Open Windows Podcast

Today’s program follows up on my last program about Advent and presents poems about Christmas from a variety of perspectives. I read poems by Clement Clarke Moore, e.e. cummings, William Butler Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Ken Hada, and Lithuanian poet Nijolė Miliauskaitė. I end with one of my own poems written during and for the Christmas season.  

Today’s program considers the end of the calendar year and some of its significances. In a few days winter officially begins; it’s the winter solstice; it’s the time of Advent and Christmas in the Christian calendar, Hannukah in the Jewish calendar, and Yule for pagans. It’s the time when daylight is short and the end of the calendar year, we believe, promises the return of light. So today I’d like to read some poems that consider the idea of light returning to the world. The coming of light, of course, means that there is also darkness that must be conquered or dispelled. That tension between darkness and light is what gives the return of light its ultimate power. I read poems by Emily Dickinson, Dylan Thomas, Wendell Berry, and Latvian poet Inara Cedrins. I end with one of my own poems that considers the tension between light and dark as well.

Today’s program considers how poetry may serve to identify, comment on, and transcend the varied restrictions placed on us as we work to sustain a civil society and our places in it. Not all of those restrictions are acceptable or palatable. Some of them – beyond the impositions of power, especially political power, that I talked about last time – are quite painful, and the reactions of poets to them are often epiphanic in their lyric expressions. I read poems by Frank O’Hara, Lithuanian poet Marcelijus Martinaitis, Larry Thomas, and Nitoo Das. I end the program with two of my own poems that comment as well on the press of such limitations. 

Today’s program considers poetry as a counterpoint and antidote to the misuse of power, and how poetry is a source of truth in the face of the corruption and lies that political power – and especially today – succumbs to. I begin with a consideration of the Elizabethan idea that poetry rouses us to virtue and then include an excerpt from President John F. Kennedy’s remarkable speech – delivered on the occasion of the dedication of the Robert Frost Library – on the role of poetry and of the artist in a free society. I read poems by Robert Frost, Michelle Hartman, Brazilian poet Ferreira Gullar, Michael Casey, and Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert to illustrate that poetic exhortation to truth. 

Today’s program presents poems about fall, from varied perspectives. Fall has been the subject of many extraordinary poems and today’s program presents a number of representative pieces, some soft in their textures just as the season itself is sometimes wrapped in a kind of gentleness and quietness, and some others a bit harder in their edges, just as the season itself might be. I read poems by William Shakespeare, John Keats, James Wright, Timothy Murphy, William Logan, and the Lithuanian poet Ilzė Butkutė. I end the program with one of my own poems that presents a similar theme.

Today’s program considers poems that are about children or that include children as parts of the poems’ principal themes. There are many contrasting visions of the state in which children live and I take a look at some depictions of children and of childhood in the works of some contemporary poets that may address two of those contrasts – innocence and experience. I read poems by William Blake, Lithuanian poet Nijolė Miliauskaitė, Julie Chappell, Alan Berecka, and Chinese poet Li Nan. I end the program with one of my own poems that presents a similar theme.

Today’s program takes a look at how poems may consider the idea of “happiness” and how some poets may write “happy” poems. The focus, in that consideration, is that happiness may have to do with a sense of contentment. In that light, “happy” poems may reflect a certain contentment in a certain circumstance at a certain time.  That is today’s foundational theme.  I read poems by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Kenneth Patchen, Gary Snyder (by way of Eliot’s “Little Gidding”), Katia Mitova, Arisa White, and Gina Athena Ulysse that resonate with such momentary contentment – with happiness – and I end with a poem of my own that presents a similar theme.

Today’s program follows up on an earlier program about how sound is incorporated into poetry. This episode considers the opposite of sound – “silence” – and how the idea and fact of “silence” may be referred to and explored in poetry. I begin with a look at the idea of the “sound of silence” as presented by Paul Simon in his song “The Sound of Silence.” I read poems by Robert Frost, Steven Schroeder, Paul Friedrich, and Sandra Becker that resonate with the notion of the “sound of silence” and end with two of my own poems that present a similar theme.

Today’s program presents poems by three of the poets whose works were essential influences in the earliest stages of my writing. They include the early William Butler Yeats, Robert Lowell in Lord Weary’s Castle, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti in A Coney Island of the Mind. I end my program with two of my own poems, one from my “Ferlinghetti stage” (written in 1968) and one from my “Lowell stage” (written in 1969).

Today’s program continues my focus on randomly chosen topics, this week considering how poets might present the ocean and some of its nuances and some of its literary contexts in their works. Today’s poems are by Robert Lowell, Loretta Diane Walker, and Albert DeGenova. I also include poems of my own about the ocean.