Podcast appearances and mentions of Wallace Stevens

In this first episode of the new series, Lisa Yuskavage talks to Ben Luke about her influences—from writers to musicians, film-makers and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work. Yuskavage, was born in Philadelphia in 1962 and lives today in New York, makes paintings that involve a cast of stylised and often eroticised, mostly female characters set within invented interiors and landscapes. Deeply engaged with the history of art and representation, Lisa's pictures explore centuries-old traditions and genres and play with them, along a sliding scale from homage to subversion, sometimes within the space of one canvas. Her figures can derive from everyday observation, draw from soft-porn magazines or a wealth of other pop-cultural sources, or quote from historic paintings. But set within enigmatic spaces, accompanied by a range of props and objects, and allied to Lisa's intoxicating colour sense, they are encapsulated in a singular realm of imagination and unleashed into the peculiar communion between this artist and us—one which can be delightful and disquieting, often at once.She reflects on the “emotional formalism” at the heart of her work, her early visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and trip to Italy and their transformative effect on her work. She discusses the seismic effect of seeing a Giovanni Bellini painting in Venice, the ongoing influence of Marcel Duchamp's Étant Donnés and her admiration for, among others, Agnes Martin, Philip Guston and Laura Owens. She talks about the poet Wallace Stevens's impact on her work and her interest in the films of Stanley Kubrick. Plus, she gives insight into her life in the studio and answers our usual questions, including the ultimate: what is art for?Lisa Yuskavage, David Zwirner, New York, until 26 June. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. As always, listeners asked more mailbag questions than we could respond to in one episode, so we continue answering them here for subscribers. In this second round we take up: a playlist of KYE's Straussian-related episodes; (Straussian) esoteric writing versus (French) death of the author and the art of writing (and interpretation); prose style—what it is, why it matters, its relationship to poetry, and the rhythms of Norman Maclean; a "Straussian" reading of Steely Dan; and why liberalism is (mostly) worth defending. Thank you to everyone who attended our live event in NYC on Thursday! We had a great time.  Sources: Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952) — Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958) Stanley Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics (1987) Wallace Stevens, "The Snow Man," Poetry, Oct 1921 Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories (1976) — The Norman Maclean Reader (2008) Edmund White, Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978) Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004) W.H. Auden, "Friday's Child," (1958) Sam Adler-Bell, "Can Liberalism Stop Being So Darn Liberal?" The New Republic, June 20, 2024.

