An episode from 9/27/21: In what may be my favorite episode of this podcast, I talk about loneliness: is it really so bad, and is easy sociability really so much better? I also look at where my own experience of loneliness began, as a four year-old who suddenly found himself with hearing problems, and how it has led to my own adult love for interviews, anecdotes on nearly any subject, autobiographies, talk radio, or any experience of a human voice.

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

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.

A reading from Mircea Eliade's book The Myth of the Eternal Return, where a folklorist discovers the source of a local myth and song, and tries to convince them of the "real" story.

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

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.

A reading from the beginning of Virgil great poem of farming and nature, Georgics, in the translation by David Ferry. There will be more readings from this book to come.

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

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 9/21/21: Tonight I read Walt Whitman's poem, "Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun," first published in the 1865 collection Drum Taps. Among Whitman's shorter poems, there is no better expression of the tension he felt between nature and urban life. You can read the poem here or find it in Walt Whitman: Selected Short 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 9/19/21: Are some topics not fit for poetry and art? Does the intentional crafting of atrocity and genocide into stanzas, scenes, rhymes, drama, or just DVD covers or posters, exploit and cheapen history? Or is this simply the way stories are told and passed down? Tonight, I talk about this in relation to two poems of mine about the Holocaust, "A Ploughed Field" and "Train." These poems were published earlier this year at Jewish Journal.

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].

A reading of my story, "Isis in Old Age." It was originally published in Bold+Italic. The story can also be read here.

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

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.

A reading of seven poems from Ted Hughes's 1976 book, Season Songs. It can be found in his Collected Poems.

The poems read here are:

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

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 9/13/21: Tonight, I read a small section of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself." For those who want to find it for themselves, it later ends up as part of section #33. I can't think of a more life-affirming passage in Whitman's or anybody else's poetry, than this rolling, glorious, catalogue.

The best place to find Whitman's poetry and other writing online remains the ⁠Whitman Archive⁠, and you can find every edition of Leaves of Grass ⁠here⁠ (as plain text downloads) and ⁠here⁠ (facsimiles of the original editions). You can find the poem in an edition of Whitman's poems that I edited, ⁠Selected Long Poems⁠.

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

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 9/12/21: Tonight, I gather together all of the poems I've recorded from my 2018 book of poems from prehistory, Bone Antler Stone. You can buy the book here, and read reviews and essays about the book here. The poems are:

Poems from traveling through Orkney

Poems of artefacts, burials, and sites:

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 9/10/21: In this sixth episode on Celtic mythology, I read the famous story of the wanderings of Oisin/Oisín in the Irish Otherworld, the Tir na nÓg.

As usual, I make use of from James MacKillop's Oxford Dictionary of Celtic Mythology. The two versions of the story I read from can be found in James MacKillop's Myths & Legends of the Celts and Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. You can also read W. B. Yeats's 1888 narrative poem, The Wanderings of Oisin.

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

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.