Basement Poetry Podcast

Jevon Jackson was awarded First Prize in Poetry in the PENamerica 2019 Prison Writing Contest.

Pen America interview with Jevon Jackson - https://pen.org/pen-ten-interview-jevon-jackson/

Poem: 

All of Us, In Prison

Some prisons are pistol-thick,

Some prisons taste like

Some prisons sit on ominous hills,

Some prisons have

some prisons, by the night,

Welcome Back!!!! Today we will take a look the poem, "The Snow man" by Wallace Stevens 

I also forgot to mention in the episode that in most cases the word "Snowman" is one word, yet Wallace Stevens spells it "Snow Man" in the title. Take that for whatever you want it to be. 

Bio - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/wallace-stevens

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Today we will be taking a look at the poem “Kind” by James Owens

This poem originally appeared in the summer 2020 issue of Chestnut Review.

https://chestnutreview.com/wp-content/uploads/CR2-1.pdf

James Owens Bio: 

James Owens’s newest book is Family Portrait with Scythe (Bottom Dog Press, 2020). His poems and translations appear widely in liter- ary journals, including upcoming publications in Atlanta Review, The Shore, The Windhover, and Southword. He earned an MFA at the Uni- versity of Alabama and lives in a small town in northern Ontario.

Today we will be taking a look at the 3rd section of "East Coker" by T.S. Eliot. 

Bio: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/t-s-eliot

Link to Poem: http://www.davidgorman.com/4quartets/2-coker.htm

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,

The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,

The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,

The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,

Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,

Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,

And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha

And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,

And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.

And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,

Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you

Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,

The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed

With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,

And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama

And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—

Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations

And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence

And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen

Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;

Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.

The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,

The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy

Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony

Of death and birth.

Today we will take a look at "Out, Out—"  by Robert Frost

Bio: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-frost

Poem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53087/out-out

BY ROBERT FROST

The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard

And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,

Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.

And from there those that lifted eyes could count

Five mountain ranges one behind the other

Under the sunset far into Vermont.

And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,

As it ran light, or had to bear a load.

And nothing happened: day was all but done.

Call it a day, I wish they might have said

To please the boy by giving him the half hour

That a boy counts so much when saved from work.

His sister stood beside him in her apron

To tell them ‘Supper.’ At the word, the saw,

As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,

Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—

He must have given the hand. However it was,

Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!

The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,

As he swung toward them holding up the hand

Half in appeal, but half as if to keep

The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all—

Since he was old enough to know, big boy

Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart—

He saw all spoiled. ‘Don’t let him cut my hand off—

The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!’

So. But the hand was gone already.

The doctor put him in the dark of ether.

He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.

And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.

No one believed. They listened at his heart.

Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.

No more to build on there. And they, since they

Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

Today we will be looking at the poem "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas

Bio: https://poets.org/poet/dylan-thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night

Do not go gentle into that good night.