My colleague Oliver Traldi recently published an essay called ‘Jane Austen's Virtuous Liberalism'. It's a very nice discussion of the ways in which Austen understand the challenges of character formation.Virtue, as Austen sees it, faces two tough challenges. First, people whose characters are not yet formed must see how to be virtuous rather than vicious. Then, the virtuous must somehow find a way to succeed in their struggles against the vicious without adopting vicious means.In this episode, Oliver and I discussed Austen's ideas of virtue, what that has to do with liberalism, the relationship between philosophy and literature more broadly, as well as poetry and ideas about the Great Books. We also talked about the Keira Knightly Pride and Prejudice. Yes, we both liked it. Here is why Oliver thinks Jane Austen is so popular among philosophers.TRALDI: And so I do think that even though she's not making arguments, she's not laying out philosophical theories, there is a level of precision in her thinking about virtue, which I do think is something that it took me a little aback.And I think it's part of why—one person who quote-tweeted my article was Daniel Kodsi, who's a friend of our colleague John Maier and his coauthor often. And he runs this magazine called The Philosophers' Magazine, which I had written before. And Daniel quote-tweeted my article with something like, “Add Oliver to the list of all the philosophers who love Austen.”OLIVER: And it's a long list.TRALDI: And I think it's a long list. And I do think this precision is part of it that she does, that it is—again, it's not like a philosophy journal article, but it is an intellectual sophistication that is often not present in novelists that we really appreciate.And here is an extract about Austen, Smith, and the wonderfully fertile period at the end of the eighteen century.TRALDI: But yes, I think it's obvious—without knowing the background, I'm sure there are scholarly questions about, how much Smith did Austen read? And they're both 250th—a lot was happening in 1775 and 1776.OLIVER: Those were great years. Those were the good old days.TRALDI: They were great years. In the great books syllabus, you get to the end of the 1700s and suddenly there's this—you have Smith, you have Kant, you have the American Revolution, you have the French Revolution, you have Burke. Rousseau is right before, Montesquieu is right before. I mean, it was a real—OLIVER: It's a great time.TRALDI: It was a great time. A lot was being done. And obviously, you know, I love the 1800s. I love the Romantics. But you could teach a whole great books course from 1750 to 1800, probably.OLIVER: You've also got all the dictionaries and all that kind of work going on as well. It's a very, very fertile—explorations.TRALDI: Yes, yes. There's all sorts of—yes, it was an amazing time.OLIVER: So did you, having read these two, Austen and Smith, close together—TRALDI: Yes, and I should say that my reading of Austen was much more careful than my reading of Smith.OLIVER: Sure, but you wrote this before you read Smith.TRALDI: Yes, absolutely.OLIVER: Or at least you fully conceived it. Do you see a lot of Smith in Austen?TRALDI: “A lot” might be—This was my favourite bit.TRALDI: Yes. But this is one of the great—I know we talked about this, but it's one of the great—you see this in Smith, you see this in Austen—commerce has its own virtues, and they are very traditional virtues. You have to be trustworthy. You have to be pleasant. You can't really be wholly self-interested in every moment because people have to be willing to deal with you given your—I mean, think about Yelp reviews or even just word of mouth. “Oh, that person screwed me over.”OLIVER: There's a discussion in one of Hayek's papers, which is—it's a very Smithian point he makes about, the nature of the knowledge problem means that it's not so much that I'm trying to get information about the thing you're trying to sell me, but I'm really trying to get information about you and whether you are someone I should be buying from. Which is exactly the project that the novelists and Smith—there's a sort of period between Smith and the early novelists, running through Austen to George Eliot, when they're all working on that problem together.TRALDI: Yes. I do think in Austen, it's often—the real puzzle is, how do you make out somebody else's character?OLIVER: Exactly.TRALDI: This is a phrase that Lizzy Bennet does use with regard to Darcy. And how do we actually figure out who the trustworthy and untrustworthy people are?OLIVER: And if you're too philosophical about that, in the sort of analytic sense, I think you can end up not paying enough attention to the particulars of that question.TRALDI: Yes.OLIVER: Because when you actually try and do it, it's really, really hard.TRALDI: Yes. And I think this is the sort of—reading Austen, you get a sense of—and there are very few philosophy papers on things like this. Reading Austen, you get a sense of, what sorts of details in a normal life are the ones that I can extract information from to make out somebody else's character?Oliver is an analytical, political philosopher. You can find out more about his work here. Here he is on Twitter. His Substack is orting. You can watch the episode on YouTube here.TranscriptHENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to Oliver Traldi. Oliver is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Toledo in Ohio. He is my colleague on the Emerging Scholars Program at the Mercatus Center, and he's written a book about political beliefs as well as many other articles for magazines, online.He's got a Substack. He's maybe the most prominent political and epistemological young philosopher of his generation. [laughter] But most importantly for us, he is interested in Jane Austen and the idea of virtue. Oliver, welcome.OLIVER TRALDI: Thank you so much for having me.Reading Austen as a PhilosopherOLIVER: Let's just start—before we get to this article you've written, tell me about being a philosopher but reading Jane Austen, because she's often read and commented on by people who are not philosophers or who are only philosophers by acquaintance or whatever.TRALDI: Right.OLIVER: Is it different reading as a philosopher, do you think?TRALDI: I think yes and no. One thing as a philosopher, there are—contemporary philosophy, we have very exacting standards of rigor and clarity. And when we look for a theory, we want something that's been improved by hundreds of people and thousands of journal articles.And so, if you were to simply extract a theory of virtue from a novel and say, “Does this—is this the end-all, be-all of moral thinking?” obviously you're going to be disappointed. So I think as a philosopher, you have to look for other types of things, other types of sensitivities rather than logical sensitivity.You have to say, how sensitive is the author to the different types of situations where people's virtue can be exhibited or challenged? Or how sensitive is the author to the different types of pressures that a character's convictions can be put under, or the different sorts of compromises that they might have to make, or the different sorts of people who might not be virtuous who they might have to interact with and sort of, you know, contract with or avoid? And what are going to be the impacts of different kinds of choices in those situations?So the novelists, I think, tend—if they do it well, a novelist who's interested in morality will understand living morally probably better than a philosopher, while maybe not understanding, say, arguments about whether morality supervenes on reality or vice versa, or what grounds morality, or different theories of meta-ethics or whatever.OLIVER: I mean, there are obviously some novelists who do have a better appreciation of those things than others, we should say.TRALDI: Yes, I think that's absolutely true. And as I wrote in my article, I do think Austen in particular had an appreciation for this issue that you might call moral disarming or unilateral disarming. You know, does the moral person put themselves at a disadvantage relative to the immoral person? And then how do we actually help—how does morality survive?So that's a kind of philosophical question, but I tend to think—I taught last year—I think we've talked about this a bit. I taught in a great books program at Tulsa.OLIVER: This is the Jennifer Frey program.TRALDI: This is the ill-fated Jennifer Frey program. Jennifer—I don't know if you've met her, but she's an incredibly charismatic person. But somehow the program, despite being enormously successful, did not survive. You know, I was there for a year, and they decided that was long enough.OLIVER: [laughs] You don't think your arrival was the—TRALDI: No, no. I hope not. I most certainly hope not.OLIVER: No. General problems of higher education prevailed. Yes.TRALDI: Yes, many, many problems of higher education these days. But yes, so I think—what was I saying?OLIVER: Well, I think we're getting to this question of, you are not just a philosopher; you teach the great books.TRALDI: Right, exactly. The great books. That's where I was. Yes.Philosophy and the Great BooksOLIVER: So, one thing I'm interested in is that, you know, reading as a philosopher, you get a slightly different perspective on Austen. When you read other fiction, poetry, whatever, is there a benefit to you as a philosopher? Does it broaden you in some way?TRALDI: Yes. I think absolutely, it's broadening, but it's also focusing in a different way. You know, contemporary philosophy is often described or captured with the word epicycles. So what we mean when we say epicycles is, you have some major theory, which is supposed to answer some big question. And then your career as a philosopher—you're like three layers deep in the theory, in some sub-debate, and you're making some really fine-grained distinctions.And if you can make those distinctions successfully, you've had a really great career. But I think it's easy to forget, why are we doing—you know, what attracted us to philosophy? Why are we doing this to begin with?And the great novels, great books in general—one example I always use is the Book of Job. It doesn't really—it's not doing clear philosophy on the question of why do bad things happen to good people. But when you read it, you feel the question, why do bad things happen to good people? You get it, you know? You get why this is a question that people have worried about for thousands of years. You get why it calls out for an answer.You know, there's a lot of truth out there. I'm looking at a set of coat hangers, and I could count the coat hangers. But if you were given the decision, would I rather have an answer to how many coat hangers are across the room from me, or why do bad things happen to good people? You'd probably go with the latter one. There's somehow some kind of depth or importance to that question, right?And I think there's—a great novelist can often generate some vividity to these questions. They can show how these questions are part of a good life, asking these questions, trying to have these questions answered—or a not-so-good life.Certainly in Austen there are a lot of characters who learn to be more virtuous. Probably Emma is the clearest example. But you might also think of Marianne Dashwood. Really—OLIVER: Lizzy Bennet.TRALDI: Lizzy Bennet really learns to be a better person. I actually think her character is rather close to Emma in a lot of ways.OLIVER: Yes, I think Emma's sort of a clear rewrite of Lizzy in some—yes, yes.TRALDI: Yes, and in some ways more evocative, actually. Yes. I mean, we can talk about all these books. But yes, I think there's these things, even—obviously qua literature, they have other virtues, right? Which much philosophy doesn't have; very little philosophy has the literary virtues.But the philosophical virtue that a lot of literature does have is you see, okay, these are the—this is what a life is like. This is what making choices is like. These are the big questions when you decide how to live your life and what kinds of choices to make.And I think Austen—these questions are all through Austen, even though nobody has to murder anybody in Austen. Nobody has to make decisions about war and peace or about, you know, civilizational decline or civilizational progress or anything like that. These people making these small choices in a lot of ways. But those are the lives that most of us lead. And when you read Austen, you think, “Oh, okay, there's a virtuous and a vicious way to lead this kind of rather normal life.”The Good LifeOLIVER: The question of what is a good life, or what is a good life in a commercial society, maybe, is the sort of bedrock of what she's doing.TRALDI: Yes, I think so. And that's why I think Austen—you know, Austen wasn't on our syllabus at Tulsa, but she was certainly discussed. And the “what is a good life” question—to me, it's the big question that a great books program for college students should always come back to.If I didn't know what else to talk about, I would just say, “Well, we just read this book.” You know, we read these old biographies of Charlemagne from, like, Einhard—Notker the Stammerer and Einhard, his adopted son or whatever. I don't remember. But this is like 800s. I'm sure you know more about this stuff than I do.And I wasn't quite sure what to do with them because what do I know about Charlemagne? So I just said, “Does it seem like Charlemagne lived a good life?” And you know, you're off to the races. And I think that's important at that age, because that's the age at which—OLIVER: For the undergraduates?TRALDI: Yes. I think that's the age at which you're starting to make your own big decisions about what sort of life to lead. And I think for me, looking back to myself at that age, I think one thing I did wrong—at Tulsa I was in some ways as much a student as a teacher. I was rereading a lot of this stuff for the first time in decades. And some of it I was reading for the first time. As I told you, I was reading a lot of Austen for the first time for this essay.OLIVER: Right, right.TRALDI: And yes, it was stuff that I had thought about at a theoretical level, you know, like what are the ins and outs of this theory or this philosophical move or something like that. But you feel the question a bit differently when you're like, “Okay, I'm an adult. I have to decide whether to live in this way or that way.”The world is open to you. You could convert to Thomism [laughter] like so many have tried to have me do, or you could become a merchant after reading The Wealth of Nations. Or you could become a revolutionary after reading Marx, or you could become a Nietzschean. You know, there are all these choices open to you.OLIVER: Please don't become a Nietzchean.TRALDI: No, no. That is, I'm a—OLIVER: Keep your children out of school if that's going to be the result. [laughs]TRALDI: Yes. I'm a committed moralist, so I cannot, but he is—he made a comeback, that's for sure.Philosophy and PoetryOLIVER: Now, there's this obviously sort of long-running question in philosophy about, what is the relationship between philosophy and poetry? Are they antagonists, or are they in some way, you know, twins, and each provides one half of what is needed for a complete way of understanding the world? Do you have a position on this?TRALDI: Yes, I mean, I think they're what the kids call twinning.OLIVER: Twinning? [laughs]TRALDI: I think they're twinning. No, no, I think that means something different. I think that means when you're wearing the same outfit or something like that.OLIVER: So we're almost twinning with our stripes—yes, I see.TRALDI: We're almost. We actually—we are stripes and blue. Yes, we're closer than I would've expected.I would say closer to twins. There are a lot of claims that philosophy is at odds somehow with this or that. There's also this—certain people will say, “Well, ever since Socrates, philosophy has been at odds with politics.” And a big part of philosophy is, how do you survive? Well, I don't know. Nobody's trying to kill me. I think of myself as a decently committed philosopher.OLIVER: It seems to me this changed fundamentally in the Enlightenment and with the Romantics, and they see it all much more joined up. It's a sort of ancient-and-modern dynamic.TRALDI: Yes, there may be an ancient-and-modern distinction there. But yes, for me I don't see any kind of contradiction. Now, there are—and I think this comes out of what I said before—philosophical attempts to understand poetry. And certain kinds of literary and aesthetic devices do sometimes fall a little flat.The philosophical literature on metaphor, for instance—I think some theories of metaphor really don't get why people use metaphors. [laughter] So one of the most important theories of metaphor is that they're all just false, that it's like everybody who uses a metaphor is lying. This isn't the full theory. There are bells and whistles added.OLIVER: Sure, sure.TRALDI: But yes, so I think there's no contradiction. But at the same time, they are different modes in some ways, and people who do the one are often trying to do something different than the other.I do think that the desire for rigor and precision and clarity that philosophers have can be a little maddening to nonphilosophers, who see the pull of philosophical questions like, “What sort of life I should lead?” and then see, what do philosophers actually do?And we're doing all this modal logic and all these truth tables and all this very technical stuff that looks like math. And they say, “That can't possibly be the right way to think about how to live.” And it's true that there are these studies of—that suggest ethicists aren't actually very good people and things like that, although you have to wonder what is the background ethical theory that went into evaluating them.So yes, I don't think there's really a contradiction between philosophy and anything else. But certainly, there was a point in my life where I always come back to trying to write poetry and do poorly and then stop. But it was always something where I would say, “Okay, if I'm doing philosophy in the afternoon, I better wait till the evening to write poetry.” You have to sort of reboot and get into a different mode.OLIVER: Iris Murdoch used to write philosophy in the morning and novels in the afternoon. That kind of thing.TRALDI: Yes, I think that's very sensible.OLIVER: And she was upstairs for the one and downstairs for the other.TRALDI: Yes. That's even better, you know?Favorite PoetsOLIVER: Which poets do you like?TRALDI: Geez, I guess for an American, I like Wallace Stevens. I wasn't expecting this question. For a Brit, you know, I actually like Philip Larkin a lot.OLIVER: Oh, yes?TRALDI: I know—what is the opinion of Larkin? Is he considered—OLIVER: Very high.TRALDI: Very high? Okay.OLIVER: Some—there are some dissenters, but basically he's the guy.TRALDI: He's the guy, okay. Yes.OLIVER: Twentieth-century English poetry is like Auden, Larkin, Betjeman.TRALDI: Yes, Auden is—actually, my friend Jane Cooper just wrote something about Auden.OLIVER: Yes, Jane is excellent.TRALDI: Yes, Jane is really great.OLIVER: That was in the New Statesman if you want to look it up.TRALDI: That was in the New Statesman. Yes, yes, yes. But Auden, I don't know quite as well.I mean, poetry is—I think it's interesting the way that we receive poetry now. I think you were talking about this a few days ago, about things like poems appearing as inspirational quotes on social media or something like that, and whoever is the most quotable. And you felt like maybe Dostoevsky is very quotable.OLIVER: Dostoevsky has a sort of screenshot quality.TRALDI: Yes, yes.OLIVER: As does Martin Amis.TRALDI: Yes. So I—OLIVER: Whereas Philip Larkin in a funny way—you know, he has very short poems. You can get the whole poem on Twitter. Like, Robert Frost has that. But something like “The Whitsun Weddings,” it's quite hard to just take three lines out. The whole thing works as a—and that, so that poem gets less—TRALDI: Yes. Which is what you would expect from a good poem, really, that it would form a kind of whole.OLIVER: Exactly. If it's a three-page ode, it should have a continuous quality.TRALDI: Yes, it should have a kind of internal structure. Yes.OLIVER: There are some one-line things and—but I think it's notable that a poet like Wordsworth doesn't seem to get a lot of social media play. And I think probably that's one reason.TRALDI: So yes, I think Larkin is somebody who, I did see some shorter references to him, and I thought I'd better just go and look up a ton of poems by this guy. And Stevens was the same way.Death and Philip LarkinOLIVER: So, which Larkin do you like?TRALDI: You're really putting me on the spot here. [laughter] It has been a little while.OLIVER: I lied to you and said it would be about Jane Austen.TRALDI: Yes, now I'm completely screwed. Well, he has a bunch about death. He has one where death is a ship following you. And he has one where death is, like, a fruit that gets picked or something.OLIVER: Apple?TRALDI: Might be an apple.OLIVER: He decides not to throw the apple.TRALDI: There's one with sweetbreads in it. And now I'm really—OLIVER: The ship one, “Next, Please”—that's excellent.TRALDI: Yes.OLIVER: He sees the—it's like hearing the music coming, and then the ship.TRALDI: I forgot that that was the title. I forgot that that was the title.OLIVER: And then as the ship goes past, it leaves nothing in its wake. It's very sort of—very gloomy.TRALDI: It's very gloomy, yes. I think I read Larkin in a gloomy phase; it was like Larkin and Radiohead or something.OLIVER: But he's a good example of what you were saying before, that he won't think propositionally. He's logical in the sense that he's sort of orderly, and he goes from one thing to the next. But he's not being a philosopher.TRALDI: No, of course. Yes.OLIVER: But he's very preoccupied with the sorts of questions that philosophers are probing, but has a sort of very meaningful treatment of them.TRALDI: Yes.OLIVER: And I think in a way, the sharp response that you want from the reader in those questions, Larkin is better at provoking than someone like Bertrand Russell or some other contemporary of his.TRALDI: Yes, yes.OLIVER: Bertrand Russell's a bit earlier, but you know what I mean.TRALDI: No, I think that's exactly right. And I think that is why I'm a fan of the great books pedagogically and not—I don't know if Larkin will be called a great, you know, like, who knows? I don't really understand that designation, but tings like poetry and novels.OLIVER: The biggest dissenter was Harold Bloom, who said Philip Larkin's just a period piece. And he doesn't understand why everyone likes him.TRALDI: Oh, yes, well, I'm not on board with everything. Oh, I've also been—OLIVER: No, you're not very Bloomian.TRALDI: I'm not very Bloomian, I don't think.OLIVER: Either Allan or Harold.TRALDI: Yes. Well, I actually—this is very embarrassing, but I've actually never read The Closing of the American Mind, which I know is—OLIVER: But why should you? I'm not sure it's retained its—TRALDI: Well, it's certainly been received into my circle. But it is like a classic of anti-ideological—OLIVER: Sure. Have you read Adler, How to Read a Book, that kind of great books stuff?TRALDI: No. There's so many things that I haven't read. I mean, I'm just learning how to read. I learned how to read in Tulsa last year, [laughter] in Oklahoma, which is not where most people would go to learn how to read.Jane Austen and the Problem of MoralityOLIVER: So let's move to Jane Austen. Your thesis basically is, many moral theories face this problem that if I believe XYZ theory and you don't believe it, you can get the advantage of me. Because I'll always stick to my principles and you can just be a bad guy.TRALDI: Yes.OLIVER: So is morality screwed? This is what people say about liberalism. This is what you're arguing. And you think Jane Austen's got an answer to that?TRALDI: Yes, I think she has a kind of answer. And again, one decision I had to make while writing the essay was, am I going to go super—this is a completely philosophically rigorous and respectable answer? Or am I just going to kind of sketch it?OLIVER: Slum it in literary criticism? [laughter]TRALDI: Yes, I wouldn't put it quite that way, but—and I think I went for the latter, where I just wanted to kind of evoke the answer. And I think the answer has something to do with living in a large enough society where—and Austen I think is not the only person to give this answer. But you live in a large enough society where, when people see you acting well and somebody else acting poorly, the disadvantage that you have in that one interaction is outweighed by the advantages you have from the society that you gain from being seen to act well by many others.So one thing I didn't mention here, but a connection I made when I was first coming up with this idea, is that it's actually a lot like what Martin Luther King Jr. says about civil disobedience. So he says, you might think, if you're out there and the police are coming at you with bats, or the white supremacists are coming at you with bats or whatever, weapons or whatever, you might think, “I'm on the losing end of this interaction.”But actually what will happen is that this interaction will be seen by many others. And you, by keeping your calm, will be seen to be the virtuous one, and they, by being violent, will be seen to be the vicious ones. And this can only help your political cause. I'm probably abstracting some of the details of King's presentation.OLIVER: In a vulgar sense, this is the sort of “be the change you want to see” approach.TRALDI: Yes, but also, be the change you want other people to see. You know? Because that's how it gets saved from—and again, one of the ways in which this is not quite philosophically rigorous is because the philosopher can say, “Well, what about an example where nobody's going to see it? Or what about an example where the situation is set up that in doing the right thing, you're perceived to have done the wrong thing?” And you get back into tough problems. And that's why we have philosophy. You know, there's always going to be these puzzles.OLIVER: But we don't get the—I think this is what the novelists are helpful for. We don't get to set the conditions in our lives. You know, when you're doing a philosophical problem, you can just say, “Well, these are the conditions. What happens then?” And what Jane Austen is so good at is saying, “I'm going to take her and drop her in this house, and that's life. And she's just going to—she won't even know what the conditions are for a long time.” That's the novelist's preoccupation.TRALDI: Yes. Yes. It's interesting what you said about not even knowing what the conditions are. It's one thing I love, which is there in, I think, a lot of Austen—and it's done by a lot of my favorite novelists. I think Kazuo Ishiguro is really good at this. It's just novels where you see the characters' growing awareness of their circumstances and—OLIVER: Like in Klara and the Sun or something.TRALDI: Yes, or I think certainly in Never Let Me Go and in Remains of the Day, a lot of the action is in a situation where you understand what's going on better than the characters do.Clues and GamesTRALDI: And I think we talked about this the other day. In Austen, Emma, for example, is this sort of, like, halfway detective where she sees a lot of clues that could help her understand the nature of the life she's leading and the circumstances she's in, but she always misinterprets the clues. But on the other hand, it's not like she misses them entirely. She's kind of on the right track, and at least she's trying.OLIVER: And what I think Austen does so well in that book—I think it's her most important book—is that by putting us, without quite realizing it, with Emma's blinkers on, as it were, and only allowing our perspective to be her perspective, she makes us the detective.But whereas in a detective novel, you know, there's a funny little man and he is a detective, and he says, “Oh, there's a clue in this novel,” the read of—on the first read very often goes straight past what they must later realize to be a clue. And that is such a normal condition of life, that, “Oh, actually, that was one of the conditions, but you couldn't have known it. Sorry.” And you can only work it out in retrospect.TRALDI: Yes. In modern love, these are sometimes called red flags. [laughter] I think it's not quite a precise analogy, but yes, I think it's right. And I certainly—I had read Emma years ago and didn't really notice. As you say, on my first read, I didn't really notice, even having watched—I think it was the, what is it, the Kate Beckinsale version maybe, from ITV in like 1996 or something.It was really in reading it for this essay that I noticed that this feature that, starting on page 30 or 40 or so, there's a—and they're often in games. The clues are often in games. So very early on, Elton is playing some sort of poem game with Emma.OLIVER: The riddles, yes.TRALDI: The riddle game. And you know, Emma already misinterprets his riddles as being about Harriet rather than about her. But then there's also—the riddles also have some relation to things that happen much later.OLIVER: Then there's the anagram game at the end.TRALDI: There's the anagram game at the end. Yes, it's the—and I don't think there are many games like that in any of the other Austen.OLIVER: People play games, but we're not taken into them and have them narrated in that way.TRALDI: And they're not word games in general. There's card games and things like that. And you know, in Pride and Prejudice, Wickham has all these gambling debts and things like that.OLIVER: Yes.TRALDI: You know, in—I don't know if you know Whit Stillman, but for the same magazine a couple years ago I wrote about Whit Stillman, who's a sort of conservative filmmaker who's a huge Austen fan and brings in Austenian themes to a lot of his movies, but writes them about characters in the 1960s and '70s. And one of them was called The Last Days of Disco, for example, about—and some of the broader social themes he talks about are also there in Austen.So one thing that was just on the edges of my consciousness as I read through the novels for this essay was the question of the noble man versus the working man, which I think is very present in Austen and has something to do with her conception of virtue: that the virtuous person will be engaging in commerce in some way.OLIVER: Those moments of the noble and the virtuous man or whatever often take place in a shop, like the drapier in Emma or the jewelry shop in Sense and Sensibility.TRALDI: That's interesting. That's interesting.OLIVER: She's very careful to take us into a commercial situation and contrast.TRALDI: See, that is the sort of detail that I think a philosopher—I think we—the mere—the vibe of, “You're in a shop, and this means something.” I think this is something philosophers are—we can watch for the action; we can judge the characters' actions. But then there are these questions of atmosphere and milieu. And certain things happen in a shop; certain things happen at the seaside. In Persuasion there's an injury by the seaside.OLIVER: Yes. That's one of the most exciting scenes in Austen. Very dramatic.TRALDI: Yes, yes. I think actually Persuasion in some ways is quite different than her other books. It has a sort of—you know, in some ways it feels a little more like Frankenstein or Wuthering Heights at points. There's a little bit of a windblown, dark quality to it at times. It's a little bit bleaker. It's a little hard to explain why, but that's just a feeling that I had reading it that maybe had changed with some of the other literary tastes of the time.Artlessness in Austen's HeroinesOLIVER: Now, the quality that you focus on in the heroines, in this question of virtue defending itself against bad actors who break the rules, is artlessness.TRALDI: Yes. So this is a term Austen uses quite a bit, and almost always, she very much picks and chooses the characters who are going to receive this term. And I thought that this is like—it's not only her artless characters who face this question about how can morality survive, or how can virtue prevail, but I think they're the limit point.Like, if you really are unwilling to use—and I mentioned in the essay, when Darcy describes—I forget what; maybe it's him describing how he found Lydia and Wickham, or it's something to do with Wickham—he said, “I had to resort to arts.” So it must be, the “arts” back then means—one of the meanings of the term is dishonesty or subterfuge or something.OLIVER: Yes, if someone was artful, it could have—TRALDI: Yes, like the Artful Dodger.OLIVER: Exactly. Could have negative connotations for sure.TRALDI: Yes. And so the artless one, you know, they're missing something.So it's the question of, if you view—morality in a way means you're missing something, right? You've taken arts out of your arsenal. You've taken tools that could deal with certain situations, and you've just decided not to use them. So the question is, how can it be an advantage to have less tools?You know, we're here at Mercatus; the economists would tell you it's never advantageous to have fewer choices, right? There's no paradox of choice. It's never advantageous to have fewer choices. And so I think this is the—if morality is a kind of unilateral disarmament, artlessness is the clearest case of that.OLIVER: And you're seeing that in Fanny Price, Elinor—TRALDI: You see that in Fanny Price. You see that in Elinor. Harriet Smith is described as artless over and over again. And then there are these other characters who are described as artful, or other things that are mentioned as arts.I think Harriet, in a lot of ways, is the one who's most often described this way. And it's interesting because you think of Emma changing a lot in Emma, but Knightley actually shifts in his evaluation of Harriet, who he thought of as sort of an unserious person. And Knightley himself comes to recognize her artlessness as a kind of seriousness which makes her a good match, not ultimately for him, but for his dude, Robert.OLIVER: The farmer.TRALDI: The farmer, yes.OLIVER: He doesn't change his view of her social position, though.TRALDI: No, certainly not. But he does change his view of her character, basically. You know, her artlessness is not silliness. It has a sort of depth to it.And yes, certainly Fanny. In the Whit Stillman movie Metropolitan that's part of what set me on this, there's this whole discussion of the book Mansfield Park and this old Lionel Trilling essay about it where he says, how is it—there's this question about how modern people can even like Mansfield Park because we've sort of lost the notion of virtue being exciting or something.One of the most provocative lines to me in Austen was in Sense and Sensibility where it says that Elinor glories in Edward's integrity, which is an odd thing to glory in. You don't glory—nobody is on Instagram showing off their integrity, you know?OLIVER: It's like that René Gerard quote people like to pass around: “Everyone is on diet pills and nobody wants to be a saint.”TRALDI: I like that. That is very Instagrammable.OLIVER: Exactly. Exactly.TRALDI: That's very good, actually. I like that. Yes, so there's something provocative about the notion that virtue can be exciting, and in particular can be romantically exciting.The Importance of IntegrityOLIVER: Or even less than that. One thing I think is difficult for people interpreting Austen today is that virtue, whether it's exciting or romantically exciting, or the notion of integrity is of interest for its own sake.There's a lot of—you know, we have integrity as an organization. It's very important for me to have integrity as a professional. But there's not as much a sense of, just having integrity is the good life. We don't need to be complicated about this. That's just—you should just do that. And Austen's very firm on that all the way through.And criticism wants to pull her towards sometimes feminism, sometimes discussions of slavery, sometimes various other things. And she's just constantly sort of resisting that by saying, “I like integrity. I like good people. I don't think it's that hard.” It's a good line you've picked up on, I think.TRALDI: There's a character in The Wire who says, “A man's gotta have a code.” I think he's Omar, who murders the drug dealers and steals from them.OLIVER: I haven't seen it.TRALDI: So he says, “A man's gotta have a code.” And I think there is a—even in a character who in some ways is bad, we admire the integrity of having a code and sticking to it.There is this debate, I guess in moral philosophy, or at least on the outskirts of moral philosophy, about, “Well, if your code is wrong, maybe it's better not to stick to it.” I don't share that perspective. I think part of the good life is holding yourself to certain standards. And if those standards turn out to be wrong, the holding yourself is still of moral value, right? Not allowing yourself—OLIVER: It doesn't mean they're not adjustable.TRALDI: Yes, no, of course. If you decide the standards are wrong, and in Austen—OLIVER: It's sort of implicit in the idea of having standards that you will be honest and therefore accept when your standards need to be improved or whatever. Right?TRALDI: Yes, I think that's absolutely right. And in Austen we certainly see people shifting their standards. And I think one thing that I—of course, modern readers and watchers of Austen do not quite understand some of these things. But I think in Pride and Prejudice in particular, we're supposed to feel that Lizzy Bennet is quite hard on people and has to learn to improve herself in that way.OLIVER: We're delighted with her when she does that because we think it's sassy.TRALDI: Yes, exactly. If you go on YouTube, you can see all these, like, “Lizzy Bennet owning people's lives for 50 minutes,” these compilations of clips from the various movies or whatever. And she's obviously very, very clever.But she realizes—after coming to understand who Wickham is and feeling that she might not have another chance with Darcy, she comes to realize that she has had certain prejudices, which have made her blind to the realities of the world and blind to what might be her best options.So yes, I was saying I believe in integrity; that's all I was saying. And integrity obviously is adjustable, but I tend to think that it's better—even if the rule is wrong, it's better for the person who has it to hold themselves to it, rather than to adjust to try to get an advantage.And in philosophy, we have all sorts of terminology for these sorts of questions: “Are you an internalist or an externalist about reasons or about rules or whatever?” I think the more literary way to say it would just be that integrity is a virtue. And people should stick to their codes unless they see a good reason to change them.Austen and Adam SmithOLIVER: Now, you have recently been reading Adam Smith.TRALDI: Yes, I did read a lot of Adam Smith for this debate we had last week. Although I did a poor job because I had forgotten that the debate was about whether Smith was a philosopher or an economist. [laughter] I thought it was simply, is he a philosopher or not? So I put myself in the odd position of arguing that Adam Smith is not an economist.But yes, I think it's obvious—without knowing the background, I'm sure there are scholarly questions about, how much Smith did Austen read? And they're both 250th—a lot was happening in 1775 and 1776.OLIVER: Those were great years. Those were the good old days.TRALDI: They were great years. In the great books syllabus, you get to the end of the 1700s and suddenly there's this—you have Smith, you have Kant, you have the American Revolution, you have the French Revolution, you have Burke. Rousseau is right before, Montesquieu is right before. I mean, it was a real—OLIVER: It's a great time.TRALDI: It was a great time. A lot was being done. And obviously, you know, I love the 1800s. I love the Romantics. But you could teach a whole great books course from 1750 to 1800, probably.OLIVER: You've also got all the dictionaries and all that kind of work going on as well. It's a very, very fertile—explorations.TRALDI: Yes, yes. There's all sorts of—yes, it was an amazing time.OLIVER: So did you, having read these two, Austen and Smith, close together—TRALDI: Yes, and I should say that my reading of Austen was much more careful than my reading of Smith.OLIVER: Sure, but you wrote this before you read Smith.TRALDI: Yes, absolutely.OLIVER: Or at least you fully conceived it. Do you see a lot of Smith in Austen?TRALDI: “A lot” might be—OLIVER: Primarily from Theory of Moral Sentiments.TRALDI: So I would say that the notion of sympathy as being fundamentally part of how you recognize a good person seems to me to be there in Austen. The characters are—OLIVER: And this is the thing about awareness of other people and learning from that awareness.TRALDI: Awareness of other people and learning from other people and feeling other people's emotions. One thing that is related to sympathy in an odd way—and I think actually Austen and Smith conceive of it a bit differently, but that is there for both of them, in particular in Sense and Sensibility—is this notion of self-control or self-command.OLIVER: Self command. Yes. Yes.The Importance of Self-CommandTRALDI: Now, Smith gives a really odd argument about self command, which is that if you don't have control over your emotions, you will end up feeling or expressing something that other people can't sympathize with. And this is bad because sympathy is good, or something like that. I actually think it's a rather confused argument.OLIVER: I think what he's saying is that if you display a lack of self-command, then no matter what you are feeling, people find it difficult to deal with that sort of uncontrolled behavior. It's not the particular expression of feeling; it's the fact that you are a little unstable or—TRALDI: Yes, I think that's right.OLIVER: —a bit extra.TRALDI: I think what Smith doesn't do is explain quite how that's bad. But what I think is that actually, in Sense and Sensibility, it's a little bit the reverse, where actually Elinor and their mother, they do sympathize with Marianne. They do feel what she's feeling after—who's the other, the w guy in Sense and Sensibility? They're all w's.OLIVER: Oh, Willoughby.TRALDI: Willoughby, right, right. Not Wickham, Willoughby. When Willoughby—OLIVER: You can just say “the cad.”TRALDI: The cad. There's always a cad. So when the cad leaves, Marianne has all these emotions, and you really feel them. And Marianne also has a lack of self-command when Willoughby is there. There's this whole episode, which I didn't quite make the most of but felt very important, where they go to the house of this woman. They just sort of barge into this house, Willoughby and Marianne.And this is really supposed to show something about the relationship. If you and your partner barge into somebody's house, it can't be a good relationship somehow because it's leading you into bad actions. That's my sense of what that episode is supposed to show from the highest possible remove.OLIVER: I think, yes, and I think there are several other instances of that: when they ride in the carriage together, unaccompanied.TRALDI: Right, right.OLIVER: And there's a sort of general consternation about this. And Marianne sort of says, “Oh, well, how can it be a problem?” And they—part of the consternation is, you're breaking the rules in a very flagrant way, but also that you are assuming that it's okay because you'll get married. And this assumption is a very big one.TRALDI: Yes. And obviously there is this assumption that—she doesn't recognize quite how—she thinks her position is much more secure than it actually is, which is how it turns out in the book. But I think we're supposed to think that even if she were right about Willoughby's affection, which in a sense, she—Willoughby—OLIVER: No. Even if they do get married, she's broken the rules in a way that—TRALDI: She's broken certain rules in a way that is—but I think what's different from Smith is, there is sympathy from her family even though she lacks self-command. But that is precisely—so it's sort of a different theory of why self-command is good. It's precisely because her emotional state is actually draining for her family.And then Elinor says—when she learns that Elinor has actually been going through something—OLIVER: The same.TRALDI: —very similar, and maybe even rougher, in this whole thing with Lucy Steele telling her about this, you know, blah, blah, blah.OLIVER: Which is a beautiful name—to steal. I mean, it's great.TRALDI: It's an amazing—honestly, in some ways Sense and Sensibility may have been my favorite. I think it's just lovely.OLIVER: If I just wanted to just read one for fun, that's what I go to. I do, yes.TRALDI: Yes. And there's a lot—none of these things are quite perfectly in there. But I think honestly, everything that's in the other novels has a little part to play in Sense and Sensibility. You know, I think if I were to recommend just one, if somebody was like, “I have time for just one,” I might recommend Sense and Sensibility.But in the end, Marianne says—again, it's one of these amazingly evocative lines. Elinor says, “You didn't act that badly. Do you compare your conduct with Willoughby's?” And she says, “No, I compare it with—Elinor, I compare it with your conduct. You have this self-command.”And it's precisely the fact—it's not—and I think this is why philosophers do like Austen, because it's not—it's still literary, but there is a precision to her moral evaluations. It's precisely the fact that Elinor knew that her family loved her and didn't want to burden—it's all quite conscious. She didn't want to burden her family with her emotions. But you actually see that Elinor has this family trait of having very strong sentiment, which Marianne does, and simply also has this virtue of self-command.And that is—there are film adaptations and TV adaptations that demonstrate self-command, but it's a very hard thing to film. It's something you feel inside. It's a very hard—the actors have to be very good for you to see—you see pieces of it in some of the adaptations of Persuasion and some of the adaptations of Sense and Sensibility, but self-command is very hard to find.Austen AdaptationsOLIVER: Which adaptations do you like the best?TRALDI: I'm forgetting—I often like the long ones that I think were for the British ITV. So I like the—I think Kate Beckinsale was in the Emma one. Although I think there was one of Persuasion, which was also quite good. I like the one of Northanger Abbey. I don't think it's that good, but it's kind of cute, which I think it's probably the cutest of her long novels.Whit Stillman did a very loose adaptation of Lady Susan, which is hilariously funny at times, and also has Kate Beckinsale and some other great actors in it.OLIVER: Did you see the new Persuasion on Netflix a couple of years ago?TRALDI: No. No.OLIVER: It has that—is it Dakota Johnson, the actress, who's famous for other non-Austenian—Fifty Shades of Grey or whatever.TRALDI: Yes, and isn't she one of the Avengers or something like that?OLIVER: Something like that. But everyone was very upset that it was this terrible adaptation.TRALDI: Oh, yes.OLIVER: Didn't—it sort of killed all of Austen's words. She looks at the camera; she drinks from the bottle. I actually thought it was quite fun. On the basis that all adaptations are bad—TRALDI: I think if you allow some looseness, it can be quite fun. So for example, the 2005 Pride and Prejudice, I think if you're just sort of like, “Well, this is just somebody who was inspired by Pride and Prejudice,” you can have a lot of fun with the movie.OLIVER: I think as an interpretation of the book, that film is quite bad.TRALDI: Oh, yes. I think it's absolutely missing the mark.OLIVER: But in terms of like, the countryside and the house and the geese and the food, it's fantastic.TRALDI: Oh, yes. It's lovely to look at.OLIVER: The dresses, right? The clothes are amazing.TRALDI: And a lot of the—and the cast is honestly like—OLIVER: Yes, it's great.TRALDI: The cast is really, really great. And the parts as they are—OLIVER: Rosamund Pike is maybe the best Jane on TV.TRALDI: She's terrific. And who's the one who plays Kitty?OLIVER: Yes.TRALDI: Who is in—and the father is the guy from The Hunger Games. I forget his name, but I think the father is excellent in that. But of course, it's not exactly the father from Austen.OLIVER: No, no, no.TRALDI: But as a movie itself—but yes, I like a lot of these longer TV versions.One odd thing—they make these choices. So there is some scholarly apparatus brought to bear on some of them. So I think maybe it's Persuasion that there were multiple versions of, and some of the adaptations use pieces from the unpublished version, which are interesting. And as I was reading it, I had to Google around a bit and figure out these things.Austen's Moral PrecisionTRALDI: I was going to say about Austen's moral precision, the other place where I think this comes in—and I wrote a bit about this in the essay—is near the end of Mansfield Park, when—the names are what I'm worst at—when Edmund, right, is finally disillusioned with—OLIVER: Mary.TRALDI: With Mary Crawford?OLIVER: Mm-hmm.TRALDI: It's because there was this affair. There's always a sibling or a cousin who makes some horrible mistake, you know? So there was this affair, and Mary Crawford can only criticize it by saying that they weren't very prudent, you know, in prudential terms. They took a big risk. They made a bad decision. You know, they really screwed themselves over.OLIVER: They could have made it work. Yes.TRALDI: Yes. And Edmund realizes that she lacks moral fervor because he thinks the appropriate criticism should be a moral one. And as a psychological matter, it shouldn't even enter your head, I think is the idea. I'm extrapolating a bit, but if you see somebody acting this badly, to then say, “Well, geez, you're doing something that isn't in your interest”—for that to be your first thought indicates that your priorities are highly misplaced in a way that, to him, is quite unattractive.And this also struck me as a moment of—this is something we philosophers talk about. What is the distinction between prudence and morality? They both tell you what you should do, in some sense, but there's different—the shoulds have different forces, right? So Edmund has a certain moral precision and sensitivity which, actually, Fanny is basically the only person he knows—not that everybody in the house is a bad person; his father is a decent guy, and one of the aunts is okay, I think.But yes, there's a real sophistication to this evaluation. And it's funny to me that she actually used this as the—I mean, I suspect that even at the time there were readers who were just like, “Wait, I really don't get what the nature of Edmund's problem is here,” because it's not like Mary—Mary's not like, “Oh, yes, I support infidelity.” You know? She's not like— it's if you blinked, you might miss it, the mistake that Mary has made.And so I do think that even though she's not making arguments, she's not laying out philosophical theories, there is a level of precision in her thinking about virtue, which I do think is something that it took me a little aback.And I think it's part of why—one person who quote-tweeted my article was Daniel Kodsi, who's a friend of our colleague John Maier and his coauthor often. And he runs this magazine called The Philosophers' Magazine, which I had written before. And Daniel quote-tweeted my article with something like, “Add Oliver to the list of all the philosophers who love Austen.”OLIVER: And it's a long list.TRALDI: And I think it's a long list. And I do think this precision is part of it that she does, that it is—again, it's not like a philosophy journal article, but it is an intellectual sophistication that is often not present in novelists that we really appreciate.Every Word MattersOLIVER: I mean, one way people talk about the great books is to say that every word matters. And a lot of novelists will say that about their own. Well, you know, Elizabeth Bowen used to say, “What you're doing is to make everything count.” Austen is one of the examples where it's actually true. Every word is being used carefully.TRALDI: Yes. It's funny, this bears on another Twitter argument I had recently about this phrase logographic necessity. Basically, every word in a great book is there for a reason. I think that's right. Although you have to be careful about—if you were to say, “Well, every word in Plato is there for a reason, so you can't really say he's wrong about every—” you would be kind of abandoning the philosophical mission.OLIVER: I mean it in the sense of what you might call the artistic or structural integrity of the book. Not everything has to tell in the meaning sense. But it all holds as a unit for some—TRALDI: Yes. I think everything is there—there is what we could call an internal reason for everything to be there. Everything is there to hold together—OLIVER: Like the making of a piece of furniture or something.TRALDI: And I think you hear—I think this is one thing that—and not all classical music, but I think it's one thing that distinguishes classical music even from very good contemporary pop music or jazz or rock music, is that you have this sense of, “Yes, every note I hear basically is holding up a larger structure of some sort.”OLIVER: Yes. And Jane Austen is very Mozart in that way.TRALDI: Yes, I think that's right. Yes.Austen's Place in Great Books ProgramsOLIVER: So should Jane Austen have a bigger place on great books programs, based on all these things you've said about her?TRALDI: Yes, this is—so, there was actually a debate—I did not write the piece in response to this debate, but this is—OLIVER: Tanner Greer.TRALDI: Yes, there was—Tanner Greer weighed in on this, and my friend Circe. I think—OLIVER: I think they're just desperately wrong.TRALDI: You think they don't—that she—OLIVER: I think Emma is obviously a book that should be on one of these syllabuses. Maybe Sense and Sensibility.TRALDI: Yes. I think the ones I would consider are Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park. I do think they're actually longer than I realized, which is always—I mean, there are these very practical concerns with putting together a syllabus.OLIVER: Sure, sure. Although I want to ask you about that, because my response to a lot of these debates, which is maybe just because of where I studied, but just make them read more. And if they don't do the reading, that's their, you know—TRALDI: That's true. Well, I don't want to get into this too much. We already make them read a lot compared to—so for example, a year ago, I had my students read two novels in a week, which is more than most courses make college students read.OLIVER: But that's by no means unreasonable.TRALDI: No, no, of course, of course.OLIVER: You know.TRALDI: Well, exigencies of the teenage mind aside—OLIVER: Because I often think this, when people debate how things should be taught and why it's so important to keep these programs, and they'll talk about the importance of writing essays. And then it turns out the students maybe write one essay a semester. And I sort of think, well, who cares? All this rhetoric for one essay.TRALDI: Yes. I don't know if I'm really ever going to assign essays again. It just is—the age of AI is upon us.OLIVER: Sure. But you see what I mean.TRALDI: No, yes, I know exactly what you mean. And I do think reading a lot is the main part of—and certainly, you know, when I read all seven of these in two weeks, that's much more reading than I normally do, as well, to write this essay.OLIVER: But you didn't have to lie on the sofa afterwards with a cold compress. You were fine.TRALDI: In a way it was a really good two weeks. If you get to read—I mean, this is why we have good lives, right? If you get to read Jane Austen and you call that work, it's a nice life.OLIVER: So yes, will you be putting Emma on your program?TRALDI: I would definitely consider Emma. I would definitely consider Sense and Sensibility. I would consider Mansfield Park. I think these are the ones that have—the moral element is very prominent. But it's obviously there in all of her books.OLIVER: You can have a really good moral discussion about Mansfield Park, which is a bigger, broader thing than Pride and Prejudice, for example.TRALDI: Yes, I think so. I would definitely consider—in the 1800s there were—obviously the British novel of the 1800s was a big deal, and there's—OLIVER: [laughs] We did quite well, yes.TRALDI: You all did quite well. So the ones we did at Tulsa—we had Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights and The Picture of Dorian Gray. And then we had one Irish, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And I don't think anybody—if you replaced one of those with Emma or Mansfield Park, I don't think anybody would say, “Oh, you made a horrible call.”OLIVER: I think Tanner's point was that you simply don't have that many slots for an English novel that deals with these sorts of ideas, and that it should obviously be Middlemarch because that is the bigger novel. It's about bigger questions of society. It's about the whole—it's got more greatness in it, whereas Austen is sort of more about the individual.TRALDI: So I do think that this question of greatness—I think there are some people who read Austen and they think, “Well, this is—obviously it has all these sorts of themes, but it's not great. It has this littleness to it. It has this smallness to it.”OLIVER: It's domestic.TRALDI: That is not my reading of it. I think if that's the question, I don't feel that way. I think it pulls out these great themes about the nature of virtue and the nature of moral learning, becoming a better person, the nature of love. We read Sappho. We read the Symposium.To me, you read Wuthering Heights and you say, “Oh, this is a really big book because it's about society and how trauma gets passed down, and it has these horror elements, and it's very dark.” But actually, it's quite hard to figure out, how do we turn Wuthering Heights in a discussion about how to live? With Austen, it's just completely straightforward.OLIVER: [laughs] How not to live, maybe.TRALDI: Yes. In Austen, it's just completely straightforward. This is the discussion. This is what she had in mind as well, this question of how to live. So to me, Austen is completely—in terms of her successes as an artist, she belongs. In terms of her themes, she belongs. So I would not rule her out. I think she is absolutely a great, and who knows what that means, but I think she would be completely appropriate on any of these syllabi.Reading PlansOLIVER: Very good. And what will you read next?TRALDI: What will I read next? I mean, our—from the beginning, I'm thinking I should read some more poetry. It's been a while. Actually, speaking of—this is funny. Well, I want to get into William Empson. He had an odd life, which I think somebody should do like a movie about him or something.OLIVER: Yes, he'd make a great movie.TRALDI: I think Empson would be a good movie. So that might be—OLIVER: Are you going to read the poems or the criticism?TRALDI: Probably a little of both, but that's for a while from now. I think, you know, at the moment I'm back to reading philosophy. So what novel will I read next? That's a good question. What should I read next?OLIVER: If you like Jane Austen?TRALDI: Yes.OLIVER: Maybe read one of the people that she admired, like Samuel Richardson or Fanny Burney, someone like that.TRALDI: You know, I do think—you saying Samuel Richardson reminded me, I've read very little Samuel Johnson. I think reading some of the great critics, I think, writing this piece—OLIVER: Oh, Johnson, yes. You would like Johnson.TRALDI: I think I would like Johnson. I think I would like Empson. The history of literary criticism is something I have very, very little idea of.OLIVER: Oh, well, then, Johnson. I mean, he's the best.TRALDI: Yes, I think I should, I should definitely read Johnson.OLIVER: English literary criticism begins and ends with Samuel Johnson.TRALDI: You know what, this is a little different, but—I might have talked about this with you a little bit—I want to read The Fable of the Bees, Mandeville, because reading about Smith—a lot of the ideas that we think of as Smithian are actually Mandevillian, and he kind of moderated them.OLIVER: Well, he hated Mandeville.TRALDI: Yes.OLIVER: Very hard on him.TRALDI: Yes. So a lot—like the invisible hand, it's only a small part of Smith's thinking, but it was like the entirety of Mandeville's thinking, this sort of dynamic.OLIVER: Well, I think it means different things for them. I think Mandeville, in a funny way, is more philosophical in the sense you were saying, and trying to make these propositions. And Smith was saying, “Well, what about feelings? What about all these funny things that we can't account for? Like, look around. It's too messy.”TRALDI: No, that makes sense to me. Yes, I think between Mandeville and Smith, Mandeville is somebody who thought virtue was sort of like a con.OLIVER: A fool's game.TRALDI: Exactly. You're sort of a sucker if you try to be virtuous.OLIVER: I think he also just assumed that if you were commercial, you were obviously on the get.TRALDI: Yes. But this is one of the great—I know we talked about this, but it's one of the great—you see this in Smith, you see this in Austen—commerce has its own virtues, and they are very traditional virtues. You have to be trustworthy. You have to be pleasant. You can't really be wholly self-interested in every moment because people have to be willing to deal with you given your—I mean, think about Yelp reviews or even just word of mouth. “Oh, that person screwed me over.”OLIVER: There's a discussion in one of Hayek's papers, which is—it's a very Smithian point he makes about, the nature of the knowledge problem means that it's not so much that I'm trying to get information about the thing you're trying to sell me, but I'm really trying to get information about you and whether you are someone I should be buying from. Which is exactly the project that the novelists and Smith—there's a sort of period between Smith and the early novelists, running through Austen to George Eliot, when they're all working on that problem together.TRALDI: Yes. I do think in Austen, it's often—the real puzzle is, how do you make out somebody else's character?OLIVER: Exactly.TRALDI: This is a phrase that Lizzy Bennet does use with regard to Darcy. And how do we actually figure out who the trustworthy and untrustworthy people are?OLIVER: And if you're too philosophical about that, in the sort of analytic sense, I think you can end up not paying enough attention to the particulars of that question.TRALDI: Yes.OLIVER: Because when you actually try and do it, it's really, really hard.TRALDI: Yes. And I think this is the sort of—reading Austen, you get a sense of—and there are very few philosophy papers on things like this. Reading Austen, you get a sense of, what sorts of details in a normal life are the ones that I can extract information from to make out somebody else's character?In philosophy, we do ask, what is a good character and what is the good action in this sort of situation? What is the bad action in this sort of situation? But it's not for the philosopher to say, “Okay, in the sorts of situations you're likely to be in, what do you pay—where do you direct your attention to try to figure out these things about?”And it's not—I don't think Austen—it's not super subtle either. In Persuasion—I mentioned in the essay—in Persuasion, it starts out by saying Anne really cared about paying off the family's debts, and the rest of her family didn't give a s**t, you know? And it's sort of like, okay, so we just immediately are like, Anne's the sort of person who you might want to have a business transaction with because if she has a debt to you, she might actually pay it. And I forget if that's the exact detail, but it's something like that, you know?OLIVER: And there's also the novelist—Jane Austen is very good at what you don't see, which aga

