then we get curious creatures. Well, first we get the idea that it inspires joy and then we get curious creatures. So there's a. The joy is then immediately undercut by a kind of ambivalence. Right. So there's just all of these descriptions of the moose combine to create a kind of ambivalent portrait, such as it is, of the animal. 30:47 Wes: Are we going to be able to answer this question? Why? Why do they feel the sweet sensation of joy? I mean, I think I would probably feel it. 30:57 Erin: Why? Why do we all feel it? I mean, they have. Well, they've successfully done what I couldn't see a moose in real life. So they're like one up on Erin. Can't wait to go back and tell her we saw moose. Yeah, I've seen certain things. I can't think of a specific example of this, but I've had plenty of instances. Whether it is a wild animal or, I don't know, like a sunset or a really spectacular natural event of some kind or other. You do get that feeling of joy, kind of excitement. 31:28 Wes: Yeah. Unfortunately, most of my encounters with large animals are at zoos. I did see a bear once. I was going to the bathroom. My mom had a house in Front Royal, Virginia, at the beginning of the Appalachian Mountains. And it was up high on a. We called it a mountain, but it was, I guess, more of a hill. But so it was out, you know, it was kind of. There was a bear on the mountain, let's just put it that way. And, yeah, I was going to the bathroom one day and looking out the window. There's a window right. You know, above the toilet. And suddenly there's bear's face looking at me. Wow. What the. So, but that, you know, and. And that was majestic. No, just kidding. That it was. I. It was surprising. 32:13 Erin: Yeah. 32:14 Wes: And there's an element of fear that involved. Even if you're, you know, even if, you know, black bears are harmless and there's a wall between you. Some. Something scary about it. I didn't have time to feel like it's majestic. Yeah. You know, like you have had these experiences in. In nature, but I can't think of a encounter like this. But it. I seem sure that if I had an encounter like this, I would feel exactly the same way. So. Yeah. What is otherworldly about it? What is majestic about it? It's a big, dumb beast. And I say that with love, without any criticism in the sense that. Right. It's an encounter with something primal. And I think we have to take into account the size of the animal as well. I mean, it is interesting to run into a fox or something like that, but it's also a matter of scale here. But. Yeah. What is otherworldly about it? I mean, I think the most. The most obvious part of this is that you know, we have lost something in our humanity and becoming language using creatures and becoming self conscious creatures. And sometimes when we're confronted with an animal like this, we're confronted with that loss. We're not as connected to the environment because of the intermediation of something like language, which poetry of course tries to overcome. It tries to put language into a disintermediating. Sorry to use these business terms. I don't know why this is happening. Into a disintermediation. 33:46 Erin: Actualize. Yeah, yeah. 33:49 Wes: When it. Yeah, right. Synergize it's agenda. Often where language might put distance between us and the world. Poetry, I think, can undo that distance. Like I was saying, with the very vivid imagery, I can undo that distance with figurative language. And maybe that distance is also undone to some extent by the dreaming or the half dreaming hallucinatory state that she was in. And the comfort of that, the return to childhood, which is also a simpler time. I don't know. I'm thinking out loud here. But yeah, I wanted to try to get more at this, you know, the otherworldly status of the moose and the joy that comes from encountering it. 34:34 Erin: I was thinking to myself, is the moose's gaze really clearly encapsulated? And then I thought, yes, she regards us amicably. And then I was like, no, no, that's the passenger who gets on the bus. 34:44 Wes: Right. Does the moose have freckles? Yeah, that'd be an interesting twist, right? 34:50 Erin: But yeah, but there is one. 34:51 Wes: Turned her into a moose. 34:53 Erin: Well, I would think that this would be a more garden variety animal encounter and maybe even a more, to use a word, I don't like, problematic poem in terms of its relationship with the animal. If it were to focus on the gaze of the animal. Because I think that is the thing which is often at the core of these interactions with animals in which we project or hope to have a kind of meaningful encounter. You want to meet the gaze of the animal and in so doing understand it. Right. And of course you don't realize that you're just projecting onto it a kind of maybe mutual regard. She regards us amicably. That you are seeing it and it is seeing you. And there's an acknowledgement and there's this, you know, spiritual encounter that you have with this animal. And all of that, of course, is often quite silly. It's often quite reductive and fanciful and unrealistic. But I am thinking of an encounter that springs to mind is in Utah. I hiked the same trail almost every day. And I Would often hike it late in order to escape the full heat of the desert sun. Which is a little dangerous, right? Because sometimes the sun would be setting and then all kinds of things come out. And one time I was trying to get back to my car before it got completely dark. And what I thought was a wolf, but what must have been a coyote. And the coyotes in Utah are huge. They look like wolves and completely white. Came out from over a hill, crossed my path, turned, looked at me in the eyes for a very long time, turned and went over on the other side of the hill. I mean, curiously, then, of course, I got to the car and I actually found out that a beloved family member, an elderly family member of mine, had passed away. And I said, I think I just saw her. You know, I had this feeling of, like. I don't know, the sense of this connection, inherent connection between these two. This woman who was dear to me and this encounter. But, of course, that's all silliness. And the idea that I was having a sort of interaction through the gate. Some sort of reciprocal. Right. Interaction with this animal was also entirely just my own projecting onto the animal. However, I will say that that's an instance in which I felt fear. But then there was also this, like, joy at the encounter, I think fear because it was dark. Because I wasn't actually sure if this was a wolf because it blocked my path. It was far enough away that I didn't feel as threatened as I might have. But it was definitely a mixed perception. 37:28 Wes: You didn't shoot it and then hang it around your neck. No, because I was thinking. I just suddenly thought of the albatross poem. 37:37 Erin: Rime of the Ancient Mariner. 37:38 Wes: Rime of the Ancient Mariner. And that sort of relationship to the natural world where. I mean, I forget what we said about it, but maybe I said something about envy and wanting to kill the albatross for. Because of its freedom or something like that. I don't. I don't know. But I think it's important because, yeah, this is part of something about the encounter with the natural world. Whether it's a big moose or something else. Yes. Is otherworldly. Strangely enough, it's otherworldly to us, even though it's where we come from. It's uncanny, maybe. And Freud actually, in the German, I think uncanny is sort of like unhomelike is what the German sounds like. And Freud made a lot out of this. I think it's home, but it's a home from which we've become alienated. We're animals, we're something more than animals. And so that primal encounter brings us back to that foundation, that natural foundation in us, but we can't fully come to terms with it. And I think the other aspect of this, I think the death. Right. So there is a link to death. Just. And I was thinking about that when you described thinking of it as seeing. As seeing your departed loved one. Because if we could regress to that animal state, it would be a kind of death. I think that the association with the movement to the pre. Linguistic, natural foundation is something like the movement towards dying, but there's something comforting. 39:07 Erin: Yes. 39:07 Wes: Right. And we encounter that when we encounter the gaze. To have a. Have a gaze returned by an animal like that usually like, like our internal. Our entire psychological structure, what makes us self. Self conscious is the internalization of a human gaze. Right. To the extent that we. We get an animal gaze, I think we are returned to that more primal part of ourselves. And it does seem to me to have something to do with being reconciled to mortality. Right. Which is part of what the function of that dialogue between the elderly people is doing. 39:44 Erin: You're leading me into the one, say, reading of the moose that I wanted to get to. And I just want to say that I think the great thing about Bishop and about this poem and all her poems is that the moose is a moose. It's not a symbol. I hesitate to offer any kind of 40:03 Wes: direct reading, but that's her job on this podcast, though. 40:05 Erin: I know, I know. It's. Yeah. In the letters with Robert Lowell when he's writing to her about her poem at the fish houses, he says, alas, all my fish just become symbols. 40:16 Wes: Ah, very good. 40:17 Erin: I hesitate to reduce. I think what you've just said makes me think that it's the maternal, the mother. 40:25 Wes: Which also brings us back to the house. 40:28 Erin: Yes, the house. Yeah. It's something that comes like the clapboard churches, like clamshells seem to arise out of the ground, if you will, or are directly compared to these native creatures. The houses are then in turn used as comparisons for the moose, the maternal. The idea that this is something that returns us to nature, that this is the encounter that we would have presumably upon death. It's the loved one that is somehow comforting, maternal, and is a female moose. It's moose mom. I don't know. I don't know. Something going on there. 41:04 Wes: Moose mom. 41:05 Erin: Natural and strange at the same time, not us. And I guess that's why I. That's why I mentioned that the story of my grandfather at the beginning, because I don't know why I wanted so badly to see a moose right after my grandfather's death. But there was something, like, logical about it to me. And I was familiar with this poem, but I very much did not have. You know, it was not something that was the forefront of my mind at all. But I think there is this inherent connection, and it's silly. You know, I kind of can't believe I'm saying this, but I do. I do think there is this kind of connection between this desire that I felt to see this animal. Like the particular kind of primordial itch that the moose in particular seems to be scratching for me in that moment. For Bishop, in this poem, something that is at once safe and comforting and from another world, natural in that kind of elemental way. 42:00 Wes: Yeah. 42:01 Erin: That all kind of coalesce in that image. 42:04 Wes: Very good. 42:05 Erin: Okay. I think that's it, Wes. All we're left with is the dim smell of moose and an acrid smell of gasoline. 42:12 Wes: Oh, you know, we should have talked about that. Maybe we can start with that on our next Bishop recording. We'll. We'll begin with the smells, the smells and the significance of that image at the end. 42:25 Erin: Nice. 42:25 Wes: That smellage at the end. 42:26 Erin: Smellage. All right. Thank you. 42:29 Wes: Thank you.

