Lyric Life

Lyric Life

By Mark ScarbroughSociety & CultureEducationArtsBooksCourses
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Lyric Life episodes

  • Jane Kenyon, "Alone for a Week"
    What if we need other people, not to make life more meaningful, but to make it less so? What if life alone becomes fraught, difficult, and, well, "allegorical," as Kenyon puts it? A powerful poem for this quarantined moment.
    15 min
  • Philip Levine, "What Work Is"
    Here's Philip Levine's gorgeous meditation on the true nature of work, on how work happens, and finally on what it is: the love we never show because we don't understand "what work is."
    16 min
  • Philip Levine, "Gin"
    Why did we ever start drinking gin? Maybe not for the reasons we think. Maybe there's something deeper than all the reasons, something more human, something more redemptive.
    19 min
  • e. e. cummings, "i carry your heart with me(i carry it in"
    Maybe we all need a little Valentine's Day right about now. Maybe love is the strangest force of the universe. And maybe we, kept apart in this age of pestilence, have to resist the forces in the universe that keep the stars apart and find out ways to carry someone else's heart.
    13 min
  • Robert Pinsky, "Antique"
    When you get beyond all the bombast of love, all that's left is the image of the one you love, held for a moment in a diminished world, held against the "acids of breath."
    16 min
  • Philip Levine, "The Simple Truth"
    Philip Levine's deceptively simple "The Simple Truth" lays out what makes us human: the ability to taste simple boiled potatoes, seasoned with butter and salt. It has been a part of my life for decades now. It is lodged in my soul. I can't wait to share it with you.
    17 min
  • Emily Dickinson, Poem #282 ("We play at paste")

    Emily Dickinson's short poem, the third of the four she sent to Thomas Wentworth Higginson to begin their relationship, is a salvo right across his bow. She either takes apart his misogyny, or his elite editorial status, or both, and more--because, after all, this is Dickinson's writing. It never says just one thing--except her rage at and acceptance of her situation.

    15 min
  • Elizabeth Bishop, "One Art"
    The art of losing isn't hard to master. Or so Bishop says. Except it is--even when I tried hard to lose every last thing in my life. I was once Bishop's disciple. I was a champion at losing. Until I started living in the open space this poem created.
    16 min
  • Wallace Stevens, "Anecdote of the Jar"

    Stevens' poetry is always weird, strange, elliptical. He may even surpass himself in this poem about an empty jar set in the wilderness of Tennessee. What does this jar do? Nothing less than bring meaning to the world. Or maybe rob it of all meaning.

    19 min

About Lyric Life

From the publisher's feed

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, on this bookmarked journey through some of the best lyric poetry in English . I've got a passion for small, evocative poems. I'd like to share that with out--as well as those…