Miroslav Volf is back, and this time he brought his friend — poet and theologian Christian Wiman — and their book Glimmerings, collection of letters exchanged over years of friendship that moves from the problem of religious language to the hiddenness of God to what it means to trust without being able to specify what you're trusting toward. It's one of the more unusual and quietly devastating books I've read in a while, and the conversation was every bit as good. In it we discuss... The origin of their friendship and the letter exchange that became Glimmerings Why big words like faith, grace, and redemption slip free from meaning — and why that's a theological problem, not just a poetic one Attention, divine agency, and the debate between active receptivity and God's ontological priority Christian writing letters from a hospital room during an experimental bone marrow transplant — and what he felt, and didn't feel, about God's presence The hiddenness of God versus Christ hidden in the faces of non-Christian friends The cross, the resurrection, and why one is visceral and the other remains mostly imagination The risk of faith, William James's mountain climber, and why Wallace Stevens kept pointing toward a further leap The "masters of suspicion" and why intellectual culture rewards doubt more than hope The hard sayings of Jesus — the passages that act like shards of glass, and what it means to park them rather than tame them Where two or three are gathered — and whether that was always a warning about what happens at five hundred You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Miroslav Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School and founder of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Born in Croatia and shaped by the former Yugoslavia, his theology has always been grounded in lived encounter with violence, nationalism, and the misuse of religious language. Previous podcasts with Miroslav Faith in the Public Square in the Era of Trump. When Neighbors Turn on Neighbors Christian Wiman is a poet, essayist, and editor widely regarded as one of the most important American religious writers of his generation. He is the author of My Bright Abyss — a memoir of faith written in the shadow of a rare blood cancer diagnosis — and multiple acclaimed poetry collections. He edited Poetry magazine for a decade and now teaches at the Yale Institute for Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School. Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at ⁠Theology Beer Camp ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.