A poem about a map opens North and South, the first collection of the great twentieth century poet Elizabeth Bishop, and since, maps have been associated with her poetic vision—at once telescoping and binocular—and with the polarities and preoccupations of her work. The map's privileged, sweeping, bird's eye view of the earth is also hand-held, man-made, intimate. Depending on its level of minuteness or obsession, it can contain the tiniest details as well as, let's say, the whole enchilada. And though it purports to be scientific and objective, it is representational and therefore subjective, particular, imaginative, and personal. For several episodes, Wes & Erin will be reading a selection of some of Bishop's most anthologized poems, starting with “The Moose” as expressions of, among other things, her map-like imagination. Upcoming Episodes: Nolan’s adaptation of “The Odyssey”; more Elizabeth Bishop poetry: “First Death in Nova Scotia,” “One Art.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Erin: A poem about a map opens north and south, the first collection of the great 20th century poet Elizabeth Bishop. And since maps have been associated with her poetic vision, at once telescoping and binocular, and with the polarities and preoccupations of her work. The map's privileged, sweeping, bird's eye view of the earth is also handheld, man made intimate. Depending on its level of minuteness or obsession, it can contain the tiniest details as well as, let's say, the whole enchilada. And though it purports to be scientific and objective, it is representational and therefore subjective, particular, imaginative and personal. Over the next few episodes, we'll be reading a selection of some of Bishop's most anthologized poems, starting with the moose as expressions of, among other things, her map, like imagination. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. Wes, have you ever seen a moose in the wild? 1:12 Wes: I have not, but I have seen Instagram videos of them and people getting too close, and I've heard that they actually are quite dangerous. 1:23 Erin: Oh, perfectly harmless. 1:24 Wes: As cute as they look. So not safe as houses. Which is a very surprising line, unless you think that houses maybe aren't as safe as they seem or ought to be. But that's something we'll talk about later. How about you? 1:38 Erin: I have not. And I actually, it's become a running joke among certain friends of mine that I haven't seen a moose because I long to see a moose in the wild. This is my dearest wish. 1:52 Wes: Is that the first time anyone said that in history? I long to see. 1:56 Erin: I don't know. 1:57 Wes: It's a good first line for a poem, actually. Why do you long. Long to see a moose in the wild? 2:03 Erin: Really? Maybe because of the poem. I don't know. I just really want to, but I. Maybe this will become significant without getting too personal or maybe with getting too personal. With apologies to the listeners. Ten years ago now, when my grandfather passed that summer, my grandmother wanted to go up to Maine and revisit certain places that she had been with him. And we ended up going to Acadia. And I was so excited to see. Am just. I got it into my head that I had to go to Acadia and see a moose. And I even bought a sweatshirt. I'm not wearing it right now. I looked down to see if I was wearing it. It's the same size and shape as this one. This is a Yankees, 1996 World Series sweatshirt. 2:42 Wes: It's not a Rocky and Bullwinkle sweatshirt, is it? 2:45 Erin: No, no, no. It's an acadia and it has a. It has a mousse on it. And so I bought it the first day that I was there and I was like, this is my sweatshirt and it has a moose on it. And I'm gonna. I'm gonna see a moose. And I did not see a moose. And then I. I bought a moose sweatshirt in, I think Grand Teton, and I was like, I'm gonna see a moose. And I did not see a moose. And then I lived obviously many years in Utah, and things would happen. Everybody knew I wanted to see a moose. And I would go to these trails where you could see moose. And I would like be going up a trail and someone would be coming down saying, there are moose up there. We just saw a moose. You just saw baby moose. I'd get all upsided and I would. I would run up and it was gone and people would taunt me. 3:32 Wes: So you don't want to see like a magic white heart or something like that? 3:38 Erin: No, no, I just want to see him. Even the garden variety moose? No, no. Just a humble moose will hide itself from me when. When it knows that I am after it. 3:49 Wes: Because they are a goofy, right? Are they majestic? Are they goofy looking? Are they both? 3:55 Erin: I think they're both. And I think that kind of qual quality is really well captured in the poem. No, I mean that quality of if not being then looking safe as houses or being a gargantuan size, and yet having. I know this is a female moose, which I believe is called a cow, as opposed to a bull. Right. But the bulls, even their horns have that hand like quality to them. You know, it looks kind of like an outstretched hand. 4:22 Wes: Interesting. 4:24 Erin: Yeah. They're not majestic. 4:25 Wes: Yeah, I think that's important to the poem. It's not some obviously majestic creature, although it is large and there is majesty in it in the poem, but it's not the typical majesty that you can just get from, oh, look at this beautiful animal. 4:41 Erin: Yeah. And this is kind of why I brought up my grandfather. There was some connection for me as I think there is something quite personal going on with the moose at the end, other than the shared experience of everybody in the bus, all of that. Like there's something bigger than us, more than us, and yet familiar in a way. And it's magical in a sense, because to see it is kind of a rare thing. Yet it also comes out of the landscape that she's that she's grown up in and that she's part of. I think there's a. Yeah. A lot of interesting dualities going on. 5:17 Wes: Okay. So maybe you can read the whole thing and then you could give a little bit. Or we could give a little bit of the biographical background because this is a bus trip she actually took. Right. 5:26 Erin: Yeah. 5:27 Wes: The significance of Nova Scotia, which is where she's departing from in the poem and all of that stuff. But. Yeah. Do you want to start by reading? 5:35 Erin: Sure. The moose from narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea, home of the long tides, where the bay leaves the sea twice a day and takes the herrings long rides where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam depends on if it meets the bay. Coming in the bay, not at home, where silted red sometimes the sun sets facing a red sea and others veins the flats. Lavender rich mud and burning rivulets. On red gravelly roads, down rows of sugar maples, past clapboard farmhouses and neat clapboard churches, bleached ridged as clam shells, past twin silver birches through late afternoon a bus journeys west, the windshield flashing pink, pink glancing off of metal, brushing the dented flank of blue beat up enamel, down hollows, uprises and waits patient, while a lone traveler gives kisses and embraces to seven relatives and the collie supervises goodbye to the elms, to the farm, to the dog. The bus starts. The light grows richer. The fog shifting, salty, thin, comes closing in. Its cold round crystals form and slide and settle in the white hen's feathers in gray glazed cabbages on the cabbage roses and lupins like apostles. The sweet peas cling to their wet white string on the whitewashed fences. Bumblebees creep inside the foxgloves and evening commences. One stop at Bass river, then the economies, lower middle, upper five islands. Five houses where a woman shakes a tablecloth out after supper. A pale flickering gone the Tantramar marshes and the smell of salt hay. An iron bridge trembles and a loose plank rattles but doesn't give way. On the left a red light swims through the dark. A ship's port lantern. Two rubber boots show illuminated, solemn. A dog gives one bark. A woman climbs in with two market bags. Brisk, freckled, elderly. A grand night. Yes, sir. All the way to Boston. She regards us amicably. Moonlight as we enter the New Brunswick woods. Hairy, scratchy, splintery moonlight and mist caught in them like lamb's wool. On bushes in a pasture the passengers lie back, snores some long sighs. A dreamy divagation begins in the night, a gentle auditory slow hallucination in the creakings and noises, an old conversation not concerning us but recognizable somewhere back in the bus, grandparents, voices uninterruptedly talking in eternity, names being mentioned. Things cleared up finally. What he said, what she said, who got pensioned. Deaths, deaths and sicknesses. The year he remarried, the year something happened, she died in childbirth. That was the son lost when the schooner foundered. He took to drink. Yes, she went to the bad when Amos began to pray, even in the store and finally the family had to put him away. Yes, that peculiar affirmative. Yes, a sharp indrawn breath, half grown, half acceptance. That means life's like that, we know it. Also death talking the way they talked in the old featherbed, peacefully on and on, dim lamplight in the hall, down in the kitchen, the dog tucked in her shawl. Now it's all right now, even to fall asleep, just as on all those nights. Suddenly the bus driver stops with a jolt, turns off his lights. A moose has come out of the impenetrable wood and stands there, looms rather in the middle of the road. It approaches, it sniffs at the bus's hot hood, towering antlerless, high as a church, homely as a house or safe as houses, a man's voice assures us, perfectly harmless. Some of the passengers exclaim in whispers, childishly, softly, sure are big creatures. It's awful plain. Look, it's a she. Taking her time. She looks the bus over, grand, otherworldly. Why. Why do we feel. We all feel the sweet sensation of joy? Curious creatures, says our quiet driver, rolling his Rs. Look at that, would you? Then he shifts gears for a moment longer by craning backward. The moose can be seen on the moonlit McAdam. Then there's a dim smell of moose, an acrid smell of gasoline. 11:05 Wes: Thank you. Very nice. It's really great to hear it spoken out loud. Spoken is the wrong word. It's the word read, performed. Do you want to say anything about the form of the poem before I ask you about some of the autobiographical background? 11:22 Erin: Yeah. Short lines, six line stanzas, 20, I believe. 28 stanzas in all. Irregularly rhymed, should we say? Kind of like a lot of bishop, you know, we get A, B, C. Then sometimes not rhymed where you might expect. So the rhymes peek their heads out and then. And then recede. Chatty a little bit in places, lots of repetitions of words. But that. That's something we could talk about More. But, yeah, kind of. Kind of mysterious form. One of the best things I've ever heard or read, I guess, about Bishop was by Michael Hoffman, who wrote quite a bit about her. And he said that it seems as though every time Bishop is writing, whether in form or in a kind of nonce form that she's creating, that she seems to be just inventing every form, like from scratch. You know, there's no blueprint. She doesn't have a familiar style in which she writes or particular kind of verse form that she seems to gravitate to. And when she writes, you know, a sistina or a villanelle or a sonnet or something like that, it seems like she's almost inventing the form as she goes along. And in this instance, there's a real. I keep wanting to say homemade after Crusoe in England. But, yeah, I think that's maybe what he was trying to get at, that homemade quality, that sort of bespoke kind of quality. And in the places where the rhyme goes in and out, I think that's really exemplified. 12:53 Wes: Well, it better be bespoke. She took forever to write it. 12:55 Erin: Yeah, that's right. She started this in, I think, 1946. 13:01 Wes: And then she finished it when this 13:04 Erin: was published in Geography 3. So she finished it in the 70s. 13:07 Wes: Okay. 13:08 Erin: Geography 3 came out in 1977. And this must have been published before then, individually, perhaps in the New Yorker, I think. Oh, geography three is 76. I would say maybe 72 is the date that comes to mind. Don't quote me on that. 13:24 Wes: Do we know why it took her so long? Obviously, she put it down for a couple days here and there. 13:29 Erin: It was the July 15th issue, 1972. So close to the day that we're recording. Why did it take her so long? She just worked on things forever and ever and ever. You see it, if you read. I highly recommend to listeners that they Get Words in Air. A very, very thick book of all the letters between Bishop and her friend Robert Lowell. You see her bringing up things or even mentioning in a description that she's writing to Lowell in a letter, a line that will later show up in a poem. Yeah. Low rate of productivity is great to. 14:08 Wes: You know, I can relate to that. 14:11 Erin: I take it as my model, honestly. Like, you know, live. Live Large and die with a slim Collected is kind of a. 14:19 Wes: Kind of a great Monroe Doctrine. But call it. What's another name? Bishpro. 14:28 Erin: That's right. 14:29 Wes: Is it right that she was forced to complete it because she agreed to read it this is something for deadlines. Right. At Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa ceremony. 14:38 Erin: I didn't know that. I know she read it at that ceremony, but I didn't know that that's what. The impetus for completing it. But that doesn't surprise me. 14:45 Wes: Yeah. So deadlines help every once in a while. 14:47 Erin: Absolutely, absolutely. 14:49 Wes: And then biographically. Right. This is based on a trip that she actually took, and she. She'd been to visit relatives in Nova Scotia and then came back on this bus trip. And the. There really was a moose. There really was a collie. Seven relatives for the rest of it. Yeah, yeah. Seven else. 15:11 Erin: Yeah, yeah. The specificity and all of it's. You know, there is a kind of like a photo realism, not just in the style, but in the. You know, we could sort of be certain that these things happened the way that she is recording them somehow, and yet she's spinning it into something more than just reportage. 15:30 Wes: So she was raised partly by her grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia. Right. Her. Her father had died in infancy and her mother was institutionalized. 15:41 Erin: That's right, yeah. 15:41 Wes: She aged at. When she was 5. 15:43 Erin: That's right. 15:44 Wes: So it's important just because. Yeah. The bus is leaving Nova Scotia, but go. Go ahead. 15:48 Erin: Yeah, it is important. She was born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and she's buried there. I've seen her grave up there. It has a line or two lines from the bite on her tombstone. All the untidy activity continues. Awful but cheerful. Yeah. So she was born in 1911. Her father died, I think, of Bright's disease when she was 8 months old. And then her mother was institutionalized when she was 5, and she never saw her again. She didn't die until the 30s, I think, while Bishop was at Vassar. 16:23 Wes: Do we know what she was institutionalized for? Mental illness in general? 