Open Windows Podcast

December can offer a full range of weather conditions in Connecticut, and the first week of this December here has seen two major storms, known as Nor'easters, marked by heavy rain and wind. Today I read poems about rain, including winter rain, by Matsuo Basho, William Shakespeare, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Carl Sandburg, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Creeley, and Ken Hada.  I end the program with one of my own poems.

December is a month of anticipation and waiting. It is not only the season of Advent that defines this month, with its promise of new light and its groundwork of redemption as the month concludes, but it is also a month that clearly frames the idea and fact of waiting as an essential parameter of human life. I read poems about waiting in that light by William Butler Yeats, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Galway Kinnell, Pablo Neruda, Alice Walker, and Walt Whitman.  I end the program with one of my own poems.

In my last program, as part of my focus on memory and on remembering November, I read poems about the results of struggle and adversity during this month. My youngest brother struggled and died in November, two years ago. I found a manuscript of poems at the bottom of one of the drawers in his desk, hidden under piles of other papers and folders. The book -- titled The Winds of Spirit Mountain --was published in 2019. I read several of the poems from his book today and end the program with one of my poems about my brothers.

As the November skies dull to a heavier gray, I have been thinking about the hard days we all have had and that we remember perhaps especially as the year draws to its close. So today I read poems about struggle and adversity by Shakespeare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Derek Walcott, Miller Williams, Lucille Clifton, Charles Bernstein, and Javier Zamora. I end the program with one of my own poems.

In my last program I read poems about El Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead in Mexico, which takes place in early November. Today I read poems about November more generally, by Thomas Hood, Thomas Hardy, Adelaide Crapsey, Robert Frost, Tomas Transtromer, and Rita Dove.  I end the program with one of my own poems.

In my last few  programs I read poems about various places as they are remembered and presented. I want to continue that trajectory today, but turn my focus instead to people we remember. That is especially poignant today, two days after the holiday celebration of El Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, in Mexico. I read poems by Lope de Vega, Davina Guadalupe Ponce Martinez, William Butler Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Maya Angelou, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Sherry Craven.  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. Today I read poems about being poor in America, living in and remembering a place that, at least in the popular imagination, is a place where poverty and its consequences seem to be endemic in profoundly visible ways. That is, living in Appalachia. I read poems by Hayden Carruth, Jean Ruth Ritchie, Loretta Lynn, Billy Edd Wheeler, Lee Howard, and Wendell Berry.

As I have suggested in my past few programs, "remembering" and "memory" are major elements in the creation of poetry. Today I read poems about Oklahoma, focusing principally on poems that remember the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression there, and ending with a poem about contemporary Oklahoma. They are by Woodie Guthrie, Roy Turner, Langston Hughes, Donald Justice, Bruce Springsteen, and Ken Hada.

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 took a look last time at remembered cities in general. Today I will read poems about San Francisco, by Vachel Lindsay, Robert Penn Warren, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Richard Brautigan, Nellie Wong, Adele Foley, and Diane di Prima.

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 -- cities-- as sources of memory and as springboards for various thematic considerations. I read poems by Walt Whitman, William Blake, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, and Nijolė Miliauskaitė. I end the program with one of my own poems in which a city plays a visible and important role.