Esta semana, temos na estante uma revista que parece um livro: a Colóquio da Primavera 2026 dedicada a Camões; “Final Cut”, de Charles Burns; “Adagia e Outros Aforismos”, de Wallace Stevens; e uma viagem no tempo à Lisboa do século XX, guiada pelo classicista André Simões, em Lusitânia. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A natureza não dá satisfações. À sua semelhança, também a poesia faz o que precisa fazer, e ninguém deve esperar que se enrede em justificações. Por outro lado, a crítica é uma arte de se mostrar audaz nos motivos que articula, como um criminoso, que fosse dispensado de cumprir qualquer tipo de pena, considerando-se que as motivações eram de tal forma eloquentes que até esse sabujo do homem médio, no seu papel, reconhece que não teria feito outra coisa, se ao menos estivesse dotado de alguma força de carácter e de coragem. Mas, por estes dias, ninguém admite como qualquer proeza significativa deve estar animada de um ímpeto e intenção criminosos, de uma paixão capaz de arrastar com ela e revirar todos os pressupostos, como se a moral se aliviasse da regularidade dos antecedentes para dar origem a uma fronteira e uma via por dentro do impensável, pelo menos até ali. Mas se pensarmos na cultura, aquela de que dispomos ao nosso redor, os exemplos mais propalados, nenhum nos adianta de nada. E o que nos servem os jornais, além dessas estatísticas sanitárias, pois se entre toda aquela jactância há muito não damos por uma ganância da realidade, as estrondosas expectativas que admitem efeitos perversos, bruscos, a vantagem de uma fantasia desordeira, e nem ao menos a sóbria e vesperal magia hebdomadária? O próprio amanhã tornou-se-nos inalcançável. Sim, porque mesmo nas condições de miséria moral actuais, todos se põem a negociar um mínimo. “Sim, porque ainda estamos no crepúsculo moribundo do amanhã, ainda podemos vislumbrar a ideia do futuro”, assinala J.G. Ballard. “Mas os meus filhos, ou os adolescentes de hoje, não estão interessados no futuro. Todas as possibilidades das suas vidas estão contidas dentro de um conjunto diferente de perspectivas, uma vida interior. Se olharmos para os últimos dez anos, podemos ver um contínuo recuo para o interior. Eu cunhei a expressão 'espaço interior' há cerca de dez anos e, geralmente, as previsões dos escritores de ficção científica provam-se erradas com 100 por cento de consistência, mas neste caso eu estava certamente certo: o que se vê é a morte do espaço exterior, o fracasso da aterragem na lua em excitar a imaginação de alguém a um nível real, e a descoberta do espaço interior em termos de sexo, drogas, meditação, misticismo. Basta olhar para a carreira dos Beatles e vê-se este recuo do exterior por etapas constantes, através das drogas, depois da meditação, para um envolvimento mais ou menos completo com os seus próprios corpos. Lennon e Yoko parecem estar a redescobrir a existência táctil, a realidade orgânica dos seus próprios abraços, e isso é muito bonito, eu acho.” Afinal, também esta leitura e previsão acabou por envelhecer mal, azedou, foi para lá do ponto. O interior tornou-se uma espécie de fuga, um álibi, um furo por onde toda a realidade vai escoando. Acabamos por ser levados a reconhecer que não há fundo para a capacidade de cada um, pelas suas razões infindáveis, pela economia das suas forças e por gestão de riscos, tirar o corpo da situação, todos tiram o corpo, e, no final, a realidade vê-se inteiramente abandonada por esta espécie. Aquele cabrão do Pasolini é que se mostrou mais presciente do que todos eles, por nunca se ter fixado em géneros desses que se especializam, e topou-nos bem os vícios, este modo de viver às arrecuas: "Encontramos assim um momento imponderável da cultura, um vazio cultural, povoado por escritores, cada um dos quais mais não faz que seguir a história particular, como numa ilha linguística ou numa área conservadora. Não se trata da crise habitual, mas de um facto totalmente novo, que evidentemente se repercute nas estruturas da sociedade." Talvez devêssemos esquecer por uns anos a longa tradição, fundar um período de intervalo, não regar os vasos, deixar toda essa vegetação que nos cobre o juízo definhar, não agir de acordo com os pressupostos, atacar as convenções, assumir o lado deficiente, ficar reduzido aos modos mais directos, aos elementos de ligação, aos contactos em que elegemos este ou aquele, e não uma suposta audiência, não alimentando a conveniência dos públicos enfartados da arte e de todos os seus produtos. Poderíamos ficar-nos pelos gestos tão fáceis de serem omitidos, dos quais muitas vezes  só resta um carimbo, um selo, um minúsculo sinal de sentido tão limitado. Poderíamos voltar às correspondências que exigem algum grau de cumplicidade, os postais, as missivas que tinham um destinatário mais ou menos seguro, remontar os rastros “desses escritos desajeitados em que, no fundo, não se diz outra coisa senão que se continua vivo e que esperamos voltar a ver‑nos em breve”, aventa Georges Perec… “parece-me que emerge algo que constitui o próprio tecido da nossa existência no que ela tem de mais quotidiano e próximo: uma história esquecida, tão pouco importante face aos nomes dos generais e das batalhas, mas que conta muito mais do que é feita a nossa vida do que aquilo que os historiadores, na maior parte das vezes, nos contam.” Afinal, uma ética dos afectos não se sustém sem a alternativa, sem aquele desprendimento, que começa por não se tomar como o centro seja do que for. Em vez de determinar a acção, um tipo aceita possuir “o encantamento de receber/ de secretamente sem fim/ receber o impalpável”. Deixamo-nos ficar por aí, entre os buracos, as zonas que não se resolvem, assistindo à invasão que é uma evasão, com Michaux, e, desse modo, pode-se chegar a ser “visionário por extensão/ por limpidez/ por acréscimo// As palavras relidas nas chamas/ e a religação distendem-se/ distendem-se/ vastas, sagradas, solenes/ em luzes violentas/ em surtos// Infinito/ Infinito que já não intimida (…) Amotinadoras impotências (…) O edifício dobra/ Eu tinha pernas noutros tempos/ A mão também se desprende”… E tudo isto para chegar à conclusão de que estamos desfeitos pelos elementos da rejeição, de já nada esperarmos uns dos outros, de não contar que venha ninguém que faça o que ainda não nos dispusemos a fazer por nós próprios… É difícil começar seja o que for no meio de tanta gente tão empenhada em reagir contra, nem sabe ao certo o quê, mas está contra o que quer que venha arranjar uma crise própria, e que a obrigue, por um momento que seja, a abandonar os seus monumentos, perdê-los de vista, bem como esse orgulho de pertença, as relações que a confirmam naquela sua frivolidade céptica, naquela sua petulância melancólica e geral indiferença, ou negligência. Ainda a altivez perante a decadência – tudo sinais do fim cuja proximidade parece tornar-nos incapazes de o reconhecer. E o pior é que se queriam reclamar da poesia desde logo esses que se encontravam sempre de ouvido cheio. Isto é o que se sabe destas duas décadas e trocos, deste quartel de uma época que se empurra com a barriga… Começam a falar de poesia e o que se ouve senão esse “carrilhão retrospectivo”? Neste episódio, e com tantos livros sobre a mesa, os esforços preparatórios e os subsequentes à antologia crítica que nos serviu de motivo, procuramos espalhar ainda mais migalhas, renunciando ao século no sentido que este leva, e ao modo como tantos se inclinam perigosamente sob as honras, sendo que a nós nos interessa resgatar o sentido negativo, ganhar a periferia do mundo civilizado, e pensar hipóteses de nos retirarmos, mesmo que por intervalos mais ou menos breves, dos seus mercados. Os rapazes vieram do Porto para falarmos da antologia, A Rosa Devorada pelos Espinhos, entre outras questões, outros modos de se usurpar o lugar perdido, encarar de frente tudo o que nos surge, esse tremor dentro dos elementos, apreciar o ouro da ininterrupção que se amontoa sem que os leitores se dêem conta. Acusam-nos de maldade, como é natural. De termos ido já muito para além da conta em termos de blasfémias. Talvez isto nos venha dessa arrogância de achar que a poesia exprime aquela ânsia de quem procura viver no mundo, “mas fora das concepções que dele existem” (Wallace Stevens).

