Open Windows Podcast

As I have suggested in my past few programs, "remembering" and "memory" are major elements in the creation of poetry. There are essential focuses or common themes that poems that include memories often use. I take a look today at another one of those focuses, memories of places in our lives -- farms -- as sources of memory and as springboards for various thematic considerations.  I read poems by Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, W.D. Ehrhart, and Timothy Murphy. I end the program with one of my own poems in which life on a farm plays a visible and important role.

As I have suggested in my past few programs, "remembering" and "memory" are major elements in the creation of poetry. There are essential focuses or common themes that poems that include memories often use.  I take a look today at another one of those focuses, memories of places in our lives -- today, mountains -- as source of memory and as springboard for various thematic considerations.  I read poems by Li Po, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Gary Snyder, and Joni Mitchell. I end the program with two of my own poems in which mountains play a visible and important role.

As I have suggested in my past few programs, "remembering" and "memory" are major elements in the creation of poetry. There are essential focuses or common themes that poems that include memories often use.  I take a look today at another one of those focuses, memories of places in our lives. I begin with one of those places -- the ocean -- as source of memory and as springboard for various thematic considerations.  I read poems by Matthew Arnold, Emily Dickinson, Robert Lowell, Pablo Neruda, and Penelope Pelizzon.  I begin the program with two of my own poems about the ocean.

As I have suggested in my past few programs, "remembering" and "memory" are major elements in the creation of poetry. There are essential focuses or common themes that poems that include memories often use. I take a look today at another one of those focuses, memories of people in our lives, particularly in our lives when we were children. This week I read poems about friends  -- especially as friends are remembered -- by James Wright, Derek Walcott, Arisa White, and Vytautas Bložė. I end the program with one of my own poems.

As I have suggested in my past few programs, "remembering" and "memory" are major elements in the creation of poetry. There are essential focuses or common themes that poems that include memories often use.  I take a look today at another one of those focuses, memories of people in our lives, particularly in our lives when we were children. This week I read poems about family -- especially as families are remembered -- by Ogden Nash, William Wordsworth, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Michael Luis Medrano, John Yao, and Ruth Stone.  I end the program with one of my own poems.

As I have suggested in my past few programs, "remembering" and "memory" are major elements in the creation of poetry. There are essential focuses or common themes that poems that include memories often use.  I take a look today at another one of those focuses, memories of loss and especially the loss of home. I read poems by Nijolė Miliauskaitė, Elizabeth Bishop, Abraham Lincoln, Zeina Azzam, and Rainer Maria Rilke.  I end the program with one of my own poems.

As I suggested in my program last week, "remembering" and "memory" are major elements in the creation of poetry. There may be some essential focuses or common themes that poems that include memories use.  I take a look today at another one of those focuses, memories of childhood. I read poems by William Blake, Dylan Thomas, William Matthews, Seamus Heaney, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Mary Oliver. I end my program with two of my own poems.

As I suggested in my program last week, "remembering" and "memory" are major elements in the creation of poetry. There may be some essential focuses or common themes that poems that include memories use.  I take a look today at one of those focuses, a theme that may be a principal dimension of what we write about, and that is love remembered because it has, somehow, been lost. I read poems by William Butler Yeats, Pablo Neruda, Sylvia Plath, Lorraine Henrie Lins, Algirdas Zdanys, and Susana Cuartas.   I end my program with two of my own poems.

My program today is about memories, things and people and events remembered. I try to affirm what I believe about the act of writing: that we shape the world through texts and use those texts to present or to hide truths. Those truths, in this context, are often things we remember and shape into something we can grasp and understand and accept or reject.  Once they are on the page, they can be directed and controlled, much more than they ever were as they were unfolding. I read poems by William Shakespeare, Robert Lowell, Hugh Seidman, David Breeden, Patricia Goodrich, and Li Nan.  I end my program with two of my own poems about the remembering.

I continue my programs about summer, today considering the silence and stillness of summer nights. A lovely quiet, a certain silence, outside, late at night, after midnight especially, fills the summer night air. It may be interrupted, here and there, now and then, by a passing and typically unexpected noise that we hear through open windows. The poems I read consider that: poems by Paul Simon, Cole Porter, T.S. Eliot, Ken Hada, Kerry Shawn Keys, and Antanas A. Jonynas. I end my program with two of my own poems about the silences of a summer night.