16:28 Erin: Yes. I don't know exactly what. In a short story of Bishop's, she describes as her. A scream coming from her mother. And whatever was wrong was exacerbated by her husband's death. And so then Elizabeth was left to be raised by her grandparents in Nova Scotia who were quite poor. And I guess she was kind of running around barefoot on the farm and stuff like that. And her father's family were very wealthy, and so when they came up to visit Elizabeth, they were, I guess, horrified by the fact that she was just like, you know, running around, hanging out with farm animals. And they took her to. Back with him to Worcester, and she was very unhappy there. Very ill child. She had asthma and eczema. And really, like, I think almost died of both at one time or other, very unhappy. And then eventually she moved to an aunt's house in, I want to say, in Revere, Massachusetts, and she was a little happier there. And then she went to Vassar, and I've been to the Vassar campus to see various buildings associated with Bishop and also to see. They did a really fabulous exhibition of her postcards at the Vassar Library a couple of years ago, which I really loved, seeing her hand and her little. In jokes and asides and really amazing to see. Anyway, at Vassar, the librarian there set up a meeting between Bishop and Marianne Moore, who became a mentor to her. They were very close. And then also over the course of her life, she was very close with and had an important friendship with Lowell. Hence the enormous book of letters. I have it here. It's so heavy I could barely pick it up. But this is a great book. It's kind of like an epistolary novel. Yeah. And she was. I think it's important to say, too, that she was a lesbian who had a very long relationship with a Brazilian architect named Lota de Mecedo Soares, who was her partner in Brazil for 15 years. She lived down there, known for travel. A lot of her collections, whether it's Geography three, which is the most obvious one, or north and south, have. There are a lot of Brazilian pumps. There are a lot of geographical poems. The first poem in her first collection, north and south, was the Map, which is often read as a kind of ars poetica. She's known for these types of, you know, sweeping landscapes that the moose begins with, and an interest in landscape and in this kind of bird's eye view. But then also you get these telescoping details, like a cinematic close up interspersed. Much is made of that in Bishop, of that kind of vision of hers, and specifically of, I don't know, the idea that she creates these. These beautiful miniatures, which is true, but maybe sometimes can be a little. I mean, she's revered, as she should be, and she's one of the most popular poets and she also has a great ear and she has so many other great things going on. So I don't want to exclusively focus on that kind of visual element, though it's there and it's very rich. 19:43 Wes: So from narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea. That's a very good opener. Why are they narrow provinces? And what is the. What are the fish and bread and tea doing? Fish and bread sounds vaguely like it could be a biblical reference, but maybe it's not. But you add tea. Right. There's something mundane here and perhaps restricted, provincial. And that's what she's going to be departing from. I mean, well, begins with the tides, but. 20:12 Erin: Yeah, right. Yeah, that's right. Narrow in a few kinds of ways. Because there's a strange. Because of the Bay of Fundy, there's almost that like U shaped corridor of land around it. So Nova Scotia is kind of narrow. And then up into. Then there's the narrow isthmus. I don't know, I don't know if I'm using that word correctly. Up into New Brunswick. Yeah, so there's something maybe a little, I don't want to say spiritually narrow, maybe somewhat limited or like practical. Practical and, you know, just the necessities and a place we learn that that is. That maybe has to be stalwart in response to the vagaries of the water around it. The Bay of Fundy, I was reading online, the tide, over the course of just one tide, can rise and fall 50ft because the bay is like a giant funnel. When it goes out, it just leaves this vast, open, muddy plain basically behind it. 21:16 Wes: She portrays this very beautifully. We get the image of the tide retreating and then the flats that are being illuminated by the setting sun as burning rivulets. And then there's almost a transition into the bus ride when she says on red gravelly roads, eventually the subject of that is going to be the bus. Although in the beginning, before we get to the bus, it looks like the rivulets have almost become roads. So you almost get the sense like the tides come in and it's going to go further inward, it's going to go all the way to Boston, but it's going to become the inhabitants of the bus who are much like the herrings. Right. In the first stanza. The herrings on the tides take herrings on long rides. So it's almost as if as the tide comes in, she is caught in the tide and brought along with it towards her destination. 22:08 Erin: That's right, yeah. And the bay itself, the water itself is also like a traveler, you know, you might go to visit it and find it's not at home, it's gone out for on a trip or something. So there's also that connection as well. Whereas the roads are part of this more solid and dependable and the water being fickle and not always depended on to be there. 22:31 Wes: Well, I was going to say there's something very poignant about the way she describes the tides and whether they're in or out. And I can't put my finger on it exactly. It's almost. It's this idea of. Right. Where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam depends on if it meets the bay. Coming in the bay, not at home. If the tide is in or coming in the river clashes with it in a wall of brown foam. Is that the idea now? And what's the image there? Is it always a wall of brown foam? Well, either way, I just. Something about this idea of. It depends on whether the bay is at home or something like that. It's a poignant image. 23:12 Erin: It is. It's that sense of just. Of disappointment or just missing someone, like a missed opportunity. Seems kind of surprisingly emotionally resonant, considering that she's talking about a tide. 23:25 Wes: And we. You know, it introduces the idea of home and. Which I think will be significant. And later on we'll talk about whether the moose is safe as houses and the reflections of the elderly and all that stuff. But. 23:40 Erin: And boundaries, too, right. You have very slippery boundary between the bay and the. And the sea, between the rivers and the bay that feeds them. And I think that boundary very much plays into the idea of home. And you could say that the bus seems to be a part of that too. Right. Like the bus becomes the home. So there's a little bit of the slippery idea of this transposition of home life into the bus, or the people on the bus all becoming the. We like a family within it. The way that it can literally cross national boundaries. It's going to Boston across the border. 24:18 Wes: Yeah. And then they'll be observing provincial life, I guess, from within the bus. And. And, you know, a woman shaking out an apron, for instance, or home life. But, yeah, I had the same thought to you. The bus. The interior of the bus becomes its own kind of mobile home, I guess. I guess the wall brown foam part. There's that push and pull, or it's a matter of who's doing the pushing. Right. In one case, the brown foam. The wall of brown foam is caused as. As the river pushes on the retreating tide. And the other case, it's the tide pushing back against the river as it comes in. But in either case, there's a clash there. 24:58 Erin: Then there are places, though, where there's blurring of boundaries. Like one of my favorite lines in the whole poem, the idea of the churches as ridged as clamshells. She always takes that. This is much remarked upon among scholars of Bishop. Where you get the thing that's. That's really big, suddenly reduced in size to the handheld, but coming out of the same idiom. You know, both the clamshell and this clapboard church are in a way equally native to Nova Scotia. The brilliance of connecting those two things and fishing being an industry in the area, you know, sort of springing out of the fishing industry. 25:42 Wes: Yeah. And shells are what's left as the tide retreats. Right. As it's as if the houses are just the natural residue of a retreating tide. 25:52 Erin: That's great. 25:52 Wes: From the beginning of the poem, there's a sense of momentum, and almost like you, at least in my case, I felt like I'm on a camera moving over the landscape, and it starts with the tide, and then it moves to the burning rivulets. Right. So now we're hovering over. I don't know what you would call it, a. A tidal plane. Anyway, she calls it the flats. Right. So all the silt, and we're moving along there, and then suddenly we're on a gravelly road. So the sun takes over from the sea. The redness of the sun. And then the bus takes over from the sun. But that's the momentum of the poem is from sea to sun to bus. 26:37 Erin: Yeah. The bus flashes pink. We get lots of pairs of the same word, creating a kind of chime with each other. So we get the windshield flashing pink. Pink glancing off of metal. And we wonder, I suppose, because part of the reason why the roads are red is because of the clay content. Right. Of the road itself. So we get that combination of, like, something red in the road or in the composition of the soil and rock of the area. 27:07 Wes: Laterite, I think, which I only know because of Graham Green, who I've been reading. Oh, and what heart of the matter. He's talking about laterite houses, like. So from the red clay, you can make, you know, homes from as well, and common in Sierra Leone. So he used the word like a hundred times before he finally looked it up. All right. There must be something that's going to not know what he's talking about. I'm like, oh, okay, now I get it. Yeah. 27:41 Erin: So that's the mineral, the. 27:44 Wes: It's reddish. Yeah. Reddish clay type of soil, topsoil or something like that. I should know more about this because I used to write about this, too, when I was writing about transportation and engineering. 27:56 Erin: Right. 27:57 Wes: It's important what kind of soil you're building on. But anyway, I remember nothing about that. But, yeah. So it could be the right word. Who knows? But. But, yeah. So you're getting at the. Yeah. The way the redness of the sun is interacting with the. 28:12 Erin: Yes, it's coming. 28:13 Wes: The redness of the soil. 28:14 Erin: Yeah. And that kind of redness coming from below and above to glint off of the bus. The windshield is flashing pink from the sun and the metal is flashing pink from the road. They're both brushing the dented flank of the blue beat up enamel from one direction or the other, it seems. Yeah. Sort of tunnel of red in which the. In which the bus is traveling. 28:41 Wes: Such a vivid image that she gives us. It made me think, you know, sometimes it's almost better than film. It's more vibrant or more. Don't know how to say it, but I was thinking about this because in some of the philosophy podcasts we do, there are philosophers who deny that we have imagery in our head. Exactly. Or we can never. Which seems true. Right. We can't imagine anything with the vividness that we would have if we actually saw it. But it makes me think when I read a poem like this, but also. And also reading some of the novels I've been reading. Well, there's a special kind of vividness to figurative language that perception can't capture. In some ways it's more. More vivid, definitely. 29:26 Erin: I think the sonic quality of the word, the repeated. Right. It's on the one hand a repeated image, but then it also creates that kind of just the soundscape, makes them feel somehow more synesthetic to say, but somehow more picturable or more tangible or more. I don't know, the pink glancing off metal, the dented flank beat up enamel. You know, there's just. It's like. I think that's contributing to it, to the vividness of the image. And yeah, you talked about momentum, too. I mean, this entire. This whole first sentence is six stanzas long. It ends with. And Akali supervises. So there's also that kind of. Yeah. Locomotive propulsion of the camera work, so to speak, Zooming in and then following the road into the bus. And then the bus arrives to sort of catch again, quite cinematically the scene that's actually happening or the place where the eye, if there is an eye in the poem, actually is the lone traveler embracing these relatives with the collie watching on. So there's a sense in which the I eye of the poem doesn't actually catch up with the speaker until stanza six and the end of this first sentence until we get goodbye to the elms, to the farm, to the dogs. So there's kind of lamination at that moment of the I eye and the capital I. 30:49 Wes: We seem to be gradually getting more of a point of view. Right. It's very omniscient in the beginning, hovering over the landscape. And I think gradually we're going to be getting a her point of view in the bus and then a we. But also just to note, this is one. I think this is the first of three pauses. Right. There's gonna. It's gonna pause here, the bus. The momentum is gonna stop as the bus lets on the lone traveler, which I presume is her. Right. Her saying goodbye. And then there'll be a pause when the amicable freckled woman gets on. She's there because we need everything to be in threes. And then we. Then we're gonna pause for the moose in the very end. I didn't miss anything. Right. There's not other places where we stop? 31:32 Erin: No. I mean, there are, of course, stanzas that end some more definitively than others and stopped with a period. There's a stop at Bass River. Right. So there is a little bit of that kind of start. Stop syntactically. But I think you're right that those are the stops where there's content. 31:49 Wes: Content goes. 31:50 Erin: Yes. And where there's a very particular. Yeah, the content of the bus, except for the moose obviously doesn't get on the bus. But there's a stop that's motivated, let's say, rather than just being described as various stops along the way where we don't know who got on and who got off or whatever. Certainly there's also a movement toward that more personal experience of the speaker. But then there are also things that the speaker couldn't possibly know or you know, because once she's said goodbye to everyone and gets on the bus, then we also get the sort of nature show close ups. The crystals of fog, the lupins like apostles, the sweet peasants clinging. One of my favorite parts, clinging to their wet white string on the whitewashed fences. Again, we get two uses of white right next to each other. Bumblebees creeping in the foxgloves. All things you really can't see from certainly from a moving bus. 32:43 Wes: Yeah, the point of view gets focused very, very gradually, maybe through the whole palm. Maybe it's not fully focused until the very end, but. Yeah. So you're pointing out something important which is at the sort of omniscient point of view is still here in these very. What do you call it when you take a close up with your phone? Macro, ironically. Yeah. These very close up pictures of flora and fauna and very Beautiful. 33:12 Erin: Yeah. They compound and then they get more and more loaded and mysterious. And just when we're about to maybe go over the edge, we get recalled back a little bit. That's at least how I'm reading, for instance, stanza 12, about the ship's port lantern and the boot and the bark of the dog. And then suddenly a woman climbs on the bus. And so we're sort of stopped from going off into some sort of train of thought that you could follow there down a rabbit hole. But I love that stanza on red light swimming through the dark. It reminds me of the last stanza of disillusionment, of 10 o'. Clock. Do you know the old sailor, drunk and asleep in his boots, catches tigers in red weather? I think that's how it goes, the Stevens bomb, because we get the boots and the red light in the ship, so they're probably. No. No real connection there. 34:07 Wes: So all of these little intricate descriptions that she's giving, right. It begins with the light growing richer, which I take it mean, means we're approaching dusk and evening, or we're in dusk and it's evening is approaching and a kind of mini winter, Right. Something. It's a diurnal cycle, but there's a bit of a parallel to something seasonal. Right. So we get crystals forming and the images like sweet peas clinging and the bumblebees inside foxgloves. As evening commences, it's almost like. I don't know if this is true, but it's almost as if we're getting the response of the animals and flora and fauna to the commencement of evening. That's our first indication of it. So I was surprised to see, okay, it's still light out enough for us to see a woman shaking a tablecloth out after supper. And that is beautifully described as a pale flickering. Right. Almost as if that's something like the light reflecting off the enamel bus, or not pink anymore, but just a flickering of pale light and then gone, I suppose. Does that mean that we're now without light? Is that sort of the way nighttime is ushered in by the end of the next stanza? And it's in the next stanza that we see a red light in the dark. Now we have a ship in the dark. So it's almost as if. Yeah, the shaking of the tablecloth is like a magician. Abracadabra. Now it's nighttime, Right? 35:39 Erin: Yeah. I love that. Yeah. You're making me realize how many connections there are to Keats in this poem. Right. There's something Keatsian about it, very. To Autumn, you get the sweet peas clinging on the fence. You get that image of fecundity things on top of other things. You know, the mossed cottage trees and the late flowers for the bees. And then the shaking out of the tablecloth is like the hair lifted by the winnowing wind. Right. Because there's. There's wind, there are flowers and bees. And then there's also, of course, redness and that image of, you know, like the evening. Autumn. Evening redness. And maybe this is. Yeah. Rows of sugar maples. Those could be red as well. If we're in an autumnal landscape, can't be too late because everything is, you know, it's got to be like August, maybe because we have this. Or. No, I guess maybe not. Gray glazed cabbages. I don't know enough about cabbages to know at what point in their development. 36:40 Wes: Yeah. Whatever season it is. I just think that the evening is almost like a mini winter. It gets colder and we see the. 36:46 Erin: Definitely. 36:47 Wes: We see the effects of it. But, yeah, maybe autumn is probably the logical season for. 36:53 Erin: Right. Yeah. And that point. Or that point in the transition from summer to autumn where, I mean, even on a summer night in Nova Scotia, the evening temperature is quite autumnal regardless. And so when the woman climbs on with the market bags, we get. 37:09 Wes: Shall we take a. Shall we? 37:12 Erin: Oh, yes. 37:13 Wes: Let's let the freckled amicable woman on in part two. 37:17 Erin: She'll have to wait. 37:18 Wes: Let's not let her on the bus yet. 37:20 Erin: You have to wait for everyone else to get off before you can get on. It's one of the cardinal rules of public transportation. Okay, we will continue in part two. Thank you. 37:29 Wes: Thank you.