Exaustos de seres virados do avesso, sem interior, protagonistas incapazes de se despirem no escuro, trabalhando essa luz desesperada que vai de escândalo em escândalo, tínhamo-nos procurado retirar entre aquilo que nos restava, gestos roubados dos longos filmes, como os víramos em miúdos, a clareza que nos diz que a violência é como a poesia, pois não se corrige, antes aceita o desastre, capaz de ir até ao fim. Andávamos à procura disso a que antes chamavam realidade, e que parecia fixar a fronteira para o que é exterior e não se deixa comover facilmente. Mas o mais difícil de suportar era a companhia de uma gente que participava por meio de charadas inconsequentes e de ausências cada vez mais prolongadas. Éramos à vez as personagens castigadas uns dos outros, amolecidas ou rudes, um pouco ridículas, irritantes, a duas dimensões, consoante a perspectiva, respirando um ar demasiado artificial, numas macaqueações patéticas, sempre um tanto presunçosos, estéreis, vagamente cultos, empertigados, meio delirantes, e tão cansativos, parecia que faltava aquela genialidade generosa de quem é capaz de escutar dos outros o que não traz já em si, previsto, devastado, alguém que desse as graças a deus nenhum senão esse que nos serve algo além da frivolidade, um abandono propício. Nesse ambiente, como era de esperar, triunfavam o género de narradores medianos, voluntariosos, que nos vinham com as variações degradadas do que em tempos nos causara um espanto geral. Com essa mediania voluntariosa, diluíam tudo, até perdermos o sabor daquilo que tínhamos vivido. Só a experiência poderia ensinar àquele que nos habituávamos a perder, abdicando dele a favor de fantasias miseráveis, um movimento decisivo na imensa matéria anónima incapaz de remediar toda a desordem que já não responde por nenhum plano. Estávamos sufocados ao ponto de não sabermos o que restara depois de destruirmos os nossos hábitos (e em nome do quê?), até aqueles simples cuidados de tradução, de decifração, alguns costumes de inteligência, que justificam o empenho em não perder inteiramente o contacto com a maldosa existência dos adultos. Basta pensar no breve ritual diário em que tantos homens com uma posição a defender fazem o nó da gravata, muitas vezes ao espelho, ensaiando a expressão com que se recomendam ao mundo. Além de uma possibilidade de introspecção, com aqueles gestos parecem dar-se a possibilidade de reconhecer esse módico de risco e sacrifício, um sinal que os aparenta aos enforcados, ou o vestígio de uma trela que se ostenta entre o pescoço e a cintura, como se toda a ambição os fizesse incorrer nessa espécie de redil, nesse sufoco comum de quem aceita todos esses rigores, obrigando-se a flutuar num mar de prescrições, de códigos e de maquinações religiosas, se pensarmos como cada um rezava intimamente ao deus das vinganças, a um desejo de uma ordem ainda mais sórdida, da qual pudéssemos sair a ganhar. Parecia que todo o talento se havia concentrado de forma obsessiva e mesquinha, e, desse modo, tantos passavam o seu tempo a inventar subdivisões, escalões nos quais uns e outros pudessem subir e descer. Tínhamo-nos imposto um jogo inextricável de distâncias sociais em que toda a gente se introduzia e se reconhecia com uma destreza maravilhosa, degraus hierárquicos, competências infinitamente cruéis, rituais absorventes, que dissipavam toda a nossa capacidade de suspensão, de nos destacarmos face a nós mesmos e àquela trama. Mas uma vez por outra, alargando-se num gesto até ele perder qualquer propósito imediato, havia alguns que se conseguiam lembrar daquela ambição de nos tornarmos anacrónicos, sermos como que desviados por acasos, e víamo-nos a inscrever frases tão soltas, nas quais nada era prescrito, nada parecia proibido, nem a modéstia ou o deboche. Perante a ausência de deuses e de anjos, de categorias menos quantificáveis, achávamo-nos de súbito tão pobres, despojados dos símbolos da piedade e das leis, dos catecismos, dos cultos, das palavras de ordem. Tinha sido para isso que havíamos começado a inscrever aqueles signos, sinais de uma pobreza que ansiava por se livrar do excesso de palavras, recolhendo a cada momento só aquelas que pareciam ter uma capacidade de suspender, não presumir mais nada. As mesas podiam não estar dispostas ao mesmo tempo num mesmo espaço, mas criavam um ambiente, uma zona intermédia, onde as máquinas de escrever iam inscrevendo sem descanso esses sinais negros, com a existência daquelas pessoas a consistir num esforço de combiná-los, desfazê-los, recombiná-los, tentando resgatar algo, uma experiência, fazer valer a sua teimosia, sendo raros aqueles que podiam desgastar-se e entorpecer as suas ânsias, dando-se liberdade para registar essas necessidades estranhas à sua vontade, aos seus desejos, tudo aquilo que nos outros chega a parecer calamitoso, a forma como nos assaltam com as suas projecções, constrangendo esse itinerário tão certo no qual parecíamos investidos, ao desenhar percursos enleados não esperando outra coisa, mais nada senão essas desgraças comuns com que nos servimos a pior justificação dos nossos fracassos. Assim, testemunhamos a uma distância fria, tão cruenta e pouco clarividente, apagando a própria vertigem à qual cada um se entrega. Ao mesmo tempo era esse encadeamento implausível que nos permitia imaginar que pudesse chegar-se a outra coisa. Vínhamos à superfície não se sabe bem do quê, para respirar um outro ar… Em vez desses questionários e folhas de controlo de estrangeiros, alguém teria inscrito na margem de um formulário a frase: “Poemas são novos temas.” (Wallace Stevens). Contra a fadiga, a demanda do inexplicável, explorávamos outros processos de habituação. A ignorância poderia então ser resgatada como uma fonte, não para uma violência de qualquer ordem contra o outro, mas uma zona na qual todos pudessem tomar, à sua maneira, partido na mudança social desde que essa fosse suficientemente profunda de modo a não nos ser tão castigador andarmos ali sem saber ao certo que diabo andamos a perseguir. O pior é quando eles querem falar de revolução como se se pudesse saber à partida onde esse percurso tão arriscado nos pode levar. Tornam-se, cada um à sua maneira, agiotas de qualquer processo de transformação, ou os seus executores impiedosos, com cada vez menos margem para contemplações, para castelos e pássaros de uma outra imaginação, aquilo que ainda não tem forma e que, ainda assim, persiste por aí pela capacidade que tem de nos proteger. Desde logo uns dos outros. Se não for possível coagirmo-nos a explicar exactamente os termos daquilo em que estamos empenhados, então a busca continua em aberto. O pior são estes que se dizem radicais e o são, mas apenas na medida em que forçam tudo à confissão mais degrada de si mesmo, e logo nos garantem que não valia a pena tanto esforço, que estávamos só a querer complicar as coisas. Percebe-se que estudaram em esquadras da polícia, e mostram-nos os seus galardões odiosos, os diplomas, os níveis que foram alcançando com a sua veterania da peste e da lepra, no grau zero da fidelidade, que é não se guiar por ideais, nem objectivos, mas pela inscrição numa hierarquia torcionária qualquer. A poesia é um modo de andar junto às portas, a coleccionar sinais dessa dor no silêncio das vidas perdidas, aqueles sinais que denunciam uma realidade cada vez mais difícil de se abrir para fora. “Que a porta do meu quarto se feche/ para sempre, e ainda que sejas/ tu que ela não se abra”, segundo a tradução sensível de Bolaño a partir dos versos de Sá-Carneiro. Fora destes eixos omissos, a cada dia, a verdade apenas emerge como um cadáver. Nada chega a acordar-nos completamente, como se só a nós mesmos pudéssemos ter por flashes, raros momentos em que alguma coisa nos fazia vir à tona… “como os guinchos longínquos de um bando de pássaros, sinal inequívoco de que uma parte da minha consciência ainda sonhava ou voluntariamente não queria sair do labirinto dos sonhos, esse campo de Marte onde se esconde o jovem envelhecido e onde se escondem os poetas mortos que então viviam e que da iminência certa do seu esquecimento erguiam no interior da abóbada craniana a miserável cripta dos seus nomes, das suas silhuetas recortadas em cartão negro, das suas obras demolidas”… (Nocturno Chileno). Na véspera de uma data memorável, mas em que nos parece cada vez mais difícil chegarmos a um pacto, a algum acerto quanto aos motivos principais, damo-nos conta de como todos os bens do mundo depressa se vão da memória. A realidade tornou‑se uma espécie de luz cansada, um brilho que já não ilumina nada, apenas denuncia a própria exaustão. Vivemos rodeados de objectos que nos dizem “aqui está o mundo”, mas o mundo já não está aí – apenas o seu reflexo tardio, replicado até à vertigem. A crise epistémica não é um acidente: é o efeito natural de um universo onde a verdade perdeu a gravidade e começou a flutuar como lixo espacial, orbitando sem destino, colidindo ocasionalmente com as nossas percepções fatigadas. Já não há o peso de um real partilhado, mas apenas uma coreografia digitalmente coreografada, onde cada gesto é eco de outro eco, e o sujeito dança sem saber se o ritmo vem de dentro ou de um algoritmo qualquer capaz de operar até cada um de nós se desfazer do pássaro rouco da sua consciência. Neste episódio, e para voltarmos a operar a partir de termos com alguma força de persistência, uma gravidade que, por si mesma, afine as nossas percepções, prepare a cerimónia de um pacto, quisemos ter uma vez mais connosco Patrícia Câmara, psicoterapeuta e psicanalista, ouvidora em profundidade, alguém que se habituou a essa infinita e generosa paciência de esperar pelos outros, de manchar com um resíduo de presença cada esquina que ficará depois a nosso favor, para as cruzarmos pela ordem que nos venha a ser mais favorável, como esses vagabundos em que nos tornamos assim que se torna preciosa para nós a nossa queda irremissível.

FULLY & COMPLETELY: REDUX"In Violet Light" - The Tragically HipEpisode Show Notes——————————————————————————————————Fully & Completely: Redux | "In Violet Light" - The Tragically Hip (2002)——————————————————————————————————Hey, it's jD here.Some albums don't just meet you where you are - they find you exactly when you need them. **"In Violet Light" is that record.** Released in June 2002, it's the one that pulled jD hard back into The Tragically Hip after a stretch of distance. And if you listen closely, it makes total sense why. This isn't a band trying to hold on - it's a band that has let go of every obligation and is just making music for themselves. **The result is one of the most quietly assured records of The Hip's entire career.**This week on Fully & Completely: redux, jD and Greg LeGros go track by track through "In Violet Light" - the eighth studio album from The Tragically Hip, recorded in the Bahamas with legendary producer Hugh Padham - and make the case that this record has no business being this good, this far into a career.——————————————————————————————————EPISODE OVERVIEW"In Violet Light" landed in a 2002 music landscape that included Coldplay's "A Rush of Blood to the Head," Queens of the Stone Age's "Songs for the Deaf," Beck's "Sea Change," and Broken Social Scene's "You Forgot It in People." The indie pop explosion was just beginning to blow the roof off Canadian music. The Hip were eight albums deep, the mainstream had largely written them off, and **they responded by making one of their best records.** No fat. No filler. Eleven tracks of lean, confident, beautiful rock and roll.The album was recorded at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas - the same studio where AC/DC recorded "Back in Black" and Bob Marley cut some of his most enduring work - with Hugh Padham, the producer behind the gated drum sound that defined the 1980s (Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight," Sting's solo catalogue, The Police's "Synchronicity"). **jD and Greg break down why that combination - this band, this producer, this place - produced something genuinely special.**——————————————————————————————————TRACK BY TRACK HIGHLIGHTS**'Are You Ready to Love'** - The opener sets the whole album's thesis. jD hears the first verse as a direct response to the critics and mainstream fans who had written The Hip off. **"They're pulling the plug. They've got our whole dug." And then - the chorus arrives like a shrug and a fist at the same time: are you ready for love?** A great rock and roll song that doubles as a mission statement.**'Use It Up'** - Built on a lyric attributed to the booklet of a Raymond Carver collection, this is a track about seizing everything, wasting nothing, and making music for the love of it. Greg hears Radiohead's "OK Computer" in the verses and the Georgia Satellites in the chorus - **and somehow The Tragically Hip pull both of those things off in the same song.** A slow burn that rewards headphones.**'The Darkest One'** - jD turns up whatever he's listening to every single time this song starts. **"The wild are strong and the strong are the darkest ones - and you're the darkest one."** Greg calls it a safe place. A song about freedom of expression, comfort, and the strange intimacy of being fully understood. Don't let the Trailer Park Boys video fool you - this song could have broken them wide open.**'It's a Good Life If You Don't Weaken'** - The centrepiece. The lead single. **Both jD and Greg pick this as their track of the record - the first time in the history of Fully & Completely that hosts have landed on the same song.** Named for a Canadian graphic novel by Seth and a phrase used by band staffer Molly Lorimer to describe life on the road, it's a song about mortality, aging, and the strange grace that comes when you stop fighting. Death is swirling all around it - and it's still one of the most uplifting things The Tragically Hip ever made.**'Silver Jet'** - The one that changes gears just right. Greg connects this song personally to the empty skies over the Danforth in the days after 9/11, and the feeling of the first plane cutting back through the silence. **A song about hope, fear, and the things that pull your gaze forward.** The wolves of Northumberland. An archipelago. A green star. Only Gord.**'Throwing Off Glass'** - Companion piece to 'Trick Rider' from "Phantom Power" - if that song is about his son, this one is about his daughter. A slow builder that rewards patience. **A soundscape that would fit comfortably on "Coke Machine Glow."****'All Tore Up'** - A great drinking rock and roll song. Dottie the bluegrass singer. Open concept. Getting a little happening with old friends. **No one else writes a lyric like this and makes it fit inside a song this well.** Turn it up.**'Leave'** - A waltz in 3/4 time. Beautiful backup vocals. A late-night phone call at three in the morning. **"You better be dying." And they were.** An emotional gut-punch that doubles as a permission slip - to leave a job, a relationship, a place that no longer fits.**'The Dire Wolf'** - A pseudo-history lesson disguised as a rock song. Tallulah Bankhead and Canada Lee, stars of Hitchcock's "The Lifeboat." Ann Harvey of Isle of Morts, Newfoundland, who rescued 163 shipwrecked souls in 1828. A poem called "Sea Surface Full of Clouds" by Wallace Stevens. **Greg pulls all of this from memory. It's an entire university lecture wrapped in six minutes of music that absolutely slaps.****'The Dark Canuck'** - The closer. Possibly the longest Tragically Hip song ever recorded at six and a half minutes. A time signature change halfway through. **Canadian soldiers as peacekeepers. Apple, Zippo, and Metronome as record labels. Jaws at the drive-in. The Dark Canuck playing second on the double bill.** Nobody at the drive-in is staying for it. And that's sort of the whole point.——————————————————————————————————WHY THIS EPISODE MATTERSThis is the album that brought jD back to The Hip in earnest - **the record that cracked open the second half of his relationship with this band.** It's also the episode where he and Greg pick the same song for the first time. And it's the one where jD, partway through discussing 'Leave,' pauses to talk about his mother. **Listen for that moment. It's what this podcast is for.**"In Violet Light" is a masterpiece with no business being this good eight albums in. And this episode earns every minute of its runtime.So there's that.——————————————————————————————————SOURCES & CREDITS• HipMuseum.com• This Is Our Life: The Tragically Hip in the 1990s (Michael Barclay)• "It's a Good Life If You Don't Weaken" - graphic novel by Seth• "Sea Surface Full of Clouds" - poem by Wallace Stevens• Ann Harvey of Isle of Morts, Newfoundland - historical record• Compass Point Studios, Nassau, Bahamas - production history• Raymond Carver - attributed quote in "Use It Up"——————————————————————————————————CONNECT WITH THE SHOW• Facebook: facebook.com/groups/tthpods• Instagram: @tthpods• YouTube: youtube.com/@tthpods• Email: tthpodcastseries@gmail.comThe Tragically Hip Podcast Series - Est. 2018#TheTragicallyHip #TheHip #InVioletLight #FullyCompletely #GordDownie #TragicallyHip #CanadianRock——————————————————————————————————Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/tthtop40/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

In Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation (U Chicago Press, 2023), Kevin Hart develops a new hermeneutics of contemplation through a meditation on Christian thought and secular philosophy. Drawing on Kant, Schopenhauer, Coleridge, and Husserl, Hart first charts the emergence of contemplation in and beyond the Romantic era. Next, Hart shows this hermeneutic at work in poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and others. Delivered in its original form as the prestigious Gifford Lectures, Lands of Likeness is a revelatory meditation on contemplation for the modern world.Kevin Hart is Jo Rae Wright University Distinguished Professor at the Duke Divinity School.Nathan H. Phillips is an independent scholar working out of South Bend, Indiana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

In Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation (U Chicago Press, 2023), Kevin Hart develops a new hermeneutics of contemplation through a meditation on Christian thought and secular philosophy. Drawing on Kant, Schopenhauer, Coleridge, and Husserl, Hart first charts the emergence of contemplation in and beyond the Romantic era. Next, Hart shows this hermeneutic at work in poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and others. Delivered in its original form as the prestigious Gifford Lectures, Lands of Likeness is a revelatory meditation on contemplation for the modern world.Kevin Hart is Jo Rae Wright University Distinguished Professor at the Duke Divinity School.Nathan H. Phillips is an independent scholar working out of South Bend, Indiana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation (U Chicago Press, 2023), Kevin Hart develops a new hermeneutics of contemplation through a meditation on Christian thought and secular philosophy. Drawing on Kant, Schopenhauer, Coleridge, and Husserl, Hart first charts the emergence of contemplation in and beyond the Romantic era. Next, Hart shows this hermeneutic at work in poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and others. Delivered in its original form as the prestigious Gifford Lectures, Lands of Likeness is a revelatory meditation on contemplation for the modern world.Kevin Hart is Jo Rae Wright University Distinguished Professor at the Duke Divinity School.Nathan H. Phillips is an independent scholar working out of South Bend, Indiana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation (U Chicago Press, 2023), Kevin Hart develops a new hermeneutics of contemplation through a meditation on Christian thought and secular philosophy. Drawing on Kant, Schopenhauer, Coleridge, and Husserl, Hart first charts the emergence of contemplation in and beyond the Romantic era. Next, Hart shows this hermeneutic at work in poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and others. Delivered in its original form as the prestigious Gifford Lectures, Lands of Likeness is a revelatory meditation on contemplation for the modern world.Kevin Hart is Jo Rae Wright University Distinguished Professor at the Duke Divinity School.Nathan H. Phillips is an independent scholar working out of South Bend, Indiana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation (U Chicago Press, 2023), Kevin Hart develops a new hermeneutics of contemplation through a meditation on Christian thought and secular philosophy. Drawing on Kant, Schopenhauer, Coleridge, and Husserl, Hart first charts the emergence of contemplation in and beyond the Romantic era. Next, Hart shows this hermeneutic at work in poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and others. Delivered in its original form as the prestigious Gifford Lectures, Lands of Likeness is a revelatory meditation on contemplation for the modern world.Kevin Hart is Jo Rae Wright University Distinguished Professor at the Duke Divinity School.Nathan H. Phillips is an independent scholar working out of South Bend, Indiana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation (U Chicago Press, 2023), Kevin Hart develops a new hermeneutics of contemplation through a meditation on Christian thought and secular philosophy. Drawing on Kant, Schopenhauer, Coleridge, and Husserl, Hart first charts the emergence of contemplation in and beyond the Romantic era. Next, Hart shows this hermeneutic at work in poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and others. Delivered in its original form as the prestigious Gifford Lectures, Lands of Likeness is a revelatory meditation on contemplation for the modern world.Kevin Hart is Jo Rae Wright University Distinguished Professor at the Duke Divinity School.Nathan H. Phillips is an independent scholar working out of South Bend, Indiana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation (U Chicago Press, 2023), Kevin Hart develops a new hermeneutics of contemplation through a meditation on Christian thought and secular philosophy. Drawing on Kant, Schopenhauer, Coleridge, and Husserl, Hart first charts the emergence of contemplation in and beyond the Romantic era. Next, Hart shows this hermeneutic at work in poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and others. Delivered in its original form as the prestigious Gifford Lectures, Lands of Likeness is a revelatory meditation on contemplation for the modern world.Kevin Hart is Jo Rae Wright University Distinguished Professor at the Duke Divinity School.Nathan H. Phillips is an independent scholar working out of South Bend, Indiana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Three “bees” from The Hive Poetry Collective warm your minds with cozy—and existential–conversation about winter poems as we draw closer to the Winter Solstice.  Roxi Power talks with Julia Chiapella and Parker Shabala live in the Santa Cruz KSQD radio station about poetry ranging from Shakespeare's sonnet to his beloved about aging to Elizabeth Robinson's new poetry about members of the unhoused community surviving frostbite. We talk about winter's philosophical soundscapes  in Louise Glück's “bone dice/of blown gravel clicking” and in the U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze's “world of being [that] is like this gravel:/ you think you own a car, a house, /this blue zig-zagged shirt, but you just borrow these things.” Tune in and let us borrow an hour of your time to enjoy Kenneth Patchen's spiritual and erotic snowscapes, laugh about Anne Sexton's branches that “wear the sock of God,” and contemplate Wallace Stevens'  “mind of winter” that beholds “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

Recorded by Academy of American Poets staff for Poem-a-Day, a series produced by the Academy of American Poets. Published on December 6, 2025. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.poets.org

Hi there, Today I am delighted to be arts calling humorist, poet, and essayist Kurt Luchs! (kurtluchs.com) About our guest: Kurt Luchs was born in Cheektowaga, New York, grew up in Wheaton, Illinois, and has lived and worked all over the United States, mostly in publishing and media. Currently he's based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. His first poetry publication came at age sixteen in the long-gone journal Epos, right next to a poem by Bukowski. He has also written comedy for television (Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher and the Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn) and radio (American Comedy Network), as well as contributing humor to the New Yorker, the Onion and McSweeney's Internet Tendency, among others. He is author of the poetry collections Death Row Row Row Your Boat (Sagging Meniscus, 2024), Falling in the Direction of Up (SM, 2021), and the humor collection It's Funny Until Someone Loses an Eye (Then It's Really Funny) (SM, 2017). His poetry chapbooks include One of These Things Is Not Like the Other (Finishing Line Press 2019), and The Sound of One Hand Slapping (SurVision Press 2022). He won a 2022 Pushcart Prize, a 2021 James Tate Poetry Prize, the 2021 Eyelands Book Award for Short Stories, and the 2019 Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest. He is a Contributing Editor of Exacting Clam. About TRIBUTARIES, now available from Sagging Meniscus Press! https://www.saggingmeniscus.com/catalog/tributaries In Tributaries, Kurt Luchs chooses twenty poems that hold vital meaning for him as a reader and writer—many, but not all, recognized as classics—and pays twofold tribute to them. First, he explores each poem with a deep-diving personal essay on how the poet works their magic upon us. Then he gives a tribute poem of his own, in response to, or inspired by, the poem under discussion. The result is a uniquely well-rounded, multidimensional way of honoring great poems, unlocking more of their treasures for both first-time and long-time lovers of poetry. Poets featured are Wallace Stevens, Robinson Jeffers, David Ignatow, Philip Larkin, D. H. Lawrence, Etheridge Knight, Wislawa Szymborska, Lucille Clifton, Gabriela Mistral, H. D., Jorge Luis Borges, Federico Garcia Lorca, Mary Oliver, Lewis Carroll, Kenneth Koch, Homer, Louise Glück, Robert Bly, Charles Simic and James Tate. Thanks for this amazing conversation, Kurt! All the best! -- Arts Calling is produced by Jaime Alejandro. HOW TO SUPPORT ARTS CALLING: PLEASE CONSIDER LEAVING A REVIEW, OR SHARING THIS EPISODE WITH A FRIEND! YOUR SUPPORT TRULY MAKES A DIFFERENCE. THANKS FOR LISTENING! Much love, j artscalling.com

Amanda Holmes reads Wallace Stevens's “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts.” 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.

Laurence Bergreen discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known. Laurence Bergreen is an award-winning biographer, historian, and chronicler of exploration. His books have been translated into more than 25 languages. They include Columbus: The Four Voyages, a New York Times bestseller, published by Viking in 2011. In 2007, Knopf published his Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu. For this book he crossed China from east to west and camped out on the steppe with hospitable Mongolians in their yurts. His bestselling Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe, was published by William Morrow in 2003.  In its 40th printing, it was awarded the Medalla de Honor by the Asociación de Alcades de V Centenario (Spain). He has also published In Search of a Kingdom about Francis Drake's voyage of discovery (Simon & Schuster, 2021) and Voyage to Mars: NASA's Search for Life Beyond Earth published by Riverhead in 2000. His research for these books included extensive fieldwork.  He has sailed twice through the Strait of Magellan and is one of the few individuals to visit the volcanic island of Surtsey off the coast of Iceland, thanks to the agile helicopters of the Icelandic Coast Guard, among other remote destinations. At NASA's request, he named numerous geographical features around the crater Victoria on Mars. Find out more at https://laurencebergreenauthor.com/. Louis Armstrong's favourite instrument https://oztypewriter.blogspot.com/2020/09/what-wonderful-world-with-typewriters.html The Well Dressed Man with a Beard by Wallace Stevens https://allpoetry.com/The-Well-Dressed-Man-With-A-Beard Vladimir Zworykin https://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/vladimir-zworykin Surtsey https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1267/ The Strait of Magellan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOOKr8Y2xsM The Rubin Observatory https://rubinobservatory.org/ This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Sensei Monshin explores the ancient Buddhist teaching of Kanno Doko — “responsive communion” or “mystical communion.” Drawing from a Wallace Stevens poem and the writings of Suzuki Roshi, she […]

Daily QuoteFor both excessive and deficient exercise ruin bodily strength, and, similarly, too much or too little eating or drinking ruins health, whereas only moderation can produce, increase, and maintain physical strength and health. (Aristotle)Poem of the DayAutumn RefrainWallace StevensBeauty of WordsThe WaldenHenry David Thoreau

Bianca Stone reads and discusses Rilke’s 7th Elegy, translation by Stephen Mitchell. Also some Wallace Stevens, Larry Levis, Lucretius, and more…. Not only all the dawns of summer–, not only how they change themselves into day and shine with beginning. Not only the days, so tender around flowers and above, around patterned treetops, so strong, […]

by Wallace Stevens

We need Emily Dickinson's startling originality today more than ever. This is why I sat down with Sharon Cameron, one of the greatest commentators on Dickinson's poetry, to explore some of Dickinson's poems in an extra-long podcast. “It's astonishing that after forty years of reading Dickinson, I am still ‘awed beyond my errand' by how Dickinson's poems let us experience something viscerally, at the edge of comprehension,” Cameron remarks in this conversation that forgoes clichés and favors critical acumen. By closely considering a few poems, Cameron explains how Dickinson speaks from placeless places and from within experiences outside of language, how her poems create wonder, and how her poems link without merging the mundane, the erotic, and other incommensurate dimensions of life. Sharon Cameron's book include: Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre; Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson's Fascicles; and, most recently, The Likeness of Things Unlike: A Poetics of Incommensurability (Chicago University Press, 2024), on Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Willa Cather, and Wallace Stevens. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

We need Emily Dickinson's startling originality today more than ever. This is why I sat down with Sharon Cameron, one of the greatest commentators on Dickinson's poetry, to explore some of Dickinson's poems in an extra-long podcast. “It's astonishing that after forty years of reading Dickinson, I am still ‘awed beyond my errand' by how Dickinson's poems let us experience something viscerally, at the edge of comprehension,” Cameron remarks in this conversation that forgoes clichés and favors critical acumen. By closely considering a few poems, Cameron explains how Dickinson speaks from placeless places and from within experiences outside of language, how her poems create wonder, and how her poems link without merging the mundane, the erotic, and other incommensurate dimensions of life. Sharon Cameron's book include: Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre; Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson's Fascicles; and, most recently, The Likeness of Things Unlike: A Poetics of Incommensurability (Chicago University Press, 2024), on Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Willa Cather, and Wallace Stevens. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

We need Emily Dickinson's startling originality today more than ever. This is why I sat down with Sharon Cameron, one of the greatest commentators on Dickinson's poetry, to explore some of Dickinson's poems in an extra-long podcast. “It's astonishing that after forty years of reading Dickinson, I am still ‘awed beyond my errand' by how Dickinson's poems let us experience something viscerally, at the edge of comprehension,” Cameron remarks in this conversation that forgoes clichés and favors critical acumen. By closely considering a few poems, Cameron explains how Dickinson speaks from placeless places and from within experiences outside of language, how her poems create wonder, and how her poems link without merging the mundane, the erotic, and other incommensurate dimensions of life. Sharon Cameron's book include: Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre; Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson's Fascicles; and, most recently, The Likeness of Things Unlike: A Poetics of Incommensurability (Chicago University Press, 2024), on Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Willa Cather, and Wallace Stevens. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Francesco Marangi"Angeli di sale"Polidoro Editorewww.alessandropolidoroeditore.itSiamo in un paese della costa ligure, tra gli ulivi e il mare. Pietro, maggiore di tre fratelli, torna nella sua casa natale per far visita al padre malato. Il suo ritorno apre una voragine che rimescola il tempo, lo inghiotte, lo dilata e rende i fratelli mere apparenze al cospetto del passato. Le voci dei protagonisti si confondono e si contraddicono e il paesaggio si deforma. Ogni cosa rimane trasfigurata dentro ricordi tragici che non si è in grado di raccontare con chiarezza, se non con la crudeltà di un'allucinazione dolorosa.Riemergono vecchi rancori, promesse, l'abbandono della madre, le violenze, l'amore di Pietro per Maria, la vicina di casa che insieme al fratello Enrico era loro compagna di giochi fin dall'infanzia. E poi la decisione di Pietro di andare lontano per non tornare più. Il vento, il mare, l'estate di ombre urlanti; ogni cosa è rumorosa. Nel frattempo, un segreto viperino progredisce con il peso mitologico di un'annunciata dannazione. Spetterà a Pietro – specie di addolorato e indemoniato Ulisse –, ricondurre tutto al principio risolutivo degli eventi.Francesco Marangi ci consegna un esordio sperimentale, di adulta poeticità, che si affaccia a Mentre morivo di William Faulkner, al romanzo oscuro La fornace di Thomas Bernhard, fino a  ricavare dalla mitologica poesia di Wallace Stevens  la delicatezza della carne senza mai divorarla.Francesco Marangi è nato a Genova nel 1998 e risiede a Varazze. Sta per conseguire la laurea triennale in Scrittura e Contemporary Humanities presso la Scuola Holden di Torino. Ha svolto vari lavori, nelle serre come aiuto bracciante e sulle spiagge come bagnino. Ha partecipato altre due volte al Premio Calvino con i romanzi Delirio in rosso e L'artista violento. Nel 2020 è arrivato nella cinquina finalista del Premio Raduga con il racconto Il bunker.Angeli di sale è il quarto titolo della collana InterzonaIL POSTO DELLE PAROLEascoltare fa pensarewww.ilpostodelleparole.itDiventa un supporter di questo podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/il-posto-delle-parole--1487855/support.

It seems like such a simple question, but how to read a poem, like poetic interpretation itself, can be answered in many different ways. But what's the best way to go about reading a poem? Katie turns to art criticism for a process that guides the episode to a deep reading of poems by: Billy Collins, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, and John Ashbury.At the table:Katie DozierTimothy GreenJoe BarcaBrian O'SullivanDick WestheimerNate Jacob

Send us a textWe get even more boggled than usual tackling three head-scratchers by American modernist Wallace Stevens (1879-1955).Domination of BlackThe Emperor of Ice Cream13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

The queens discuss gay icon status with Brenda Hillman--and then launch in to a revisit of several of her poems, including her fabulous "Male Nipples."Please Support Breaking Form!Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.Pretty Please.....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 see readings by Brenda Hillman here (one poem, ~4 min, 2020), here (20min, 2012), and here (2024, poetry and conversation with Jesse Nathan).For a review and discussion of Hillman's new book, Three Talks, check out this episode of The Only Property. (~30 min).(Re)read Wallace Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"Learn more about Kathleen Fraser here. Discover more about Barbara Guest and her 9 collections of poetry here.If you'd like to know more about Kelsey Street Press's mission and history, it's a fascinating journey that you can start here.A basic introduction to gnosticism can be had here. Learn more about the Black Mountain Poets here.Read about Objectivist Poetics here.

Of all the great American Modernists, the poetry of Marianne Moore is perhaps the most idiosyncratic, even the most radical, of them all—no small feat in a group of friends and admirers that included Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, e. e. cummings, and HD. Moore's preferred form was a syllabic stanza bespoke to each poetic occasion, like the unique shell of each individual snail or paper nautilus, and often containing rhyme. In these stanzas, Moore hid behind her virtuosic performance of deflection and difficulty and, of course, revealed herself in it, much as one of her pet-subjects, the exotic animal-portrait, contained a self-portrait at its heart. In her poem on the jerboa, Moore contrasts the desert mouse's decorousness with the decadence of empire, and in so doing, distinguishes her ideal of true artistry—a vigorous, humble, and ultimately liberated response to one's natural and formal limitations—with a false art which oppresses the natural in service of the powerful. Wes & Erin discuss Marianne Moore's poem, “The Jerboa,” first published in 1932, and whether power and wealth might paradoxically prove less abundant than the strictures of form and necessity.

