Lyric Life

If you know this podcast, you know how much I love the poetry of Emily Dickinson. No, more than love. How much in awe of it I am. I'm in the middle of teaching eight two-hour sessions on her poems--and they're doing to me what they always do: they break my brain.

How did anyone write like this in the nineteenth century?

This poem is one I just finished teaching in a larger set of poems about her relationship with Romanticism and nature. It's an oft-anthologized poem but one that gets at the core of some of what her art does.

"There's a certain slant of light" takes all our expectations of nature poetry, Christian imagery, and personal insight and turns them all on their head. Or worse, on our head, forcing us to realize that revelation is not all it's cracked up to be.

Here's a very short poem by one of my favorite poets, Galway Kinnell: "Prayer." Just three lines, no invocation, no "amen"--instead, an elliptical, lyrical strangeness that gets to the heart of being human, summed up in a form that's usually addressed to the deity.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I work out the ways this poem has hit me in recent weeks, the ways it's become a mantra in my mind as I go about my days. I'm not a religious person. It's all the prayer I could ever recite. But it's enough.

If you know this podcast, LYRIC LIFE, you know I love grit in all its poetic forms. This poem, by the well-known B. H. Fairchild, is a plainsong statement about grit--or more like, about the ambivalence of grit.

How do you escape the world you're in? Is it important to shine a light on it? And what sort of light? Sunlight? Or manufactured light? Because for a poet, it's all manufactured light. And what if that's not enough.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I explore this gorgeously evocative, carefully constructed poem about shifting time, the pull of false hopes, and the truth about light. It can only get you so far.

Esteban Rodríguez' poem "9 El Barril" stopped me cold when I found it on Twitter a while back. It's an elegantly crafted poem that explores the divide between a young boy and his drunk father, out in the yard, burning everything in sight.

The poem is caught on divides in every direction, exploring those gaps and silences through deceptively simple language that keeps moving in and out of poetic forms and rhythms.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I explore this lyric poem by a young poet in Austin, Texas. The poem catches me up short, decenters me as a white reader, and offers the truth about what happens when you see your father for who he really is.

If you'd like to see more of Rodríguez' work, check out his latest collection of poetry here: https://sundress-publications.square.site/product/the-valley-by-esteban-rodriguez-pre-order-/145?cs=true&cst=custom

And for more gritty poetry (the stuff I love), check out pidgeonholes, where this poem was first published.

Grace Paley's evocative and elegiac lyric poem, "When I Was Asked how I Could Leave Vermont In The Middle Of October," is a haunting statement of the truth we in New England live: that we yearn for that gorgeous moment when the leaves are turning orange and red, when in reality death is pressing in, when we're reminded that the world will come back again next year for another go at this gawdy show while we will just be another year older.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I explore this spare, sly, witty poem that dares to answer the fundamental question: How come I have to endure so much beauty when my body is aging away from me?

Winter is too often seen as a curse. It's certainly a curse in Texas while I'm recording this episode. But it's also thought a curse too often where I live in rural New England. But it doesn't have to be.

How do you practice gratitude when you don't know what your grateful for? Or to whom?

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I explore this gorgeous, evocative poem by Dayna Patterson about winter, a mother-to-mother poem, in which "thank you" is a repeated refrain to "our lady of snow forts," the one who makes winter possible.

I found this poem in the magazine Literary Mama. Please check out the magazine here.

Imagistic poetry is tough. It doesn't have that storytelling structure which gives us easy access to its emotional space. But this poem, James Miller's "Song in Flood Time," is just not to be missed. It's modern, current, evocative.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I try to do it justice. I found this poem by accident--or almost. I found it in a tweet from SCOUNDREL TIME, an online journal, part of their "land and weather" series. I read it--and couldn't stop rereading it. So it's here in the podcast Lyric Life. I hope you find its emotional space as glorious as I do.

In this time of Covid, and maybe in all times of human existence, we experience these great emotions of love and grief. And we have only one way to explain them: in storytelling. But there's a deep problem here: we can't experience them in the same way we try to explain them. We can't tell our way out of the fundamental emotions of the human experience.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I take an in-depth look at Mark Doty's gorgeous poem about grief and loss, "The Embrace." It's one of the most honest, heart-felt revelations about loss I've ever read on this podcast.

This Emily Dickinson poem has been on my mind a lot lately--maybe because of the current political climate, maybe because of some personal things, maybe because things come to the mind when they do!

This poem is about light and dark, of course. But it's more about living in the dark. What happens when there's no light? How do you go about your life?

Dickinson has a few answers. Or maybe not answers. Maybe metaphors. She's the bravest I know. She gropes toward an answer, even in the dark. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, on this episode of LYRIC LIFE as I explore this gorgeous, troubling, and, well, true poem.

Nancy Cross Dunham's poem "What I'm Learning About Grief" was part of an NPR challenge to find poems that dealt with grief during the lockdowns of Covid. It's a quiet, devastating exploration of the ways out of grief: from cliché to something quite different, something that is redemptive, never forgetting that the "next night" is always just ahead.