Tonight, I replay two of my favorite episodes from Human Voices Wake Us: from September of 2021, I talk for a moment about loneliness and creativity. The next segment (beginning at 36:00) is from July of 2021, where we hear more about creativity and living in the world, this time from Beethoven, Joseph Campbell, W. S. Merwin, and W. D. Snodgrass.

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

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I assume that the small amount of work presented in each episode constitutes fair use. Publishers, authors, or other copyright holders who would prefer to not have their work presented here can also email me at [email protected], and I will remove the episode immediately.

An episode from 5/25/22: Tonight, I conclude with the last in a five-part series called Notes from the Grid. (A ⁠print version⁠ of NFTG has since been published.) The first section, "Simple Awareness," is followed by "The Uncomfortable, Unsolvable Middle" (begins at 20:30).The series concludes with "All Its Ways" (starts at 48:40)

Taken together, these last three sections ask why it is, in the world that we've made, it is always easier to be selfish rather than selfless, and what can we do about it? Rather than putting forth some kind of program of political or social reform, I return to the transformative importance of those hidden moments in our private lives. If we are willing to live in the world and not dismiss it with cynicism, or literally go off the grid, the key to our own fulfillment seems to be in seeing the eternal and the everyday as inextricably intertwined. No specific cultural or religious pose is required, except the pursuit and search and finding of meaning, the joy, the bittersweetness, the perpetual learning.

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 5/2/22: Tonight, I continue my five-part series called Notes from the Grid. (A print version of NFTG has since been published.) It asks why we grant so much authority and influence to reviewers and criticism—is it because so few of us will ever create a lasting work of art, but all of us find it easy to give our opinions on everything?

In the second half of the episode (beginning at about 27:02), a chance remark from the actor Richard Burton prompts a handful of important questions on creativity. What is it about the public face of creativity that demands a prolific output, or finishing anything at all? Why do we expect our most powerful creators to also be able to talk fluently, like some scripted newscaster, about what they’ve done? Why do we demand manifestos, rallying cries, and the certainty of split-off schools, groups, and tribes?

The excerpt I play from an interview with George Steiner ⁠comes from a 1996 episode of Desert Island Discs⁠.

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].