Lyric Life

By Mark Scarbrough

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... more

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FAQs about Lyric Life:

How many episodes does Lyric Life have?

The podcast currently has 85 episodes available.

Lyric Life episodes:

November 15, 2019 Luke Kennard, "The Persistence of Rubbish"
Luke Kennard's very contemporary poem almost overwhelms its reader with imagery--until the poem makes a strange turn into story, incipient, vague, but visible, connecting back to itself and to "us," the ones made of nothing but dust.
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26min
November 08, 2019 John Keats, "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer"
The limits of poetry, explored through the limits of language, in a poem full of gaps and silences, written in that gorgeous language that only Keats can craft.
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27min
October 25, 2019 Emily Dickinson, Poem #304 ("The nearest dream recedes")
With this second in a mini series on the poems Emily Dickinson sent to Thomas Wentworth Higginson (see episode 30 for the first one in this series), let's try to understand why she claims dreams recede. Or is it heaven that recedes? Or maybe poetry? Or Dickinson herself? This poem is a confusing interpretive knot--like the poet herself. Perhaps that's why she sent it to the man she wanted to become her "preceptor."
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23min
October 18, 2019 Ellen Bass, "Indigo"
A haunting and provocative poem, honest and painful, true and gorgeous, about what it's like to dream yourself into another life when you can't live your own--or dream yourself into another life when your own presses too near for comfort.
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28min
October 11, 2019 John Keats, "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles"
I've seen this sonnet the same way for thirty years. Then a student made me question everything I think about it. That's the secret of great poetry: it has the power to make itself new over and over again, even an old chestnut like this sonnet by John Keats.
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21min
October 04, 2019 Emily Dickinson, Poem 204 ("I'll tell you how the sun rose")
In few spare words, the New England poet baffles us and leaves us with the sheer beauty of her words, her craft. She'll tell us how the sun rose. Except she won't.
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22min
March 27, 2019 Galway Kinnell, "The Correspondence School Instructor Says Goodbye To His Poetry Students"
What's at the bottom of poetry? Maybe of every work of literature, these brave and crafted acts of communication between a writer and his or her audience? Maybe what's left is loneliness.
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17min
August 25, 2017 Tracy K. Smith, "The Universe As Primal Scream"
This poem--ode? lyric? both?--is a meditation on the metaphysical reality of the physical world, including the kids screaming upstairs. Or is it? Or is the racket merely a racket? And does it matter since something may--or may not--be waiting for us to "sweep our lives clean" and the knock the mirrors off our walls.
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19min
August 18, 2017 Percy Bysshe Shelley, "England In 1819"
Percy Bysshe Shelley is angry--angry at the disenfranchisement, political unrest, authoritarian rule, and top-down rot in the England of his day. But he might as well have been talking about ours, predicting us almost two hundred years ago. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, in reading and thinking about this provocative sonnet.
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19min
August 11, 2017 Ruth Bavetta, "Matins"
Ruth Bavetta's poetry is part of the American plainsong tradition--but with a twist. Rather than being part of the quiet contemplative tradition, it's an exuberant plea to embrace the world in the art of bread-making, an early morning task that can "fill the house with praise."
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13min

FAQs about Lyric Life:

How many episodes does Lyric Life have?

The podcast currently has 85 episodes available.