The queens visit The Lowells in a game of "Amy Robert Lowell"Support Breaking Form by reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts here.Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press. James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.  Notes:Watch a brief biographical video about Amy Lowell here. Poems we mention include these by Amy Lowell:"Sword Blades and Poppy Seed""Opal""The Letter""A Winter Ride" (which includes the line "Everything mortal has moments immortal"; the poem appeared in her first book, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass [Houghton Mifflin, 1912])."A Decade""September, 1918" (which we discuss at length)And these by Robert Lowell:"Night Sweat""Home After Three Months Away""The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket" which includes the line "The Lord survives the rainbow of his will.""Reading Myself"Watch a longer documentary about Robert Lowell here (~60 min).Here's the music video for Chappell Roan's "Casual"Here's an article about Amy and Robert Lowell that's worth reading. Here's a link to "Amy Lowell: Selected Poems" edited by Honor Moore; watch Moore discuss Lowell here (~60 min).Watch Naomi Shihab Nye read Amy Lowell's "The Garden by Moonlight."Watch Kids Magazine TV A bit about hyphenated use of words like "to-day" vs "today." In Old and in Middle English, the practice was to join the time with the preposition, using a hyphen "to-day," and "to-morrow," and "to-night," for instance. As the sense of their use as single notions developed, the two elements were brought together in written language (i.e., to night, to-night, and tonight). Nineteenth-century dictionaries opted for the hyphen in all three words. The OED shows hyphenated examples throughout the 19th century and into the early 20th. Latest examples are of to-day (1912), to-night (1908), and to-morrow (1927, with a possible further example as late as 1959). (Adapted from this article).

