An episode from 4/19/22: From the opening line of the Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman announced that his great theme was unity: “I celebrate myself,/And what I assume you shall assume,/For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” As the last two episodes show, his best poems on both love and death rise up out of this central belief in humanity’s unity with nature and the animal world, and our unity as a human species, which crosses all barriers of race, religion, and belief. And finally, in perhaps his best poem, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” that unity extends from the past, the present, and into the future.

Tonight, then, I read the best of Whitman’s poems in this vein, which (for lack of a better word) I have simply called “mystical.” All of the poems can be found in the two recent books I edited, ⁠The Selected Short Poems of Walt Whitman⁠, and ⁠The Selected Long Poems of Walt Whitman⁠.

Short Poems:

Long Poems:

Don’t forget to support Human Voices Wake Us on Substack, where you can also get our newsletter and other extras. You can also support the podcast by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone.

Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to [email protected].

An episode from 4/14/22: “Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?” Walt Whitman asks. “I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.” Long after so many aspects of his poems have ceased to shock us, Whitman’s attitude towards death remains perhaps the most challenging in all of his poetry. Tonight, I read from my favorite of those poems: the youthful bits from “Song of Myself,” his meditations over the Civil War, and the poems that came from old age. They can all be found in ⁠The Selected Short Poems of Walt Whitman⁠, and ⁠The Selected Long Poems of Walt Whitman⁠.

Short Poems:

Long Poems:

Don’t forget to support Human Voices Wake Us on Substack, where you can also get our newsletter and other extras. You can also support the podcast by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone.

Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to [email protected].

An episode from 4/9/22: Is Whitman our great poet of love, or of longing? Is there a difference? In this episode, I share my favorite of his love poems, many of which are expressed as unfulfilled longing. They can all be found in ⁠The Selected Short Poems of Walt Whitman⁠, and ⁠The Selected Long Poems of Walt Whitman⁠:

Following these poems (at around 1:06:57), I’ve inserted a reading from a previous episode on Whitman’s love and sex life, from Paul Zweig’s book, ⁠Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet⁠.

Don’t forget to support Human Voices Wake Us on Substack, where you can also get our newsletter and other extras. You can also support the podcast by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone.

Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to [email protected].

An episode from 4/6/22: Another two-part episode. In the first, we hear from Toni Morrison about the use of anger in writing novels; from the poet Richard Wilbur on the suicide of fellow-poet John Berryman, and the perils of having few interests outside of poetry. Other remarks from Berryman himself, and T. S. Eliot, touch on the general perils of the creative life.

In the second part (starting around 24:17), I read from Walt Whitman’s earliest critics. While there’s a great deal of what we’d expect—denunciation and even mockery—it’s surprising to hear how much begrudging praise there is, as well. The full text of these and many other contemporary reviews of Leaves of Grass can be found in Gary Schmidgall’s ⁠Selected Poems of Walt Whitman⁠.

Don’t forget to support Human Voices Wake Us on Substack, where you can also get our newsletter and other extras. You can also support the podcast by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone.

Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to [email protected].

An episode from 3/29/22: Another two-part episode. The first is a reading of five poems, and my favorites from this batch are Robert Lowell’s “Bobby Delano,” an unforgettable poem about adolescence, and Anne Finch’s “A Nocturnal Reverie,” whose blank verse meditation looks ahead to Wordsworth like few other poems. John Clare’s “An Invite to Eternity,” Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s “A Summer Evening’s Meditation,” and Edmund Spenser’s famous Garden of Adonis, from The Faerie Queene, round out the rest.

In the second part (starting at about 42:00), I read from Eudora Welty’s ⁠One Writer’s Beginnings⁠, and Helen Keller’s ⁠The Story of My Life⁠. Both, in their own way, are about each writer’s earliest discovery of words.

Don’t forget to support Human Voices Wake Us on Substack, where you can also get our newsletter and other extras. You can also support the podcast by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone.

Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to [email protected].

An episode from 3/25/22: Why have I always assumed that lovers of poetry want to talk to other people about it? In the first part of this episode, I continue a discussion on Loneliness that began last year, and remind myself that there are a million ways to live with poetry and art. In the second part, I read from Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Shakespeare, where the Bard’s sonnets and love life are discussed.

Don’t forget to support Human Voices Wake Us on Substack, where you can also get our newsletter and other extras. You can also support the podcast by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone.

Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to [email protected].

An episode from 3/22/22: One of my goals for The Great Myths has been to show how strange, even off-putting, the stories that we know and revere really are. I don’t know of a better example of this than the largest literary text surviving from twelfth-century Ireland, The Tales of the Elders of Ireland (⁠Acallam na Senórach⁠).

Using the wanderings of Saint Patrick throughout Ireland as the frame story, Patrick meets with the surviving warriors from older times, and between them more than two hundred small stories are strung together. The lore of place-names, stories of battle and the Otherworld, as well as the mournful pathos surrounding the passing of the pagan world, are related in exciting, heart-wrenching, dry, scholarly, or just bizarre ways, in poetry and prose. The translation I read from is that of ⁠Ann Dooley and Harry Roe⁠.

Other episodes on Celtic mythology ⁠⁠are here⁠⁠.

Don’t forget to support Human Voices Wake Us on Substack, where you can also get our newsletter and other extras. You can also support the podcast by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone.

Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to [email protected].

An episode from 3/14/22: What happened during ⁠Jane Goodall’s famous appearance in Gary Larson’s The Far Side⁠ in 1987, and what can it teach us about the pedestal we place our idols on? What did a child’s introduction to The Beatles’ “Revolution 9” teach me about the power of preconceptions? This grab-bag episode, which includes bits from ⁠Leon Wieseltier’s 1996 book, Kaddish⁠, touches on all of this and more.

Don’t forget to support Human Voices Wake Us on Substack, where you can also get our newsletter and other extras. You can also support the podcast by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone.

Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to [email protected].

An episode from 3/8/22: How would you talk about your job, if someone came around asking? Tonight, we hear from Beverly Valentine, a Funeral Home Director, and Jason Groth, a Telemarketer. They were interviewed more than twenty years ago for the 2000 book ⁠Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs⁠, and I have yet to find a boring interview in the entire book.

The book is clearly meant as an update to Studs Terkel's 1974 collection of interviews, Working.

Don’t forget to support Human Voices Wake Us on Substack, where you can also get our newsletter and other extras. You can also support the podcast by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone.

Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to [email protected].

An episode from 3/2/22: At a listener’s request, the first part of this episode is devoted to the earliest bookstores I remember, from childhood through adolescence. The Friday night in high school that I spent, buying a copy of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, remains an especially formative experience.

The second part of this episode takes up the creation and immediate fame of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica. The books I read from are Simon Schama's ⁠The Power of Art⁠ and John Richardson's ⁠Life of Picasso, Volume 4: The Minotaur Years⁠.

Don’t forget to support Human Voices Wake Us on Substack, where you can also get our newsletter and other extras. You can also support the podcast by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone.

Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to [email protected].