However well the poet bears the unclear word within themselves, they are dedicated to precision. To arrive without fully knowing one’s function in language, but utter faith in it nonetheless. An episode riffing off a lecture to some education retirees the other day & the function of the poet in the world. The Laureates out […]

“Silent friend[s] of many distances,” I write to you from the mountains where Rilke wrote his final elegies and the whole of the Sonnets to Orpheus. I am thankful to the Dartmouth Leslie Center Faculty Research Fellowship funds for their support. Someone in Berlin said to me, You’re going to where there are cow bells. […]

“Silent friend[s] of many distances,” I write to you from the mountains where Rilke wrote in final elegies and the whole of the Sonnets to Orpheus. I am thankful to the Dartmouth Leslie Center Faculty Research Fellowship funds for their support. Listen to the promo and follow link to follow on Patreon and hear it […]

We’re talking today with Mathias Svalina and David St. John about the new collected Larry Levis book Swirl and Vortex, which has just come out from Graywolf Press. Mathias has been a long-time reader and scholar of Levis’ work, and so I knew I needed him on here today. He’s been on this podcast many […]

“What kind of knowledge, if any, does poetry provide?” Joseph Acquisto, French language and poetry professor at the University of Vermont, asks in his incredible book, Poetry’s Knowing Ignorance (Bloomsbury). Friedrich Schlegel said that “one can say that it’s a distinguishing mark of poetical genius to know a great deal more than he knows he […]

Bianca Stone talks with Mathias Svalina and Ben Pease about two poems, Paul Celan’s posthumously published book Schneepart, “I HEAR THE AXE HAS FLOWERED,” and “[God Talks to Each of Us as He Makes Us]”. https://www.mathiassvalina.com

There is a tension in the poet’s longing towards the complete book, wanting not to be too swept up in the commercialism, yet needing some kind of readership to engage with the poems. As poetry has evolved from the utterance from the mouth alone, and has changed and moved with technology over the centuries, consciousness […]

Bianca Stone is joined with the host of Moral Minority Podcast, Charles Dashings, for the penultimate moment: Rilke’s 9th elegy. The Ninth Elegy. The “last but one.” We are not actually at the end, yet the end has somehow begun, like a wave just as it begins to form into a visible wave, nearing the […]

“With all its eyes the natural wo,rld looks out / into the Open. Only our eyes are turned / backward, and surround plant, animal, child / like traps, as they emerge into their freedom. Bianca and Mathias Svalina talk about Rilke’s 8th elegy! Find out more about Mathias Svalina here! ‘

Bianca Stone reads and discusses Rilke’s 7th Elegy, translation by Stephen Mitchell. Also some Wallace Stevens, Larry Levis, Lucretius, and more…. Not only all the dawns of summer–, not only how they change themselves into day and shine with beginning. Not only the days, so tender around flowers and above, around patterned treetops, so strong, […]