Emotion Put Into Measure: Poetry Matters

Friedrich Hölderlin's poetry marks a mesmerizingly profound engagement with the philosophers of his time. Hölderlin performs his response to philosophers like Kant, Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel in his poetry. With the help of philosopher Christopher Satoor, we begin to enlighten ourselves on Hölderlin and his ability to help us contend with German Idealism, Romanticism, the Enlightenment and our own era.

Robert A. Boates is living his second life and poetry is everything for him. Today we discuss Man Without Memory, a manuscript from his first life, along with some of his more recent poems from Cataract of the Mind. We are fortunate to hear Robert's thoughts on memory, brain damage, survival, poetry and rhythm.

The famous Thirteenth Century Islamic poet and Sufi mystic, Jalāl ad-Dīn Mohammad Rūmī, had some profound ideas and an incomparable range of subject matter, from eroticism and vulgar sexuality to love and the divine. Today we begin a journey through Rūmī's life and poetry.

We recently had the immense privilege of speaking to our first guest, Albert Frank Moritz, current Poet Laureate of Toronto, who speaks to us today about new and old poetry, the past, terrorism, eternity, heroism, and so much more!

Finally we put politics aside and find a poet who can help us with the calming effect of poetry, narrative, and the ability to put images to words without the pressure to pin down interpretations. But listen next time. There's much more to Al Moritz.

Clifton takes some creative liberties with biblical characters, giving them desires and complexities unlike in any other telling of these stories. These characters take on meaning in their own right and within a context of African-American history. Most notably, Lucille seems to identify with Lucifer as God's critic, a critic who will not be silenced.

History's absences live today, as Clifton's imagination proves. From the plantation to Rodney King & the L.A. Riots.

Her work is vast, profound, everyday yet omnipresent, reviving history, multidimensional, impossible to categorize, and simply mesmerizing. This is the beginning of an impossible journey.