We preview a theatrical production that opens next Wednesday at Carthage College in the studio theater: "Dear Elizabeth" by Sarah Ruhl. We speak with three Carthage seniors: Annaliese Ruhs, who is the director - and Jessie Skonesey and Chase Juster, who comprise the two-person cast. The play is based on letters that were exchanged between two gifted 20th century poets - Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell - over the course of thirty years.

“De alguna forma la literatura parece divorciada de la cultura, se ha vuelto demasiado especializada, incapaz de expresar buena parte de la experiencia; se ha vuelto un oficio y tiene que haber alguna manera de reconciliarla con la vida”

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

Today's poem is a “row of perfect rhymes” and an absolute delight. Happy reading.You can find the text of the poem here.George Starbuck was born in Columbus, Ohio on June 15, 1931. He grew up in Illinois and California. He attended the University of California at Berkeley for two years, and the University of Chicago for three. He then studied with Archibald MacLeish and Robert Lowell, alongside peers Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, at Harvard University. Starbuck won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for his collection Bone Thoughts (1960). He is the author of several other books, including The Argot Merchant Disaster: New and Selected Poems (1982), Elegy in a Country Church Yard (1974), and White Paper (1966). He taught at the State University College at Buffalo, the University of Iowa, and Boston University.Starbuck's witty songs of protest are usually concerned with love, war, and the spiritual temper of the times. John Holmes believed that “there hasn't been as much word excitement ... for years,” as one finds in Bone Thoughts. Harvey Shapiro pointed out that Starbuck's work is attractive because of its “witty, improvisational surface, slangy and familiar address, brilliant aural quality” and added that Starbuck may become a “spokesman for the bright, unhappy young men.” Louise Bogan asserted that his daring satire “sets him off from the poets of generalized rebellion.”After reading Bone Thoughts, Holmes hoped for other books in the same vein; R.F. Clayton found that, in White Paper(1966), the verse again stings with parody. Although Robert D. Spector wasn't sure of Starbuck's sincerity in Bone Thoughts, he rated the poems in White Paper, which range “from parody to elegy to sonnets, and even acrostic exercises,” as “generally superior examples of their kind.” In particular, Spector wrote, when Starbuck juxtaposes McNamara's political language and a Quaker's self-immolation by burning, or wryly offers an academician's praise for this nation's demonstration of humanity by halting its bombing for “five whole days,” we sense this poet's genuine commitment.Starbuck died in Tuscaloosa, Alabama on August 1, 1996.-bio via Poetry Foundation This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

William Doreski reads his poem "These Can't Be Real Angels," and Lauren Suchenski reads her poem "Prometheus."William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at several colleges and universities. He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell's Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in various journals.Lauren Suchenski has a difficult relationship with punctuation. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and four times for The Best of the Net. Her full-length collection All You Can Measure (2022), as well as a chapbook Full of Ears and Eyes Am I (2017), is available from Finishing Line Press. Another chapbook, All Atmosphere, is also available from Selcouth Station (2022). More of her writing can be found on Instagram @lauren_suchenski.

How Walsingham was treated in ballad/poetry, with the Pynson Ballad, of the 15th century, then the Wreck of Walsingham of the 1580s/90s, then Ophelia's song in Hamlet whose words fit exactly Byrd's Walsingham variations, then Manley Hopkins from 19th century and Robert Lowell's great section of the Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket.If you enjoyed this programme, please consider supporting us with a one-off or monthly donation. It is only through the generosity of our listeners that we are able to be a Christian voice by your side. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://radiomariaengland.uk/donations/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Seamus and Mark look at four elegies written for family members, ranging from the romantic period to the 2010s, each of which avoids, deliberately or not, what Freud described as the work of mourning. William Wordsworth's ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a View of Peele Castle' (1807) is an oblique memorial to a brother that seems scarcely able to mention its subject. Like Wordsworth, Denise Riley's elegy for her son, ‘A Part Song' (2012), embraces the atemporal nature of poetry as a protest against the destructive power of time, but also uses dramatic shifts in register to openly question the use of ‘song' as a method of mourning. Robert Lowell's elegies for his parents, from Life Studies (1959), offer a startling resistance to the traditional elegiac mode by spurning the urge to grandiloquence with a series of prosaic vignettes. Anne Carson's ‘Nox' (2010) goes further by challenging the idea of a coherent account of someone's life entirely, with a sequence of fragments contained within a single sheet of paper, ranging from poems and translations to telephone conversations, photographs and drawings, as a deliberately disordered memory of her relationship with her brother that nonetheless exposes the purest ingredients of elegy. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrld⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsld Poems discussed in this episode: William Wordsworth, ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a View of Peele Castle' https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45516/elegiac-stanzas-suggested-by-a-picture-of-peele-castle-in-a-storm-painted-by-sir-george-beaumont Robert Lowell, selections from 'Life Studies' https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/life-studies-robert-lowell Denise Riley, ‘A Part Song' https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n03/denise-riley/a-part-song Anne Carson, Nox https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/nox-anne-carson Next episode: ‘Poems of 1912-1913' by Thomas Hardy.

As long as there have been poets, they have been writing war elegies. In this episode, Mark and Seamus discuss responses to the American Civil War (Walt Whitman), both world wars (W.B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, Rudyard Kipling, Keith Douglas) and the conflict in Northern Ireland (Michael Longley) to explore the way these very different poems share an ancient legacy. Spanning 160 years and energised by competing ideas of art and war, these soldiers, carers and civilians are united by a need that Mark and Seamus suggest is at the root of poetry, to memorialise the dead in words. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrld⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsld Poems discussed in this episode: Walt Whitman, ‘Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night' ⁠https://⁠⁠w⁠⁠ww.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45478/vigil-strange-i-kept-on-the-field-one-night⁠ Wilfred Owen, ‘Futility' ⁠https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57283/futility-56d23aa2d4b57⁠ Keith Douglas, ‘Vergissmeinnicht' ⁠https://warpoets.org.uk/worldwar2/poem/vergissmeinnicht/⁠ W.B. Yeats, ‘An Irish Airman foresees his Death' ⁠https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57311/an-irish-airman-foresees-his-death⁠ Michael Longley, ‘The Ice-Cream Man' ⁠https://poetryarchive.org/poem/ice-cream-man/⁠ Rudyard Kipling, ‘Epitaphs of the War' ⁠https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57409/epitaphs-of-the-war⁠ Further reading in the LRB: Ian Hamilton on Keith Douglas's letters: ⁠http://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n03/ian-hamilton/tough-guy⁠ Jonathan Bate on war poetry: ⁠http://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n22/jonathan-bate/players-please⁠ Poems by Michael Longley published in the LRB: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/michael-longley⁠ Next episode: Family elegies by William Wordsworth, Denise Riley, Anne Carson and Robert Lowell.

Happy 4th of July and happy reading! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

The queens talk literary confidantes; then we discuss the pros and pitfalls of poetic friendships.Please Support Breaking Form!Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.NOTES:Check out Toni Morrison's  1987 eulogy for James Baldwin in the New York Times.We read from Fran Lebowitz's remembrance of her friend Toni Morrison, printed in the Paris Review.If you haven't already, read Brenda Hillman's "Male Nipples" Read "The Curious Friendship of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell" from The Atlantic.Check out this exploration of the dynamics in literary friendships published in Esquire. 

These four winners from year 41 at the Writers & Illustrators of the Future workshop and awards gala: Robert Lowell, author of "Kill Switch"; Jordan Smajstrla, illustrator of "Kill Switch"; CL "Cherrie" Fors, illustrator of "A World of Repetitions"; Ian Keith, author of "Blackbird Stone." We discuss their journey as creative individuals and what makes the workshop so special for them and what Writers and Illustrators of the Future means to them and to the genre.

These four winners from year 41 at the Writers & Illustrators of the Future workshop and awards gala: Robert Lowell, author of "Kill Switch"; Jordan Smajstrla, illustrator of "Kill Switch"; CL "Cherrie" Fors, illustrator of "A World of Repetitions"; Ian Keith, author of "Blackbird Stone." We discuss their journey as creative individuals and what makes the workshop so special for them and what Writers and Illustrators of the Future means to them and to the genre.

