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Lyric Life
Lyric Life episodes
- Franz Wright, "Circle Drawn In Water"Franz Wright's hauntingly beautiful lyric poem imagines a future self who will read this very poem--and try to remember exactly why he wrote it. It's a quiet, jagged exploration of time and the "unsayableness" of the simplest things.21 min
- Elizabeth Bishop, "Sandpiper"What matter more than the sand between your feet? Especially in a world of constant flux. Maybe Bishop's right. Maybe we should look down as the tide roars around us.17 min
- Galway Kinnell, "Blackberry Eating"Come out with Kinnell to the icy blackberry vines and taste what it's like to write poetry.18 min
- Kay Ryan, "Things Shouldn't Be So Hard"This small lyric poem is a quiet yet ironic meditation on what's left after a life--specifically, the marks that should be there but that are not. It's a plainsong evocation of loss with a subtle ironic undertow, a beautifully said poem from one of the United States' best lyric poets.14 min
- Emily Dickinson, Poem #550 ("I measure every Grief I meet")This lyric, one of Dickinson's longest poem and written at the height of the Civil War, explores the nature of grief--and specifically, how to cross the boundary of the emotional experience from one person to the next. How can you tell if someone has felt what you've felt? Should you try? The answer lies in "wonder."25 min
- Pablo Neruda, "Ode To The Present"Bite into it, the present. Or maybe not. Maybe it's too much work to live every day to its fullest. Instead, don't reach for the present. Just watch the clouds. Because they are the present.9 min
- Emily Dickinson, Poem #269 ("Wild nights, wild nights")
Celebrate Valentine's Day with this short poem, Emily Dickinson's intense expression of passion, the hope of physical connection in a stormy world.
14 min - Sharon Olds, "Adolescence"
A sexy and raw poem about sex in adolescence--or if not sex, then getting ready for it, preparing for it, reaching and reaching. A mature poet finds her former self in a place far removed from the mature world--and perhaps more interesting, more dangerous, or at least more honest.
12 min - Adam Zagajewski, "Try To Praise The Mutilated World"
Percy Bysshe Shelley was wrong. Poets are not the unacknowledged legislators of the world. They are the world's voice, saying the things we can't, reminding us that light goes out and returns with shocking abandon.
11 min - Matthew Olzmann, "Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised As A Love Poem"
Olzmann does a brilliant job of summing up the small things that make up love--and the tenuous nature of the truce that is at the very heart of love. It's not the commercial, the consumer culture ending. At least not at first. But it gets there the hard way. The real way.
14 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…
poems, of course! Together, we'll encounter the core things that make us human: love, the inner life, the emotions, our notion of purpose, and our relationship with the natural world around us. Join me. We humans are made for each other!