Topics mentioned in this episode:

 -The Ohio Poetry Association
-Milton: Anapests or nah?
-Revisions of elisions 
-Bach deserves some rubato now and then 
-Thomas Hardy: Poet, novelist, romantic, modernist, man of mystery. 
-Shout out to those weird inbetweeners Robinson and Frost 
-What "hap" happens to mean 
-The Dante Rossetti of sonnets 
-Lear, Job, and other sad, god-smacked men 
-What exactly is in this ecstasy? 
-The awkward moment when you realize that both the horrific theological scenarios you talk about accurately describe the Christian god. 
-Cool it with the spondees! 
-A bad god is better than no god 
-Where mete and meter meet. 
-Cretics and Amphibrachs? Somebody stop me! 
-Hardy has some assumptions to answer for 
-The real difference between believers and atheists 
-The fractal dance of chaos and order in the universe 
-The universe desires order via us. 
-Two kinds of "dice" are twice as nice 
-Two kinds of "doom" threaten and loom 
-Scansion to bacchic excess 
-Bill Coyle! 
-As usual, the Greeks did it first 

Text of poem: 

Hap 

If but some vengeful god would call to me 
From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing, 
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy, 
That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!” 

Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die, 
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited; 
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I 
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed. 

But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain, 
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown? 
—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain, 
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . . 
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown 
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain. 

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My favorite poetry podcasts for:
Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets
Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says
The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight

Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet:
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)