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

As the long, exhausting march toward summer begins for many students, the wise and compassionate David Wagoner takes us to the intersection of love and weakness. Happy reading.David Wagoner was recognized as the leading poet of the Pacific Northwest, often compared to his early mentor Theodore Roethke, and highly praised for his skillful, insightful and serious body of work. He won numerous prestigious literary awards including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and was nominated twice for the National Book Award. The author of ten acclaimed novels, Wagoner's fiction has been awarded the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Award. Professor emeritus at the University of Washington, Wagoner enjoyed an excellent reputation as both a writer and a teacher of writing. He was selected to serve as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1978, replacing Robert Lowell, and was the editor of Poetry Northwest until 2002.Born in Ohio and raised in Indiana, Midwesterner Wagoner was initially influenced by family ties, ethnic neighborhoods, industrial production and pollution, and the urban environment. His move to the Pacific Northwest in 1954, at Roethke's urging, changed both his outlook and his poetry. Writing in the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Wagoner recalls: “when I drove down out of the Cascades and saw the region that was to become my home territory for the next thirty years, my extreme uneasiness turned into awe. I had never seen or imagined such greenness, such a promise of healing growth. Everything I saw appeared to be living ancestral forms of the dead earth where I'd tried to grow up.” Wagoner's poetry often mourns the loss of a natural, fertile wilderness, though David K. Robinson, writing in Contemporary Poetry, described the themes of “survival, anger at those who violate the natural world” and “a Chaucerian delight in human oddity” at work in the poems as well. Critics have also praised Wagoner's poetry for its crisp descriptive detail and metaphorical bent. However, Paul Breslin in the New York Times Book Review pronounced David Wagoner to be “predominantly a nature poet…as Frost and Roethke were nature poets.”Wagoner's first books, including Dry Sun, Dry Wind (1953), A Place to Stand (1958), and Poems (1959), demonstrate an early mastery of his chosen subject matter and form. Often comprised of observations of nature, Wagoner links his speakers' predicaments and estrangement to the larger imperfection of the world. In Wagoner's second book, A Place to Stand,Roethke's influence is clear, and the book uses journey poems to represent the poet's own quest back to his beginnings. Wagoner's fourth book, The Nesting Ground (1963), reflects his relocation physically, aesthetically and emotionally; the Midwest is abandoned for the lush abundance of the Pacific Northwest, and Wagoner's style is less concerned with lamentation or complaint and more with cataloguing the bounty around him. James K. Robinson called the title poem from Staying Alive (1966) “one of the best American poems since World War II.” In poems like “The Words,” Wagoner discovers harmony with nature by learning to be open to all it has to offer: “I take what is: / The light beats on the stones, / the wind over water shines / Like long grass through the trees, / As I set loose, like birds / in a landscape, the old words.” Robert Cording, who called Staying Alive “the volume where Wagoner comes into his own as a poet,” believed that for Wagoner, taking what is involves “an acceptance of our fragmented selves, which through love we are always trying to patch together; an acceptance of our own darkness; and an acceptance of the world around us with which we must reacquaint ourselves.”Collected Poems 1956-1976 (1976) was nominated for the National Book Award and praised by X. J. Kennedy in Parnassus for offering poems which are “beautifully clear; not merely comprehensible, but clear in the sense that their contents are quickly visible.” Yet it was Who Shall Be the Sun? (1978),based upon Native American myth and legend, which gained critical attention. Hayden Carruth, writing in Harper's Magazine, called the book “a remarkable achievement,” not only for its presentation of “the literalness of shamanistic mysticism” but also for “its true feeling.” Hudson Review's James Finn Cotter also noted how Wagoner “has not written translations but condensed versions that avoid stereotyped language….The voice is Wagoner's own, personal, familiar, concerned. He has achieved a remarkable fusion of nature, legend and psyche in these poems.”In Broken Country (1979), also nominated for the National Book Award, shows Wagoner honing the instructional backpacking poems he had first used in Staying Alive. Leonard Neufeldt, writing in New England Review,called “the love lyrics” of the first section “among the finest since Williams' ‘Asphodel.'” Wagoner has been accused of using staid pastoral conventions in book after book, as well as writing less well about human subjects. However, his books have continued to receive critical attention, often recognized for the ways in which they use encounters with nature as metaphors for encounters with the self. First Light (1983), Wagoner's “most intense” collection, according to James K. Robinson, reflects Wagoner's third marriage to poet Robin Seyfried. And Publishers Weekly celebrated Walt Whitman Bathing (1996) for its use of “plainspoken formal virtuosity” which allows for “a pragmatic clarity of perception.” A volume of new and collected poems, Traveling Light, was released in 1999. Sampling Wagoner's work through the years, many reviewers found the strongest poems to also be the newest. Rochelle Ratner in Library Journal noted “since many of the best are in the ‘New Poems' section, it might make sense to wait for his next volume.” That next volume, The House of Song (2002) won high praise for its variety of subject matter and pitch-perfect craft. Christina Pugh in Poetry declared “The House of Song boasts a superb architecture, and each one of its rooms (or in Italian, stanzas) affords a pleasure that enhances the last.” In 2008 Wagoner published his twenty-third collection of verse, A Map of the Night. Reviewing the book for the Seattle Times, Sheila Farr found many poems shot through with nostalgia, adding “the book feels like a summing-up.” Conceding that “not all the work reaches the high plane of Wagoner's reputation,” Farr described its “finest moments” as those which “resonate with the title, venturing into darkness and helping us recognize its familiar places.”In addition to his numerous books of poetry, David Wagoner was also a successful novelist, writing both mainstream fiction and regional Western fiction. Offering a steady mix of drama seasoned with occasional comedy, Wagoner's tales often involve a naive central character's encounter with and acceptance of human failing and social corruption. In the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Wagoner described his first novel, The Man in the Middle (1954), as “a thriller with some Graham Greene overtones about a railroad crossing watchmen in violent political trouble in Chicago,” his second novel, Money, Money, Money (1955), as a story about “a young tree surgeon who can't touch, look at, or even think about money, though he has a lot of it,” his third novel, Rock (1958) as a tale of “teenage Chicago delinquents,” and his fifth novel, Baby, Come On Inside (1968) as a story “about an aging popular singer who'd lost his voice.” As a popular novelist, however, Wagoner is best known for The Escape Artist (1965), the story of an amateur magician and the unscrupulous adults who attempt to exploit him, which was adapted as a film in 1981. Wagoner produced four successful novels as a Western “regional” writer. Structurally and thematically, they bear similarities to his other novels. David W. Madden noted in Twentieth-Century Western Writers: “Central to each of these [Western] works is a young protagonist's movement from innocence to experience as he journeys across the American frontier encountering an often debased and corrupted world. However, unlike those he meets, the hero retains his fundamental optimism and incorruptibility.”Although Wagoner wrote numerous novels, his reputation rests on his numerous, exquisitely crafted poetry collections, and his dedication as a teacher. Harold Bloom said of Wagoner: “His study of American nostalgias is as eloquent as that of James Wright, and like Wright's poetry carries on some of the deepest currents in American verse.” And Leonard Neufeldt called Wagoner “simply, one of the most accomplished poets currently at work in and with America…His range and mastery of subjects, voices, and modes, his ability to work with ease in any of the modes (narrative, descriptive, dramatic, lyric, anecdotal) and with any number of species (elegy, satirical portraiture, verse editorial, apostrophe, jeremiad, and childlike song, to name a few) and his frequent combinations of a number of these into astonishingly compelling orchestrations provide us with an intelligent and convincing definition of genius.”Wagoner died in late 2021 at age 95.-bio via Poetry Foundation This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

"MARY BETH HUGHES - CLASSIC CINEMA STAR OF THE MONTH" - 3/03/2025 For those of you who don't know the charms of MARY BETH HUGHES, when she was under contract at MGM, she was dubbed "the poor man's LANA TURNER." It was a rather unfair assessment since MGM gave Lana all the plum roles, and Mary Beth got her hand-me-downs. But still, Mary Beth had great comic chops, and no one played bitchy, hard-boiled blondes as well as she. Despite her beauty and talent, she never managed to get out of B-pictures. She did have small parts in great films like The Women (1939) and The Ox-Bow Incident (1942). She played the good girl as often as she played the bad girl, but when she played bad....you were in for a treat. Her pouty lips, snappy dialogue, and petulant attitude lit up many a lackluster production. This week, we celebrate her as our Star of the Month. SHOW NOTES:  Sources: The Official Mary Beth Hughes Website; “Mary Beth Hughes, Born in Alton, Benign Groomed for Stardom in Movies,” January 4, 1939, Alton Evening Telegraph; “Mary Beth Hughes,” October 1971, by T.P. Turton, Films in Review; “Mary Beth Hughes Stars In A New Shampoo,” December 20, 1976, People Magazine; Mary Beth Hughes: She Never Gave Up,” December 2015, by Dave White, Classic Images; “The Look of Mary Beth Hughes,” June 6, 2019, www.grandoldmovies.com; http://www.briansdriveintheater.com/marybethhughes.html Wikipedia.com; TCM.com; IMDBPro.com; Movies Mentioned:  The Women (1939), starring Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, & Rosalind Russell; The Ox-Bow Incident (1942), starring Henry Fonda, Harry Morgan, Dana Andrews, MBH, & Anthony Quinn; Broadway Serenade (1939), starring Jeanette MacDonald & Lew Ayres; Dancing Co-Ed (1939), starring Lana Turner & Richard Carlson;  These Glamour Girls (1939), starring Lana Turner & Lew Ayres: Fast and Furious (1939), starring Franchot Tone & Ann Sothern; Free, Blonde & 21 (1940), starring Lynn Bari, MBH, & Joan Davis; Star Dust (1940), starring Linda Darnell & John Payne; Four Sons (1940), starring Don Ameche, Alan Curtis, Eugenia Leontivich, & MBH; Lucky Cisco Kid (1940), starring Cesar Romero, Dana Andrews, & MBH; The Great Profile (1940), staring John Barrymore & MBH; Sleepers West (1941), starring Lloyd Nolan & MBH:  Ride on Vaquero (1941), starring Cesar Romero & MBHs; Charlie Chan In Rio (191410, starring Sidney Toler & MBH; Dressed To Kill (1941), starring Lloyd Nolan & MBH; Design For Scandal (1941), starring Rosalind Russell & Walter Pidgeon; The Cowboy and The Blonde (1941), starring MBH & George Montgomery; Blue, White, and Perfect, (1942), starring Lloyd Nolan & MBH; The Night Before The Divorce (1942), starring Lynn Bari, Joseph Allen, & MBH; Orchestra Wives (1942), starring Ann Rutherford & George Montgomery: Over My Dead Body (1942), starring Milton Berle & MBH; Timber Queen (1944), starring Richard Arlen & MBH; Men On Her Mind (1944), starring MBH; I Accuse My Parents, (1944), starring MBH & Robert Lowell; The Lady Confesses (1945), starring MBH & Hugh Beaumont; The Great Flamarion (1945), starring Erich von Stroheim, MBH, & Dan Duryea; Holiday Rhythm (1950), starring MBH & David Street; Young Man With A Horn (1950), starring Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, & Doris Day; Highway Dragnet (1954), starring Richard Conte & Joan Bennett; Loophole (1955), starring Barry Sullivan, Charles MacGraw, & Dorothy Malone; Gun Battle At Monterey (1957), starring Sterling Hayden & MBH; How's Your Love Life? (1971), starring John Agar, Leslie Brooks, Grant Willians, & MBH; The Working Girls (1974), starring Sarah Kennedy, Laurie Rose, & Cassandra Peterson; --------------------------------- http://www.airwavemedia.com Please contact sales@advertisecast.com if you would like to advertise on our podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

fWotD Episode 2856: Anactoria Welcome to Featured Wiki of the Day, your daily dose of knowledge from Wikipedia’s finest articles.The featured article for Friday, 28 February 2025 is Anactoria.Anactoria (or Anaktoria; Ancient Greek: Ἀνακτορία) is a woman mentioned in the work of the ancient Greek poet Sappho. Sappho, who wrote in the late seventh and early sixth centuries BCE, names Anactoria as the object of her desire in a poem numbered as fragment 16. Another of her poems, fragment 31, is traditionally called the "Ode to Anactoria", though no name appears in it. As portrayed by Sappho, Anactoria is likely to have been an aristocratic follower of hers, of marriageable age. It is possible that fragment 16 was written in connection with her wedding to an unknown man. The name "Anactoria" has also been argued to have been a pseudonym, perhaps of a woman named Anagora from Miletus, or an archetypal creation of Sappho's imagination.The English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne's "Anactoria" was published in his 1866 collection, Poems and Ballads. "Anactoria" is written from the point of view of Sappho, who addresses the title character in a long monologue written in rhyming couplets of iambic pentameter. The monologue expresses Sappho's lust for her in sexually explicit terms; she first rejects art and the gods for Anactoria's love before reversing her stance and claiming to reject Anactoria in favour of poetry. Swinburne's poem created a sensation by openly approaching then-taboo topics such as lesbianism and dystheism. Anactoria later featured in an 1896 play by H. V. Sutherland and in the 1961 poetic series "Three Letters to Anaktoria" by Robert Lowell, in which an unnamed man loves her before transferring, unrequitedly, his affections to Sappho.This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 01:22 UTC on Friday, 28 February 2025.For the full current version of the article, see Anactoria on Wikipedia.This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai.Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.Until next time, I'm generative Olivia.

