While Human Voices Wake Us is still on hiatus, I wanted to play this episode from the archive, to celebrate the official release of my book of essays, Notes from the Grid. 

Get your copy here.

Tonight's episode is a reading of the last essay in the book, "All Its Ways." You can hear the other episodes from the book, that I recorded last summer, here.

If this episode speaks to you in any way, please consider buying the book, or sharing it with anyone who might be interested. I’ve never put more of myself into anything, even my poetry. I doubt that writing a hundred pages will ever take so long again, or contain so much.

I started the book back in 2006, sitting at a Kinko’s in Corona, California. It has followed me everywhere since then, into the world of marriage and fatherhood, from Ohio to Brooklyn and now to Pittsburgh, and from the strange land of my mid-twenties and into my forties. I can hardly believe it's done.

Here are only a few of the questions the book asks:

What if we rediscovered our own privacy, our own hidden life, a place where our opinions and ideas didn’t need to be constantly proclaimed, seen, and approved?

What if we understood that the only real problem is meaning, and where we choose to find it or create it?

What if we sensed that none of our categories or attempts at identity can completely represent or explain us? What if we accepted our own complexity?

What if we were taught that the world cannot be perfected, that irregularity cannot be overcome, that ambiguity cannot be ironed out? What if we found ways to live in a difficult and uncertain world, instead of being overwhelmed by its imperfections?

What if we reconsidered what all of this could mean for how we live with culture and religion, education and technology, and how we view the past and live in the present?

An episode from 1/26/23: Tonight I read a handful of poems on the theme of How to live, what to do? How to get by in the world as a devotee of culture, solitude, ritual, beauty, tradition and individuality?

There is of course no one answer, and anyway, poetry should stay as far away from direct “advice,” or proscription of any kind. Still, when I sit back and think about the kind of poems that help me through the day – and the months, and the years – these are some of them:

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 1/18/23: Tonight I ask the question: what is love, and what is love poetry? Are poems about family and friendship love poems, just as much as those about romantic feeling, and longing, and heartbreak?

And even more: what is romantic love? What, for instance, did T. S. Eliot mean when he said, “Love is most nearly itself/When here and now cease to matter,” or when Emily Dickinson wrote of “Wild nights”?

The poems I read are:

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 1/10/23: Tonight we hear from two great writers of fiction, Charles Dickens and Alice Munro.

Through a handful of readings from Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens: A Life, we see how Dickens (1812-1870) was able to juggle, for almost a year, the writing of two novels simultaneously, both for serial publication. Thanks to a letter written by Fyodor Dostoevsky, who visited Dickens in London in 1862, we also hear Dickens speaking privately in a way that he rarely did publicly, admitting that his villains were better reflections of himself than his more lovable and generous characters. We also answer the question: what do David Copperfield and Jane Eyre have in common?

From the introduction to her Selected Stories, Alice Munro (born in 1931, and winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize) describes how, as a homemaker, she came to writing short stories very nearly by necessity. She also discusses how she set her first attempts at fiction in faraway, historical, or Brontë-inspired surroundings, and only later came to see the artistic potential of her own backyard, in the Lake Huron region of Canada.

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 12/23/22: How did the Viking Norse tell a story as important as Ragnarok (the end of the world) in poetry, and then in prose? What does prose require that poetry does not, and vice-versa, especially when the accounts we have are separated by centuries of historical change, and religious conversion? 

In this third episode on Norse Mythology, I read the story of Ragnarok from the Prose Edda (dating to c. 1220), and then its corresponding section in the poem Voluspa (c. 1000) in the Poetic Edda. Each section is preceded by the story of the death of Odin's son, Balder, which in many ways precipitated Ragnarok. I also read from a later poem, Balder's Dreams (c. 1300).

The translation of the Poetic Edda (and Balder's Dreams) that I read from is by Andy Orchard, and the Prose Edda by Anthony Faulkes. The commentary I read from throughout the episode comes from the translation and commentary by Ursula Dronke.

The essential reference books on Norse myth that I will be using for this series are John Lindow’s Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals & Beliefs, Rudolf Simek’s Dictionary of Northern Mythology, and Andy Orchard’s Cassell Dictionary of Norse Myth & Legend.

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 12/15/22: Tonight, I read eleven essential poems from the American poet William Carlos Williams (1883-1963). In the same generation as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Williams is perhaps best known for never becoming an expatriate, and instead living most of his life as a family doctor in Rutherford, New Jersey.

His poems can be found in The Collected Poems Volume I: 1909-1939, The Collected Poems Volume II: 1939-1962, and Paterson. The biographies I read from are Paul Mariani’s William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked, and the essay on Williams’ life at The Poetry Foundation.

The poems I read are:

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 11/29/22: "Give Me a Tarantula" is shorthand for a scattering of thoughts on a handful of things that can't fill their own episode. The first Tarantula collection is here, but tonight I talk about:

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 11/4/22: Tonight, I read ten essential poems from the American poet, Robert Lowell (1917-1977). Lowell was perhaps the last American poet we could possibly call “famous” during his lifetime. The combination of his early success and subsequent struggles with mental illness meant that the public witnessed all of it, from his slow break with formalism, his stint with “Confessional” poetry, and the wildly uneven nature of his huge output. Ten other people would come up ten other poems to include here. These are mine:

They can all be found in his ⁠Collected Poems⁠. His letters are collected in ⁠The Letters of Robert Lowell⁠, ⁠Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop & Robert Lowell⁠, and ⁠The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle⁠. It’s been a while since I read it, but I remember enjoying Paul Mariani’s ⁠Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell⁠.

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 11/4/22: Tonight, I talk about creativity and wonder what actors and writers have in common. In the most general sense of finding solace in the anecdotes from the working lives of other creative people, I also mention the revelation that Inside the Actor's Studio was, for me, in my early twenties.

The springboard for much of what I say is Simon Callow’s ⁠article in the New York Review of Books⁠, which itself is a review of Isaac Butler’s “history” of Method acting, ⁠The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act⁠.

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 10/27/22: Tonight, I talk about our love horror and true crime, and ask: what makes a story truly frightening, instead of just entertaining? What kinds of movies or books, or ways of storytelling, take us beyond entertainment to true horror, to actual fear? For instance, how does the disturbing story of Ed Gein end up, filtered through convention and expectation, as “standard” (even if classic) movies like Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs?

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].