Warwick poet and musician D.K. Mckenzie presents excerpts from his spoken word and music podcast, The Poe Underground, in a Warwick Radio exclusive. In this episode, hear jazz-inspired, original music and the poems Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens, Songs from the Dusk by Russell W. Davenport, and Infinity by D.K. Mckenzie. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird I Among twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was the eye of the blackbird. II I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds. III The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds. It was a small part of the pantomime. IV A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one. V I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after. VI Icicles filled the long window With barbaric glass. The shadow of the blackbird Crossed it, to and fro. The mood Traced in the shadow An indecipherable cause. VII O thin men of Haddam, Why do you imagine golden birds? Do you not see how the blackbird Walks around the feet Of the women about you? VIII I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know. IX When the blackbird flew out of sight, It marked the edge Of one of many circles. X At the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply. XI He rode over Connecticut In a glass coach. Once, a fear pierced him, In that he mistook The shadow of his equipage For blackbirds. XII The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying. XIII It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs. Songs from the Dusk (Movement for an Imaginary Violin) Take me there, take me there—far, far within The scarlet cloisters of the clouds, hung over This glassy water-terrace rimmed with clover, O my imaginary violin! It cannot hush, it cannot hush—as thin, As wild, as sweet as miracle! Mad lover, My heart must almost perish to discover What ecstasy of wine we are—what kin. Yet you grow slow aloft, and falter—fall. I scarcely hear, I scarcely hear at all Those drops of tone. Warblers and swallows call Across the water, drawing shore to shore; The woodpecker; the dusk. Oh, play one more— One more—one more—one more note! That is all. Infinity Death pulls me one way You tug me the other Your giant eyes dance Bust forth with black hole gravity Atomic fusion is your smile with a voice of combustion There you go with the laughter of a thousand earthquakes Rattling the ground beneath your feet Never exhausting your gate of storms and fire Your kiss however is the thing The most powerful thing that topples the world And keeps the oceans from flowing The poison of time is postponed and so is death The universe is on hold when we're together We are immortal dancing, spinning, embracing Through the constants of infinity and true love Visit The Poe Underground ⁠⁠website⁠⁠. Tune in to The Poe Underground ⁠⁠podcast⁠⁠.

Read by Terry Casburn Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Today we're diving into how shifting from narratives to perspectives can enhance self-improvement, mindfulness, and mental health. In a world filled with stories, narratives help us make sense of chaos. But what if these stories are holding us back? Humans are natural storytellers, but narratives can sometimes restrict our thinking and offer a false sense of order. Today, we'll uncover how embracing perspectives over rigid narratives can lead to greater personal growth, mindfulness, and mental well-being.  Narratives and Their Impact on Mental Health Narratives provide structure, turning mundane events into meaningful stories. Philosophers  argue that our lives inherently have a narrative structure, crucial for understanding our actions. Yet, these narratives can limit our freedom and hinder mental health by simplifying the complexity of life. Narrative therapy addresses these issues by helping people construct new, more helpful stories about their lives. However, it often merely swaps one narrative for another. To truly enhance mental well-being, we must explore possibilities beyond storytelling. Mindfulness and Perspectives Mindfulness encourages us to live in the present, embracing each moment without judgment. Living in the now. By shifting focus from narratives (some of which may be deliberately false) to perspectives, we engage the world more mindfully, similar to how poetry captures non-linear experiences. Perspectives, shaped by beliefs and values, allow for a flexible understanding of our lives, and the lives of others. This is imperative, especially now. Wallace Stevens, ' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" illustrates how different perspectives offer varied insights into the 'same reality'. Embracing mindfulness through perspectives helps us find significance in the present, enhancing mental health, self-awareness as well as awareness of others. Self-Improvement and Personal Growth Self-improvement thrives on personal growth and a willingness to challenge limiting narratives. By adopting new perspectives, we open ourselves to diverse experiences, fostering resilience and adaptability. This shift not only promotes authentic existence but also aligns with the core of self-improvement—embracing change and personal evolution. Understanding the role of perspectives empowers us to redefine our narratives, unlocking new avenues for personal growth and mental well-being.  By focusing on perspectives, we expand our potential and embrace the unpredictability and richness of life.  In shifting from narratives to perspectives, we embrace mindfulness rather than mind numbness and explore the perspectives that enhance personal growth and mental well-being. Thank you for tuning in. If you found this episode insightful, please subscribe and share it with others.  xoxo          

When we think of wonder or beauty, we might be inclined to think in terms of an external appearance, a scene of nature or an attractive person. But what if wonder is something that grows from the inside out? What if wonder is way of seeing? And what if wonder is an interior force, one that begins in the hidden recesses of our perceptions? Today, on the show I'm talking with Oregon based, poet, writer and critic, Paul J Pastor. Paul serves HarperCollins as senior acquisitions editor for their Zondervan imprint, and also serves as a contributing editor for Ekstasis magazine. He's the author of several books, including Bower Lodge: Poems, and two forthcoming titles: The Locust Years and The Fire Cantos. In our conversation, Paul and I discuss the importance of learning to see as a means of engaging wonder. Drawing from the work of William Blake, Flannery O' Connor and stories from the Gospels, this episode takes us on a journey into our perceptions and invites us to reconsider beauty as more than an aesthetic experience. Topics: Perception, beauty, wonder as an interior experience.Art Forms: Literature, PhilosophyName Drops: William Blake, Flannery O'Connor, Herbert, Donne, Horace, Sappho, Wallace Stevens, Dante, Byung Chul HanMusic: Some Were At SeaTHE BREATH AND THE CLAY WRITER'S RETREAT Oct. 25-27 in Moravian Falls, NC. APPLY NOW.Join our creative collectiveGive a one-time donation

Philosopher, Simone Weil said that attentiveness is the heart of prayer. In this episode, we discuss postures of attentiveness as gateways to wonder.Guests: Dr. Mary McCampbell is an author, educator, and speaker whose publications span the worlds of literature, film, and popular music. She is the author of Imagining Our Neighbors as Ourselves: How Art Shapes Empathy.Dr. Joe Kickasola is a Professor of Film and Digital Media at Baylor University. He is the author of The Films of Krzysztof Kieślowski: The Liminal Image, and has published in numerous academic venues and anthologies, including Film Quarterly, The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. _____Topics: Attentiveness, cynicism, receptivity, humility, consumerism, experiencing wonder during times of upheaval, Art Forms: filmmaking, photography, literature. Name Drops: Douglas Copeland, G.K. Chesterton, Jim Jarmusch, Terrence Malick, T.S.Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Andrei Tarkovsky, Andrey Rublev, Rothko, Stan Brakhage, Virginia Wolfe, David Foster Wallace, Movie References: Patterson, Tree of Life, Zabriskie Point Support The Podcast! We need your help to continue our work of advocating for the arts.Join our creative collectiveGive a one-time donation

READ TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE -Dearest friends,We are so sorry to have to share the hardest news with you - something we could never imagine having to say...Our beautiful friend and the founder, co-host and guiding light of The Poetry Exchange, Fiona Bennett, has died after a short illness.We are so sorry this will come as a huge shock to you all.It is hard to begin to express the enormous sense of loss, grief and endless love we are feeling for our most beloved Fiona. We know so many of you will be feeling this with us. FIona touched so many people's lives in such a profound way....whether through you listening in to her voice every month on the podcast, or through meeting and knowing Fiona in person.As Michael puts it in the introduction to this episode: "Fiona was a real one off. She really was one of the very best."This episode is a converastion Fiona really wanted us to share. It is an exchange with the wondrous David Lewsey about the poem that has been a friend to him: 'The World as Meditation' by Wallace Stevens. We recorded the conversation just a few months ago, and it is wonderful to hear David share all his passion for this poem and for poetry with Fiona and Michael.We would love to hear from you with any messages, feelings and reflections about Fiona, and you can get in touch with us on hello@thepoetryexchange.co.uk. We are going to be taking some time to process and face the loss of our beautiful friend, and to think about ways of lifting up and honouring her extraordinary life and legacy.For now, we are incredibly grateful for all your friendship, and we are sending so much love to you all.Michael, John and The Poetry Exchange xx Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Recorded by Academy of American Poets staff for Poem-a-Day, a series produced by the Academy of American Poets. Published on August 18, 2024. www.poets.org

In this episode, I talk with author and novelist about his recent hybrid memoir and cultural exploration, Always Crashing in the Same Car. We discuss his fascination with figures who faced creative crises in Hollywood, from F. Scott Fitzgerald, filmmaker Hal Ashby or musician Warren Zevon to more overlooked but similarly brilliant figures like Carole Eastman, the screenwriter of the 1970s classic Five Easy Pieces.We also explore the realities of growing up in LA, including being “celebrity-adjacent.” That's perhaps best illustrated by the time Marlon Brando left an incredible monologue in the form of a voicemail. We do a deep dive into the attraction of hybrid memoir for fiction writer, Matthew's approach to research, and whether it's possible any longer to be a middle-class creative in Hollywood.--------------------------“All of those kind of impulses fused in me, and eventually, and I sort of realized, like, oh, this is what I want to write. I want to write a book that's a memoir that isn't about me, or a memoir that's only kind of, you know, partly about me.”--------------------------Key Takeaways* Always Crashing In the Same Car pays homage to figures who've faced both genius and marginalization in Hollywood, including Thomas McGuane, Renata Adler, Carole Eastman, Eleanor Perry, Hal Ashby, Michael Cimino, Warren Zevon & more. The book is about “those who failed, faltered, and whose triumphs are punctuated by flops...”* Matthew shares his fascination with Carol Eastman, best known for Five Easy Pieces. He was deeply touched by her prose writings, comparing her to poets like Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens.* The book and the interview also delves more deeply into women's contributions to Hollywood, focusing on other overlooked talents like Eleanor Perry and Elaine May. Matthew reflects on his mother, a one-time screenwriter, and how her generation had less opportunity to develop their skills.* Why a hybrid memoir? Matthew was reading, and inspired by, writers like Hilton Als, Heidi Julavits, and Olivia Laing. He wanted to create a narrative that wasn't limited to—or rather moved beyond—the self, weaving together cultural criticism about Hollywood and creative crises.* We talk a lot about voice, which Matthew says is crucial for him to discover early on. “Once I can locate the voice for any piece of writing... I have it in the pocket,” he says. The narrator of this book blends personal reflections with a noir quality, he says.* Matthew sees himself as a novelist at heart. He considers the narrative tools of a novelist indispensable, even when writing memoirs and cultural critiques: “I am fundamentally a novelist….I think that's part of being a fiction writer or novelist is, you know, anything that you write is a kind of criticism in code. You're always responding to other texts.”* Matthew begins by explaining his unique research style: "I'm kind of ravenous and a little deranged about it…” His research process involves intuitive dives, like a two-day blitz through Carol Eastman's archives.* The discussion also touched on Matthew's upbringing with a mom who was a one-time screenwriter and who crossed the picket line during one writer's strike, and his father, who had modest beginnings but went on to become a famous Hollywood “superagent” representing Marlon Brando, Morgan Freeman, Helen Mirren & many others.* At the same time, Matthew explores misconceptions around Hollywood glitz, addressing the middle-class reality of many involved in the film industry. For a long-time, Hollywood could support such middle-class creatives, Matthew contends, something that is no longer really possible.* Addressing the evolution of the entertainment industry, Matthew notes the shift towards debt servicing, influenced by corporate acquisitions. This financial pragmatism often overrides the creative impulse, squeezing the middle class out.* Another takeaway? The creative world, especially in Hollywood, is fraught with periods of drift and struggle. In one sense, Always Crashing In the Same Car is a love letter to that state of things.--------------------------"I still kind of think of [Always Crashing…] as being secretly a novel. Not because it's full of made up s**t…but because I think sometimes our idea of what a novel is is pretty limited. You know, there's no reason why a novel can't be, like, 98% fact."--------------------------About Matthew SpecktorMatthew Specktor's books include the novels That Summertime Sound and American Dream Machine, which was long-listed for the Folio Prize; the memoir-in-criticism Always Crashing in The Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California, and The Golden Hour, forthcoming from Ecco Press. Born in Los Angeles, he received his MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College in 2009. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, GQ, The Paris Review, Tin House, Black Clock, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies. He is a founding editor of the Los Angles Review of Books.Resources:Books by Matthew Specktor:* Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California* American Dream Machine* That Summertime Sound* Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz, introduction by Matthew SpecktorReferenced on this episode:* The Women, by Hilton Als* Low, by David Bowie* The Great Gatsby, This Side of Paradise, The Last Tycoon, The Pat Hobby Stories, and The Crack-Up, by F. Scott Fitzgerald* F. Scott Fitzgerald on Writing, edited by Larry W. Phillips* The Folded Clock: A Diary, by Heidi Julavits* The Lonely City, by Olivia Laing* 300 Arguments, by Sarah Manguso* “Bombast: Carole Eastman,” by Nick Pinkerton* “The Life and Death of Hollywood,” by Daniel Bessner, Harper's, May 2024.CreditsThis episode was produced by Magpie Audio Productions. Theme music  is "The Stone Mansion" by BlueDot Productions. Get full access to The Book I Want to Write at bookiwanttowrite.substack.com/subscribe