Hey all you Potterheads! A number of “Firsts” on this show, we'll let you reveal just what they are. We talk to Hunter Sanders, writer, father, emergent dresser about lacrosse AND Harry Potter, We talk Oklahoma, What it's like living as a weirdo in the midst of assholes, Problematic Bible Study, Certain Feelings of Obligation, Rural Life, Fantasy, Renn Faire, Breece D'J Pancake, At Long Last: Astrology Discussion, Robert Lowell, Ilya Kaminsky, Matrilineal Jewelry, and more

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SLEERICKETS is a podcast about poetry and other intractable problems. My book Midlife now exists. Buy it here, or leave it a rating here or hereFor more SLEERICKETS, check out the SECRET SHOW and join the group chatLeave the show a rating here (actually, just do it on your phone, it's easier). Thanks!Wear SLEERICKETS t-shirts and hoodies. They look good!SLEERICKETS is now on YouTube!Some of the topics mentioned in this episode:– When the Earth Flies into the Sun by Derek Mong– At Length magazine– 32 Poems No 43. Summer 2024– There by Christopher Childers– I Too Had a Childhood by Eleanor Stanford– One of two poems of mine in the new 32 Poems– The part in Tree of Life where (among other things) Jessica Chastain flies– Marjorie Perloff's review of The Birthday Letters– The Two Ariels: The (Re)making of the Sylvia Plath Canon by Marjorie Perloff– Ariel by Sylvia Plath– Ariel: The Restored Edition– Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes– Sylvia (2003)– Pike by Ted Hughes– Sharon Olds– Anne Sexton– Deborah Landau– Metaphors by Sylvia Plath– Adrienne Rich– Helen Vendler– Daddy by Sylvia Plath– Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath– Nick and the Candlestick by Sylvia Plath– A Secret by Sylvia Plath– You're by Sylvia Plath– William Heyen– Swoop by Hailey Leithauser– Transformations by Anne Sexton– Kevin Young– Life Studies by Robert Lowell– Memories of West Street and Lepke by Robert Lowell– 13 Reasons Why (2017)– Wintering by Sylvia Plath– A rough approximation of a store in my town– Purdah by Sylvia Plath– Sheep in Fog by Sylvia Plath– Honey's Dead by The Jesus and Mary Chain– Shaken Baby SyndromeFrequently mentioned names:– Joshua Mehigan– Shane McCrae– A. E. Stallings– Ryan Wilson– Morri Creech– Austin Allen– Jonathan Farmer– Zara Raab– Amit Majmudar– Ethan McGuire– Coleman Glenn– Alexis Sears– JP Gritton– Alex Pepple– Ernie Hilbert– Joanna PearsonOther Ratbag Poetry Pods:Poetry Says by Alice AllanI Hate Matt Wall by Matt WallVersecraft by Elijah BlumovRatbag Poetics By David Jalal MotamedAlice: Poetry SaysBrian: @BPlatzerCameron: CameronWTC [at] hotmail [dot] comMatthew: sleerickets [at] gmail [dot] comMusic by ETRNLArt by Daniel Alexander Smith

The APR team is in a punchy mood on this episode; Elizabeth tries to rein in the conversation as Steven and Hannah riff on topics including Robert Lowell's revision process and the current era of political sloganeering. Also: selections from our July/August 2024 issue, with readings from Leah Umansky and Emily Skaja.

Compra el llibre aquí: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.onallibres.cat/apunts-del-natural-morts-per-la-unio Aquesta setmana a L'illa de Maians, presentat i dirigit per Bernat Dedéu, parlem del llibre 'Apunts del natural'. En parlem amb Josep Maria Fulquet, Jaume C. Pons Alorda i Marina Porras. Un podcast d'Ona Llibres - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://onallibres.cat⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Presentat i dirigit per Bernat Dedéu. Edició per Bernat Marrè. Realització i producció per Albert Olaya.

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

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

The poet, novelist and playwright Fred D'Aguiar was born in Britain, grew up in Guyana and now lives in Los Angeles. There he came across the story which became his most recent collection of poems, For the Unnamed. It was originally entitled For the Unnamed Black Jockey Who Rode the Winning Steed in the Race Between Pico's Sarco and Sepulveda's Black Swan in Los Angeles, in 1852. That tells us what we know: the horses' names, who owned them, where and when the race was run, and that the winning jockey was black. His name, though, was not recorded. Fred D'Aguiar recovers and re-imagines his story, in several voices – including the horses. In this edition of In the Studio, Julian May meets D'Aguiar on the cusp. For The Unnamed is written and D'Aguiar explains how he is now preparing it for publication and his way of proof-reading. He is also feeling his way towards his next project, beginning a series of poetic studies of people he has known, people he has lost and people who inspire him. This is, tentatively, entitled Lives Studied. D'Aguiar reveals his processes, how he begins, rising very early, taking his dog, Dexter, for a walk, drinking a coffee, then setting to. He speaks quickly, so writes always in longhand with a pen, to slow thought down, to consider. He speaks too of his reading and influences, for instance Robert Lowell and his collection ‘Life Studies'. For D'Aguiar the practice of writing is integral to his existence - writing is living.

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

Snap out of it! The queens use Cher to revise some poems and the result is ICONIC!Support Breaking Form!Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.Buy our books:     Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.      James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books. You can hear Louise Glück read "The Mirror" here and read it for yourself here. (The show was taped before LG's untimely death.)Read "Old Ironsides" by Oliver Wendell HolmesRead "Homage to my hips" by Lucille CliftonYou can read Alexandra Teague's excellent poem "Language Lessons" here. Tess Gallagher's "I Stop Writing the Poem" can be found here. Go here to read Dorothea Lasky's poem "If you can't trust the monitors"Here's Robert Lowell's poem "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket"Finally, we mention Hart Crane's poem "Chaplinesque"Here are two clips from Moonstruck"Meeting outside the opera"I want you to come upstairs with me and get in my bed!" 

Poet and critic Robert B. Shaw earned a BA from Harvard University, where he studied with Robert Lowell, and a PhD from Yale University. Influenced by Elizabeth Bishop and Philip Larkin, Shaw's wry and plainspoken formal verse is often grounded in, or sprung from, the debris of daily life. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Solving For X (2002), which won the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize; Below the Surface (1999); and The Wonder of Seeing Double (1988). His criticism appears widely in such places as the New York Times Book Review, and he has also published a critical study of poets John Donne and George Herbert, The Call of God: The Theme of Vocation in the Poetry of Donne and Herbert (1981). Shaw has received Shenandoah's James Boatwright III Prize for Poetry as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. Since 1983, Shaw has taught at Mount Holyoke College as the Emily Dickinson Professor of English.-bio via Poetry Foundation Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Today's poem is by Seamus Justin Heaney MRIA (/ˈʃeɪməs ˈhiːni/; 13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013), an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.[1][2] Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major published volume. Heaney was and is still recognised as one of the principal contributors to poetry in Ireland during his lifetime. American poet Robert Lowell described him as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats", and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have said that he was "the greatest poet of our age".[3][4] Robert Pinsky has stated that "with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller."[5] Upon his death in 2013, The Independent described him as "probably the best-known poet in the world".[6]—Bio via Wikipedia Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Today's poem is Epilogue by Robert Lowell.The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today's poem affirms the simple approach of narrating our lives as a means of shining a light on our complex era. Given our quick passage on earth, the poem argues that to tell our stories and name the people who populate our lives is noble and rewarding enough.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Read by Terry Casburn Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

This week's challenge: notice little victories.You can hear the after show and support Do By Friday on Patreon!——Edited by Alex Cox——Show LinksOblique Strategies - WikipediaOblique StrategiesEp. 268: "A Principled Ohioan" - Roderick on the Line - Merlin MannRobert Lowell - WikipediaWaking in the Blue by Robert Lowell (read by Tom O'Bedlam) - YouTubeLamotrigine - WikipediaNext to Normal performance at 2009 Tony Awards - Aaron Tveit - YouTubeWho's Crazy / My Psychopharmacologist and I - Next to Normal - YouTubePose (TV series) - WikipediaMj Rodriguez & George Salazar: Suddenly Seymour - YouTubemr schue being a bad (and creepy) teacher for 4 min and 45 secs straight - YouTube"Documentary Now!" Soldier of Illusion, Part 1 (TV Episode 2022) - IMDb"Documentary Now!" Soldier of Illusion, Part 2 (TV Episode 2022) - IMDbAguirre, the Wrath of God - WikipediaGrizzly Man - WikipediaBurden of Dreams - WikipediaFitzcarraldo - WikipediaOriginal Cast Album: Company (1970) - YouTube"Documentary Now!" Original Cast Album: Co-Op (TV Episode 2019) - IMDbJiro Dreams of Sushi - Wikipedia"Documentary Now!" Juan Likes Rice and Chicken (TV Episode 2016) - IMDbSantaland Diaries - This American LifeWorld Wide Web - WikipediaSTRANGE WAY OF LIFE | Official Trailer (2023) - YouTubeWhy Trump's CNN event was ideal for him—and bad for journalism.Domino (character) - Wikipedia(Recorded Wednesday, May 17, 2023)Next week's challenge: plug into ChatGPT.

What better way to bring back The Daily Poem than with a poem by one of my favorite poets, Seamus Heaney. Heaney was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.[1][2] Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major published volume. Heaney was and is still recognised as one of the principal contributors to poetry in Ireland during his lifetime. American poet Robert Lowell described him as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats", and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have said that he was "the greatest poet of our age".[3][4] Robert Pinsky has stated that "with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller."[5] Upon his death in 2013, The Independent described him as "probably the best-known poet in the world".[6](Bio via Wikipedia) Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

This week's challenge: look at the sky.You can hear the After Show and support Do By Friday on Patreon!----Edited by Alex Cox----CW: mental health, drug use, brief mention of sexual assaultShow LinksNEU! - "Hero" (Live, 1974)John Mulaney: "Baby J" | Official Teaser | Netflix - YouTubeInside the Making of John Mulaney's ‘Baby J' Netflix Special | Vanity FairDolphin by Robert Lowell - Poems | Academy of American PoetsMarriage, Betrayal, and the Letters Behind “The Dolphin” | The New Yorker"Waking in the Blue" by Robert Lowell (read by Tom O'Bedlam) - YouTubeHomer's Enemy - WikipediaBob Welch - Ebony Eyes - YouTubeBilly Joel - Big Shot (Official Video) - YouTubeDonna and Crazy Craig | Parks and Recreation - YouTubeI Think I Found the Rolex Buyer From John Mulaney's Baby JWhy weather apps blow.Carrot Weather for iOS and AndroidSmart Home Weather Station | NetatmoSkyView on the App StoreAstronomy Apps | Best space exploration apps - YouTubeEasily Identify Stars At Night | Mobile Stargazing | Essential Guide To Astronomy | Star WalkMy Octopus Teacher - WikipediaThe Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness: Montgomery, Sy: 9781451697728: Amazon.com: Books(Recorded Wednesday, April 26, 2023)Next week's challenge: talk to your phone.

