Open Windows Podcast

In my program today, as a follow up to last week's podcast, I explore immigration more widely and read poems by poets who consider the framework of immigration and the destinies of those who find themselves crossing borders, legally or illegally, to find a new home.  I read poems by Woody Guthrie, Galway Kinnell, Blas Manuel de Luna, Tishani Doshi, Tracy K. Smith, Lory Bedikian, and Adrienne Su. I end the program with one of my own poems.

Today I read poems from my book Lithuanian Crossing. That book explores the immigrant experience in the United States as my wider family, and as I, have experienced its immediate and its long-term effects.  

I continue my consideration of new beginnings today, particularly the new beginnings made possible when trees are planted.  So today, in recognition of their many wondrous qualities, I read poems about trees, by Robert Frost, Joyce Kilmer, Federico Garcia Lorca, Rosanna Warren, W.S. Merwin, Jean Valentine, and Linda Pastan. I end the program with one of my own poems.

The idea of new beginnings, of initiation after conclusion -- and in this program linked to Easter -- guides my selection of poems today. I read poems by T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, William Butler Yeats, Claude McKay, Amy Clampitt, Charles Wright, Anne Sexton, and Elizabeth Raby. I end the program with one of my own poems.

On this last day of March, I have been thinking about time, particularly about endings and how they set the stage for beginnings. In that consideration, I read poems by T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, John Donne, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Strand, Howard Nemerov, and Mona van Duyn. I end the program with one of my own poems.

Today I read poems about the wind, some of them about March winds, to celebrate wind as a natural expression and as a symbolic representation of the actions of the world. In this view, nothing stays calm, but nothing, also, stays forever in motion. I read poems by Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Dylan Thomas, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Katharine Tynan, Sara Teasdale, Claude McKay, and Ted Hughes.  I end the program with one of my own poems.

In celebration of the Ides of March (which marks the full moon) and in honor of St. Patrick's Day, I read poems about the moon and about Ireland by Irish poets: William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Amergin as translated by Lady Gregory, and Derek Mahon. I end the program with poems from my book St. Brigid's Well, written on and about the West Coast of Ireland.

I continue my look today at poems about March and include additional poems about transition and change, as affirmation and as challenge. I read  poems by Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Lucille Clifton, May Swenson, Naomi Shihab Nye, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Michael Jennings. I end the program with two of my own poems.

My program today considers transitions. Poems about the month of March often consider transitions from one state of being to another, from winter to spring on the outside and from various metaphoric and symbolic states on the inside. I read such poems today by William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Antonio Machado, Pablo Neruda, Anna Akhmatova, Philip Levine, and Kornelijus Platelis. I end the program with one of my own poems.

To follow up on my last program, I continue my look at opposites, of two things both operating at the same time, and consider how inherent contradiction leads to unity in duality, to an affirmation of the cosmology of the Yin-yang. I read poems by Walt Whitman, "Anonymous," Paul Laurence Dunbar, Robert Frost, Theodore Roethke, and Alice Walker. I end the program with two of my own poems.