<p>One of the hardest things to get right in a poem is who the speaker is. With me, and I don't know about other poets, it is rarely I who speak. This poem tells us right away who is speaking: not I, but an observer. And as I think about it now, the account of events of Christmas night is told by a nameless observer.</p>

One of the hardest things to get right in a poem is who the speaker is. With me, and I don't know about other poets, it is rarely I who speak. This poem tells us right away who is speaking: not I, but an observer. And as I think about it now, the account of events of Christmas night is told by a nameless observer.

Episode 32: From Cosmo, Astrologer to the Three Kings

John's podcasts and poems are frozen still moments recorded as mental photos that run in the reader's imagination like full films. As both participant and chronicler John removes himself from the action, makes his observations quickly (and hopefully cogently) and then escape. If John is a good observer, he sees things that by themselves are extraordinary revelations about each of us which seem as caricatures rooted in ordinary life and amplified by the focus of each person's mind on the "other" … ourselves. In other words, if a kid is "an indefatigable nose picker with bluster all his own" we get a complex message about human behavior that we got from an unmentionable source: us. Long after hearing  John's podcasts and poems, the scenes he describe live "rent free" in the reader's mind.

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John's podcasts and poems are frozen still moments recorded as mental photos that run in the reader's imagination like full films. As both participant and chronicler John removes himself from the action, makes his observations quickly (and hopefully cogently) and then escape. If John is a good observer, he sees things that by themselves are extraordinary revelations about each of us which seem as caricatures rooted in ordinary life and amplified by the focus of each person's mind on the "other" … ourselves. In other words, if a kid is "an indefatigable nose picker with bluster all his own" we get a complex message about human behavior that we got from an unmentionable source: us. Long after hearing John's podcasts and poems, the scenes he describe live "rent free" in the reader's mind.

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Episode 32: From Cosmo, Astrologer to the Three Kings

Episode 32: From Cosmo, Astrologer to the Three Kings