Welcome back to ParaPower Mapping and the fourth installment of "The Secret History of MasSUSchusetts". It's a surprise double header! This was initially going to be one episode, but I got so obsessed w/ mapping William Pynchon's fur-trading monopoly and decoding the Rosicrucian wordplay in Thomas Pynchon's short story "Under the Rose" that I had to split this episode into 2. But don't worry, if you're anxious for our MasSUSchusetts Pynchon special, it's waiting for you. This episode includes: more maypole mythos; the veggie god Attis and "Great Mother" Cybele; correspondence b/w Cybele & Demeter; Demeter & Persephone myth variants, origins of the Eleusinian Mysteries; agrarian cult connections b/w the Eleusinian Mysteries & Cult of Cybele; aspects of the Eleusinian Greater Mysteries, sacraments, sacred words, and the prototypical oath of secrecy punishable by death (possible origin point of future initiatic societies' militant approach); the "Galli", the eunuch priests of the Cult of Cybele; the sacred feast day "Dies sanguinis" (Day of Blood) and their ritual castration; the ritual sacrifice continuum from Bacchanalia/ Dionysia, Thesmophoria, Eleusinian Mysteries, & Cult of Cybele to the Minotaur and child sacrifice to Moloch in Phoenicia & Canaan... ...the conclusion of the Saga of Thomas Morton; a note on Morton's maypole rite's efficacy as sympathetic magick and the fact that the frequent starvation of the colonizers likely contributed to their decision to hold the maypole revel; John Winthrop Sr. & the Puritan authorities' possible framing & murder accusations against Morton & their burning of his house; his second exile; Puritan attempts at suppressing his text New English Canaan; colonial-era depictions of indigenous society; the Ninnimissinuok & Algonquian pantheon, including elemental & cardinal directional deities, the creator god Kytan, & the evil Hobbamock; the Ninnimissinuok etiology of the giant Maushop/ Moshup, who threw massive boulders into the bay by Martha's Vineyard & used tree trunks to cook whales on spits; tobacco offerings to the giant; Ninnimissinuok ingenuity, craftsmanship, agriculture, and economy; the colonizers' weird race-science-y beliefs that indigenous Americans originated in the Trojan diaspora or one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel; Morton's belief in indigenous origins in the Trojan diaspora & attempts at syncretizing their spiritual beliefs into Greek & Latin myth; his argument that the frequent indigenous use of the word "Pan" indicated to past worship of the pagan god "Pan"; the Puritan desecration of Cheecatawback's mother's grave & other incidents of Pilgrim's backstabbing the Algonquian; Morton & Sir Ferdinando Gorges's legal quo warranto case against MA Bay Colony's royal charter; the resolution of Gorges's power struggle by his reception of a charter to territory in Maine; Morton's return to New England & death in Acomenticus... ...Puritan lit brat pack nepo-babies obsession w/ Morton; Jefferson & Adams family's interest in him; Nathaniel Hawthorne's numerous appropriations and other remixers of the Morton saga, including Longfellow, William Carlos Williams, the NYT, and the neo-pagan Thomas Morton Alliance; Robert Lowell's dramatization of Hawthorne's "Endecott & the Red Cross" and interest in Morton & Rosicrucian apocalyptic ideas; and finally Philip Roth's The Dying Animal and anti-protagonist sleazy professor David Kapesh's obsession w/ Morton and reappropriation of Morton as progenitor of the "cultural tsunami" that was the "sexual revolution" of Henry Miller & the 1960s. Songs: | Morris On — "Staines Morris" | | Cocteau Twins — "Ivo" | | Soft Machine — "Esther's Nose Job" |

Read by Juliet Prew Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Read by Terry Casburn Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

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

Hannah is in Paris and the bookstore owners are just going right ahead and asking her to take over their shops. Not happening! But she did buy three books from the Red Wheelbarrow, with a train theme of sorts that she didn't plan, a couple of which aren't available yet here in the States. We then chat briefly about "Saxophone Colossus" (don't miss the special episode Sam recorded, EP35), and a book Hannah probably won't finish even though she sorta likes it (yes, Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell were married in Beverly Farms), but then we move into a long discusion of the neurological underpinnings of why we like the music and books that we like. Oh, plus "Zig Zag," a good book about doing drugs, and "Demon Copperhead," which is making Hannah sad even though it might win the Pulitzer. 

On the centenary of the publication of Eliot's ‘The Waste Land' in book form, Mark and Seamus finish the second series of Modern-ish Poets by considering how revolutionary the poem was, the numerous meanings that have been drawn out of it, and its lasting influence.To listen to series one of Modern-ish Poets and all our other Close Readings series, sign up here:Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPqIn other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsFurther reading on Eliot in the LRB:Frank KermodeDan JacobsonBarbara EverettMark FordTerry EagletonSeries one of Modern-ish Poets looks at Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Thomas Hardy, Stevie Smith, A. E. Housman, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and Robert Lowell.This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in December 2022. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the lives and works of Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery, close friends and leading lights of the New York School, who sought to create an anti-academic, hedonistic poetry, freeing themselves from the puritan American tradition.To listen to series one of Modern-ish Poets and all our other Close Readings series, sign up here:Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPqIn other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsSeries one of Modern-ish Poets looks at Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Thomas Hardy, Stevie Smith, A. E. Housman, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and Robert Lowell.Further reading on O'Hara and Ashbery in the LRB:C.K. SteadJohn BayleyStephanie BurtJohn KerriganThis episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in June 2022. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Eric Newman and Kate Wolf speak with the novelist and critic Darryl Pinckney about his new memoir, Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan. The book recounts Pinckney's relationship with a legend of American letters: the singular stylist Elizabeth Hardwick. Hardwick was Pinckney's professor in a creative writing class at Barnard in the early 1970s, and they quickly became close friends. She invited him into her home, into her writing process, and into a world of New York literary culture and gossip, which Pinckney doles out here in generous cupfuls. It was through Hardwick that Pinckney met Barbara Epstein, an editor and co-founder of the New York Review of Books, where he began his writing career. His memoir documents a critical time in both his own life and in Hardwick's, including the dissolution of her marriage to the poet Robert Lowell, and the composition of her masterful novel, Sleepless Nights. Also, Namwali Serpell, author of The Furrows, returns to recommend "Old Boys Old Girls" a short story by Edward P. Jones from his collection All Aunt Hagar's Children.

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

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

Seamus Justin Heaney MRIA (/ˈʃeɪməs ˈhiːni/; 13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013) was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.[1][2] Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major published volume. Heaney was and is still recognised as one of the principal contributors to poetry in Ireland during his lifetime. American poet Robert Lowell described him as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats", and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have said that he was "the greatest poet of our age".[3][4]Robert Pinsky has stated that "with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller."[5] Upon his death in 2013, The Independent described him as "probably the best-known poet in the world".[6]Bio via Wikipedia See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

(Recorded March 2021) These two comedy nerds discuss the elements of math, science, art, and music that go into constructing the perfect joke as they trade collected wisdom about writing from Steve Martin, Mary Karr, Robert Lowell, Philip Roth, and Anne Lamott. They also dig into the rule of 3s, growing up in Massachusetts, the difference between “book smahrt” and “street smaht” and how Gary turned tragedy into comedy in his hit HBO special, “The Great Depresh.” Please consider donating to: Helen Keller International

The editor and publisher Robert Giroux was born on this day, 1914. He published Jean Stafford, Robert Lowell, and Flannery O'Connor.

Hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot do a classic album dissection of John Prine's debut album with author Erin Osmon. They also listen to feedback on recent episodes from listeners and bid farewell to Meat Loaf. Join our Facebook Group: https://bit.ly/3sivr9TBecome a member on Patreon: https://bit.ly/3slWZvcSign up for our newsletter: https://bit.ly/3eEvRnGMake a donation via PayPal: https://bit.ly/3dmt9lURecord a Voice Memo: https://bit.ly/2RyD5Ah Featured Songs:John Prine, "Angel From Montgomery," John Prine, Atlantic, 1971John Prine, "A Good Time," Live at the 5th Peg, unreleased, 1970John Prine, "Paradise," John Prine, Atlantic, 1971John Prine, "Sam Stone," John Prine, Atlantic, 1971Dusty Springfield, "Son of a Preacher Man," Dusty In Memphis, Atlantic, 1969Bonnie Raitt, "Angel From Montgomery," Streetlights, Warner Bros, 1974John Prine, "Illegal Smile," John Prine, Atlantic, 1971John Prine, "Spanish Pipedream," John Prine, Atlantic, 1971John Prine, "Hello In There," John Prine, Atlantic, 1971John Prine, "Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore," John Prine, Atlantic, 1971Viagra Boys, "In Spite Of Ourselves (feat. Amy Taylor)," Welfare Jazz, Year0001, 2021Iris DeMent, "Let The Mystery Be," Infamous Angel,  Philo, 1992John Prine, "Jesus, The Missing Years," The Missing Years, Oh Boy, 1991John Prine, "When I Get To Heaven," The Tree of Forgiveness, Oh Boy, 2018Throwing Muses, "Counting Backwards," The Real Ramona, 4AD, Sire, 1991Neal Francis, "Can't Stop The Rain," In Plain Sight, ATO, 2021Aimee Mann, "Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath," Queens of the Summer Hotel, SuperEgo, 2021Pom Pom Squad, "Head Cheerleader," Death of a Cheerleader, City Slang, 2021Meat Loaf, "Bat Out of Hell," Bat Out of Hell, Cleveland International, 1977The Go-Go's, "Vacation," Vacation, I.R.S., 1982