Today's poem is a shape poem dedicated to chefs, but (surprise?) it might be about more than cooking.John Hollander, one of contemporary poetry's foremost poets, editors, and anthologists, grew up in New York City. He studied at Columbia University and Indiana University, and he was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows of Harvard University. Hollander received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Levinson Prize, a MacArthur Foundation grant, and the poet laureateship of Connecticut. He served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and he taught at Hunter College, Connecticut College, and Yale University, where he was the Sterling Professor emeritus of English.Over the course of an astonishing career, Hollander influenced generations of poets and thinkers with his critical work, his anthologies and his poetry. In the words of J.D. McClatchy, Hollander was “a formidable presence in American literary life.” Hollander's eminence as a scholar and critic was in some ways greater than his reputation as a poet. His groundbreaking introduction to form and prosody Rhyme's Reason (1981), as well as his work as an anthologist, has ensured him a place as one of the 20th-century's great, original literary critics. Hollander's critical writing is known for its extreme erudition and graceful touch. Hollander's poetry possesses many of the same qualities, though the wide range of allusion and technical virtuosity can make it seem “difficult” to a general readership.Hollander's first poetry collection, A Crackling of Thorns (1958) won the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets Awards, judged by W.H. Auden. And in fact James K. Robinson in the Southern Review found that Hollander's “early poetry resembles Auden's in its wit, its learned allusiveness, its prosodic mastery.” Hollander's technique continued to develop through later books like Visions from the Ramble (1965) and The Night Mirror (1971). Broader in range and scope than his previous work, Hollander's Tales Told of the Fathers (1975) and Spectral Emanations (1978) heralded his arrival as a major force in contemporary poetry. Reviewing Spectral Emanations for the New Republic, Harold Bloom reflected on his changing impressions of the poet's work over the first 20 years of his career: “I read [A Crackling of Thorns] … soon after I first met the poet, and was rather more impressed by the man than by the book. It has taken 20 years for the emotional complexity, spiritual anguish, and intellectual and moral power of the man to become the book. The enormous mastery of verse was there from the start, and is there still … But there seemed almost always to be more knowledge and insight within Hollander than the verse could accommodate.” Bloom found in Spectral Emanations “another poet as vital and accomplished as [A.R.] Ammons, [James] Merrill, [W.S.] Merwin, [John] Ashbery, James Wright, an immense augmentation to what is clearly a group of major poets.”Shortly after Spectral Emanations, Hollander published Blue Wine and Other Poems (1979), a volume which a number of critics have identified as an important milestone in Hollander's life and career. Reviewing the work for the New Leader, Phoebe Pettingell remarked, “I would guess from the evidence of Blue Wine that John Hollander is now at the crossroads of his own midlife journey, picking out a new direction to follow.” Hollander's new direction proved to be incredibly fruitful: his next books were unqualified successes. Powers of Thirteen (1983) won the Bollingen Prize from Yale University and In Time and Place (1986) was highly praised for its blend of verse and prose. In the Times Literary Supplement, Jay Parini believed “an elegiac tone dominates this book, which begins with a sequence of 34 poems in the In Memoriam stanza. These interconnecting lyrics are exquisite and moving, superior to almost anything else Hollander has ever written.” Parini described the book as “a landmark in contemporary poetry.” McClatchy held up In Time and Place as evidence that Hollander is “part conjurer and part philosopher, one of our language's true mythographers and one of its very best poets.”Hollander continued to publish challenging, technically stunning verse throughout the 1980s and '90s. His Selected Poetry (1993) was released simultaneously with Tesserae (1993); Figurehead and Other Poems (1999) came a few years later. “The work collected in [Tesserae and Other Poems and Selected Poetry] makes clear that John Hollander is a considerable poet,” New Republic reviewer Vernon Shetley remarked, “but it may leave readers wondering still, thirty-five years after his first book … exactly what kind of poet Hollander is.” Shetley recognized the sheer variety of Hollander's work, but also noted the peculiar absence of anything like a personality, “as if the poet had taken to heart, much more fully than its author, Eliot's dictum that poetry should embody ‘emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet.'” Another frequent charge leveled against Hollander's work is that it is “philosophical verse.” Reviewing A Draft of Light (2008) for Jacket Magazine, Alex Lewis argued that instead of writing “philosophizing verse,” Hollander actually “borrows from philosophy a language and a way of thought. Hollander's poems are frequently meta-poems that create further meaning out of their own self-interrogations, out of their own reflexivity.” As always, the poems are underpinned by an enormous amount of learning and incredible technical expertise and require “a good deal of time and thought to unravel,” Lewis admitted. But the rewards are great: “the book deepens every time that I read it,” Lewis wrote, adding that Hollander's later years have given his work grandeur akin to Thomas Hardy and Wallace Stevens.Hollander's work as a critic and anthologist has been widely praised from the start. As editor, he has worked on volumes of poets as diverse as Ben Jonson and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; his anthologist's credentials are impeccable. He was widely praised for the expansive American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century (1994), two volumes of verse including ballads, sonnets, epic poetry, and even folk songs. Herbert Mitgang of the New York Times praised the range of poets and authors included in the anthology: “Mr. Hollander has a large vision at work in these highly original volumes of verse. Without passing critical judgment, he allows the reader to savor not only the geniuses but also the second-rank writers of the era.” Hollander also worked on the companion volume, American Poetry: The Twentieth Century (2000) with fellow poets and scholars Robert Hass, Carolyn Kizer, Nathaniel Mackey, and Marjorie Perloff.Hollander's prose and criticism has been read and absorbed by generations of readers and writers. Perhaps his most lasting work is Rhyme's Reason. In an interview with Paul Devlin of St. John's University, Hollander described the impetus behind the volume: “Thinking of my own students, and of how there was no such guide to the varieties of verse in English to which I could send them and that would help teach them to notice things about the examples presented—to see how the particular stanza or rhythmic scheme or whatever was being used by the particular words of the particular poem, for example—I got to work and with a speed which now alarms me produced a manuscript for the first edition of the book. I've never had more immediate fun writing a book.” Hollander's other works of criticism include The Work of Poetry (1993), The Poetry of Everyday Life (1997), and Poetry and Music (2003).Hollander died on August 17, 2013 in Branford, Connecticut.-bio via Poetry Foundation Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Just when you thought you were out, The Daily Poem pulls you back in–to poems about movies. Today's charming and earnest poem imitates the medium it describes (film) by swapping memorable images and sensations for linear propositions. Happy reading.Amy Clampitt was born and raised in New Providence, Iowa. She studied first at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, and later at Columbia University and the New School for Social Research in New York City. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Clampitt held various jobs at publishers and organizations such as Oxford University Press and the Audubon Society. In the 1960s, she turned her attention to poetry. In 1974 she published a small volume of poetry titled Multitudes, Multitudes; thereafter her work appeared frequently in the New Yorker. Upon the publication of her book of poems The Kingfisher in 1983, she became one of the most highly regarded poets in America. Her other collections include A Silence Opens (1994), Westward (1990), What the Light Was Like (1985), and Archaic Figure (1987). Clampitt received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Clampitt taught at the College of William and Mary, Amherst College, and Smith College.Joseph Parisi, a Chicago Tribune Book World reviewer, called the poet's sudden success after the publication of The Kingfisher “one of the most stunning debuts in recent memory.” Parisi continued, “throughout this bountiful book, her wit, sensibility and stylish wordplay seldom disappoint.” In one of the first articles to appear after The Kingfisher's debut, New York Review of Books critic Helen Vendler wrote that “Amy Clampitt writes a beautiful, taxing poetry. In it, thinking uncoils and coils again, embodying its perpetua argument with itself.” Georgia Review contributor Peter Stitt also felt that “The Kingfisher is … in many ways an almost dazzling performance.” In the Observer, Peter Porter described Clampitt as “a virtuoso of the here and the palpable.” Porter ranked her with the likes of Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop.Critics praised the allusive richness and syntactical sophistication of Clampitt's verse. Her poetry is characterized by a “baroque profusion, the romance of the adjective, labyrinthine syntax, a festival lexicon,” said New York Times Book Review contributor Alfred Corn in an article about Clampitt's second important collection, What the Light Was Like (1985). Indeed, the poet's use of vocabulary and syntax is elaborate. “When you read Amy Clampitt,” suggests Richard Tillinghast in the New York Times Book Review, “have a dictionary or two at your elbow.” The poet has, Tillinghast continues, a “virtuoso command of vocabulary, [a] gift for playing the English language like a musical instrument and [a] startling and delightful ability to create metaphor.” Her ability as a poet quickly gained Clampitt recognition as “the most refreshing new American poet to appear in many years,” according to one Times Literary Supplement reviewer.Clampitt's work is also characterized by erudite allusions, for which she provides detailed footnotes. Times Literary Supplement critic Lachlan Mackinnon compared her “finical accuracy of description and the provision of copious notes at the end of a volume,” to a similar tendency in the work of Marianne Moore. “She is as ‘literary' and allusive as Eliot and Pound, as filled with grubby realia as William Carlos Williams, as ornamented as Wallace Stevens and as descriptive as Marianne Moore,” observed Corn. Washington Post reviewer Joel Conarroe added Walt Whitman and Hart Crane to this list of comparable poets: “Like Whitman, she is attracted to proliferating lists as well as to ‘the old thought of likenesses,'” wrote Conarroe. “And as in Crane her compressed images create multiple resonances of sound and sense.”What the Light Was Like centers around images of light and darkness. This book is “more chastely restrained than The Kingfisher,” according to Times Literary Supplement contributor Neil Corcoran. Conarroe believed that the poet's “own imagery throughout [the book] is sensuous (even lush) and specific—in short, Keatsian.” Corn similarly commented that “there are stirring moments in each poem, and an authentic sense of Keats' psychology.” He opined, however, that “her sequence [‘Voyages: A Homage to John Keats‘] isn't effective throughout, the reason no doubt being that her high-lyric mode” does not suit narrative as well as a plainer style would.Clampitt's Archaic Figure (1987) maintains her “idiosyncratic style,” as William Logan called it in the Chicago Tribune. New York Times Book Review contributor Mark Rudman noted the poet's “spontaneity and humor; she is quick to react, hasty, impulsive, responsive to place—and to space.” In the London Sunday Times, David Profumo further praised Archaic Figure. Taking the example of the poem “Hippocrene,” the critic asserted that this work “demonstrates her new powers of economy, the sureness of her rhythmic touch and the sheer readability of her magnificent narrative skills.” “Amy Clampitt,” concluded Logan, “has become one of our poetry's necessary imaginations.”Clampitt died in Lenox, Massachusetts in 1994. Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Amanda Holmes reads Wallace Stevens's “Peter Quince at the Clavier.” 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.

Farnaz Fatemi and Nancy Miller Gomez discuss her debut book of poems, Inconsolable Objects, from YesYes Books. In addition to talking about several poems in the collection, Gomez talks about self-doubt along with her assessment of “poets as the fighter pilots of the literary world.”  Poems by others mentioned: Brigit Pegeen Kelly's “Song” and Wallace Stevens' “Snowman”. 

They say imitation is the highest form of flattery—but it's also a learning tool and a lot of fun. Katie, Tim, and friends discuss the art of adopting another poets voice, joined by award-winning formalist and ventriloquist A.M. Juster, author of The Billy Collins Experience. Along the way, we share some other great poems mimicking Wallace Stevens, Kay Ryan, Bob Dylan, and more. At the table: Katie Dozier Timothy Green A.M. Juster Dick Westheimer Joe Barca

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.”

"And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been." Rilke Word of the Year: "Affection" noun af·​fec·​tion ə-ˈfek-shən  Synonyms of affection 1: a feeling of liking and caring for someone or something : tender attachment : FONDNESS She had a deep affection for her parents. Middle English affeccioun "capacity for feeling, emotion, desire, love," borrowed from Anglo-French, "desire, love, inclination, partiality," borrowed from Latin affectiōn-, affectiō "frame of mind, feeling, feeling of attachment," from affec-(variant stem of afficere "to produce an effect on, exert an influence on") + -tiōn-, -tiō, suffix of action nouns Referench: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/affection philostorgos: tenderly loving Original Word:φιλόστοργος, ον Phonetic Spelling:(fil-os'-tor-gos) Definition:tenderly loving Usage:tenderly loving, kindly affectionate to Reference: https://biblehub.com/greek/5387.htm For the full text of the Jefferson Lecture 2012, by Wendell Barry, please visit: https://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture/wendell-e-berry-biography Photo by Guy Mendes Quoted excerpts from the lecture: “Because a thing is going strong now, it need not go strong for ever,” [Margaret] said. “This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years. It may be followed by a civilization that won't be a movement, because it will rest upon the earth.E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910) p. "The term “imagination” in what I take to be its truest sense refers to a mental faculty that some people have used and thought about with the utmost seriousness. The sense of the verb “to imagine” contains the full richness of the verb “to see.” To imagine is to see most clearly, familiarly, and understandingly with the eyes, but also to see inwardly, with “the mind's eye.” It is to see, not passively, but with a force of vision and even with visionary force. To take it seriously we must give up at once any notion that imagination is disconnected from reality or truth or knowledge. It has nothing to do either with clever imitation of appearances or with “dreaming up.” It does not depend upon one's attitude or point of view, but grasps securely the qualities of things seen or envisioned. I will say, from my own belief and experience, that imagination thrives on contact, on tangible connection. For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy." "But the risk, I think, is only that affection is personal. If it is not personal, it is nothing; we don't, at least, have to worry about governmental or corporate affection. And one of the endeavors of human cultures, from the beginning, has been to qualify and direct the influence of emotion. The word “affection” and the terms of value that cluster around it—love, care, sympathy, mercy, forbearance, respect, reverence—have histories and meanings that raise the issue of worth. We should, as our culture has warned us over and over again, give our affection to things that are true, just, and beautiful. It is by imagination that knowledge is “carried to the heart” (to borrow again from Allen Tate). The faculties of the mind—reason, memory, feeling, intuition, imagination, and the rest—are not distinct from one another. Though some may be favored over others and some ignored, none functions alone. But the human mind, even in its wholeness, even in instances of greatest genius, is irremediably limited. Its several faculties, when we try to use them separately or specialize them, are even more limited. The fact is that we humans are not much to be trusted with what I am calling statistical knowledge, and the larger the statistical quantities the less we are to be trusted. We don't learn much from big numbers. We don't understand them very well, and we aren't much affected by them." ((Who Owns America? edited by Herbert Agar and Allen Tate, ISI Books, Wilmington, DE, 1999,  pages 109–114. (First published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1936.) [Nature] "As Albert Howard, Wes Jackson, and others have carefully understood, she can give us the right patterns and standards for agriculture. If we ignore or offend her, she enforces her will with punishment. She is always trying to tell us that we are not so superior or independent or alone or autonomous as we may think. She tells us in the voice of Edmund Spenser that she is of all creatures “the equall mother, / And knittest each to each, as brother unto brother.” (The Faerie Queene, VII, vii, stanza XIV.) "To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we “know” that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined. The economic hardship of one farm family, if they are our neighbors, affects us more painfully than pages of statistics on the decline of the farm population. I can be heartstruck by grief and a kind of compassion at the sight of one gulley (and by shame if I caused it myself), but, conservationist though I am, I am not nearly so upset by an accounting of the tons of plowland sediment borne by the Mississippi River. Wallace Stevens wrote that “Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail.” (Opus Posthumous, edited, with an Introduction by Samuel French Morse, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1957, page 176.) "But we need not wait, as we are doing, to be taught the absolute value of land and of land health by hunger and disease. Affection can teach us, and soon enough, if we grant appropriate standing to affection. For this we must look to the stickers, who “love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.” "E. M. Forster's novel, Howards End, published in 1910. By then, Forster was aware of the implications of “rural decay,” and in this novel he spoke, with some reason, of his fear that “the literature of the near future will probably ignore the country and seek inspiration from the town. . . . and those who care for the earth with sincerity may wait long ere the pendulum swings back to her again.” (Howards End, page 15, 112). Margaret's premise, as she puts it to Henry, is the balance point of the book:  “It all turns on affection now . . . Affection. Don't you see?” (Ibid., page 214). To have beautiful buildings, for example, people obviously must want them to be beautiful and know how to make them beautiful, but evidently they also must love the places where the buildings are to be built. For a long time, in city and countryside, architecture has disregarded the nature and influence of places. It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile . . . That is not imagination. No, it kills it. . . . Your universities? Oh, yes, you have learned men who collect . . . facts, and facts, and empires of facts. But which of them will rekindle the light within? (Ibid., page 30)." “The light within,” I think, means affection, affection as motive and guide. Knowledge without affection leads us astray every time. Affection leads, by way of good work, to authentic hope. The factual knowledge, in which we seem more and more to be placing our trust, leads only to hope of the discovery, endlessly deferrable, of an ultimate fact or smallest particle that at last will explain everything. Margaret's premise, as she puts it to Henry, is the balance point of the book:  “It all turns on affection now . . . Affection. Don't you see?” The great reassurance of Forster's novel is the wholeheartedness of his language. It is to begin with a language not disturbed by mystery, by things unseen. But Forster's interest throughout is in soul-sustaining habitations: houses, households, earthly places where lives can be made and loved. In defense of such dwellings he uses, without irony or apology, the vocabulary that I have depended on in this talk:  truth, nature, imagination, affection, love, hope, beauty, joy. Those words are hard to keep still within definitions; they make the dictionary hum like a beehive. But in such words, in their resonance within their histories and in their associations with one another, we find our indispensable humanity, without which we are lost and in danger. Of the land-community much has been consumed, much has been wasted, almost nothing has flourished. But this has not been inevitable. We do not have to live as if we are alone.

Today's poem is The Idea of Order at Key West by Wallace Stevens. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “When a performer brings their whole self the planets align. Life magically makes sense. Today's famous poem ponders one of those moments in which, through another's expression, all agonies and confusions give way to a dignified stasis.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

In today's poem, Marianne Moore (November 15, 1887 – February 5, 1972) gets candid about poetry itself.One of American literature's foremost poets, Marianne Moore's poetry is characterized by linguistic precision, keen and probing descriptions, and acute observations of people, places, animals, and art. Her poems often reflect her preoccupation with the relationships between the common and the uncommon, advocate discipline in both art and life, and espouse restraint, modesty, and humor. She frequently used animals as a central image to emphasize themes of independence, honesty, and the integration of art and nature. Moore's work is frequently grouped with poets such as H.D., T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and, later, Elizabeth Bishop, to whom she was a friend and mentor. In his introduction to her Selected Poems (1935), Eliot wrote: “Living, the poet is carrying on that struggle for the maintenance of a living language, for the maintenance of its strength, its subtlety, for the preservation of quality of feeling, which must be kept up in every generation … Miss Moore is, I believe, one of those few who have done the language some service in my lifetime.”-bio via Poetry Foundation Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Stevens moved to Connecticut in 1916, having found employment at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co., where he became vice president in 1934. He had also begun to establish an identity for himself outside the worlds of law and business. His first book of poems, Harmonium (Alfred A. Knopf), published in 1923, exhibited the influences of both the English Romantics and the French Symbolists, and demonstrated a wholly original style and sensibility: exotic, whimsical, and infused with the light and color of an Impressionist painting. Today's poem comes from that early collection.For the next several years, Stevens focused on his business career. He began to publish new poems in 1930, however. In the following year, Knopf released a second edition of Harmonium, which included fourteen new poems, but excluded three of the decidedly weaker ones.More than any other modern poet, Stevens was concerned with the transformative power of the imagination. Composing poems on his way to and from the office and in the evenings, Stevens spent his days behind a desk at his office, and led a quiet, relatively uneventful life.Though now considered one of the major American poets of the twentieth century, Stevens did not receive widespread recognition until the publication of The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (Knopf, 1954), just a year before his death. His other major works include The Necessary Angel (Alfred A. Knopf, 1951), a collection of essays on poetry; Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction (The Cummington Press, 1942); The Man With the Blue Guitar (Alfred A. Knopf, 1937); and Ideas of Order (The Alcestis Press, 1935).-bio via Poets.org Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe