This is Episode 75 of Poems for the Speed of Life.

Today's poem is "⁠It Aint What You Do It’s What It Does to You", by Simon Armitage

Simon Armitage is the British Poet Laureate. He has published more than 20 collections of poetry, starting with Zoom! in 1989.

The poem in this episode is one of his “Marsden Poems”, which were gathered together in his 2020 book Magnetic Field, a collection which centres around his home village of Marsden in West Yorkshire. (A note on the text: he mentions Black Moss, which is a reservoir high in the Pennines near Marsden.)

You can read the poem here.

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This is Episode 74 of Poems for the Speed of Life.

Today's poem is "What You Mean to Me" by Penny Boxall.

Penny Boxall is a Scottish poet. She has published three collections of poetry, including Ship of the Line, which won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Prize, Scotland’s most prestigious poetry award. She is currently Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Lucy Cavenish College, Cambridge. 

As with all the introductions to poems on this podcast, my perspective is necessarily incomplete. If this or any of the poems in this podcast speak to you in other ways, please allow that to happen. This poem, to me, is a poem about place and identity, and about where place and identity come fully together: home. And it’s also about what happens when our home is no longer home, when we choose or are forced to move and our home becomes — finally, almost grotesquely — home to someone else.

⁠You can read the poem here⁠⁠.

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This is Episode 73 of Poems for the Speed of Life.

Today's poem is "It's Our Dance", by Brendan Cleary.

Brendan Cleary is an Irish-born poet who has lived in England for more than 40 years. He has published a number of collections and was also the publisher and editor of The Echo Room, a poetry magazine which ran in the 1980s and 90s.

One of the most powerful capacities of poetry, one of the most important jobs a poem can do, is to capture a single moment in life that in turn captures a broad expanse of a lifetime.

This poem, a poem about a song by Nina Simone, and a dance, and the love of life, and maybe even the love of love, does just that.

You can read the poem here⁠⁠.

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Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://onsound.eu/⁠⁠⁠⁠  | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com

This is Episode 72 of Poems for the Speed of Life.

Today's poem is "Great Plain" by Kevin Powers.

Kevin Powers is an American fiction writer and poet. He is also an Iraq War veteran and he rose to prominence in 2012 when his debut novel, The Yellow Birds, which drew on his experiences of that conflict.

That book drew comparisons with a classic of war writing, The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, about the Vietnam War and this poem “Great Plains” also reminded me of O’Brien.

There’s a line in O’Brien’s work that goes, “Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to” and that haunting line came back to me as I read and experienced this poem, a powerful piece about man’s inhumanity to man, yes, but also about the things we’re sometimes forced to do, or choose to do, or end up doing by the terrible joined forces of momentum and circumstance.

You can read the poem here⁠.

***

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Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | ⁠⁠⁠https://onsound.eu/⁠⁠⁠  | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com

This is Episode 71 of Poems for the Speed of Life.

Today's poem is "Because" by James McAuley.

James McAuley was a 20th century Australian poet, essayist and academic. He took poetry’s art and craft so seriously that he was behind one of history’s most elaborate (and successful) literary hoaxes, ridiculing modernist verse by creating a fictional modernist poet and manufacturing his entire body of work in one day. The creation, Ern Malley, was heralded as a genius by the Australian modernist poets whose work he despised as lacking depth and meaning and artfulness.

This poem, “Because”, is less about art and more about life. It's about parenting and being parented and the deep and lasting impact that relationship has on the full spectrum of one’s life.

There is a depth of feeling here, and a perceptiveness about truly complex matters, that is profound.

As a man, one of the things I’m most interested in is the relationships between fathers and sons, and this poem has so much to say on that that it would be unfair to say any more. I’ll let the poem speak.

You can read the poem here.

***

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This is Episode 70 of Poems for the Speed of Life.

Today's poem is "The Peace of Wild Things" by Wendell Berry.

Wendell Berry is a farmer, novelist and activist, has been producing poetry for more than half a century. 

It might just be the increased availability of news and events and emotions from across the world through the unprecedented and fundamentally life-changing technology of the Internet, but there does seem to be a lot of despair—and its even more dangerous children, apathy and meaninglessness—around right now. 

Consider this poem an antidote. It starts with the line “When despair for the world grows in me” and what follows is a treatment protocol for the despair we all sometimes feel.

⁠You can read the poem here⁠.

This is the second Wendell Berry poem to feature on this podcast. Scroll in your podcast player to find Episode 32, "Do Not Be Ashamed".

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This is Episode 69 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "Instructions on Not Giving Up" by Ada Limón.

Ada Limon is an American poet and, since 2022, the US Poet Laureate, the first Latina-American woman to hold that position. She has published five collections of poetry.

This poem is a sonnet, 14 lines, but it defies the structure that often seems to come with the sonnet form. It is defiant in more than structure too. It looks beyond the colour of spring—nature’s “baubles and trinkets”—to look at what lies beneath that colour: the “strange idea of continuous living, the thing that runs through us all, carrying us through the endless seasons, and that carries on through life and death itself.

It tells us of the permanence of the world, in both brightness and dullness, and acts, I think, as a sort of life-raft to hold onto on those darker days.

⁠You can read the poem here⁠.

This is the second Wendell Berry poem to feature on this podcast. Scroll in your podcast player to find Episode 32, "Do Not Be Ashamed".

***

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Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | ⁠https://onsound.eu/⁠  | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com

This is Episode 68 of Poems for the Speed of Life.

Today's poem is "The Lost Land" by Eavan Boland.

Eavan Boland was an Irish poet who died in 2020 at the age of 75. She taught at Stanford University professor for the last 25 years of her life. 

This poem was written, I believe, soon after she left Ireland for the west coast of America. 

Posted here for the first time on March 17th, 2023, St Patrick’s Day, it is an exploration of two types of grief: the bittersweet grief of seeing children grow up and move on to their own lives, and the grief of saying farewell—of leaving home, or being left behind.

You can read the poem here.

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This is Episode 65 of Poems for the Speed of Life. 

Today's poem is "The Resemblance Between Your Life and a Dog" by Robert Bly.

Robert Bly was an American writer, poet, essayist and men’s groups leader who died in 2021 at the age of 94. He is perhaps best known now for his bestselling prose book Iron John, a study of the male experience and role through old myths and stories. 

This poem, written towards the end of his career, is a humble and at times bleak reflection on how life goes. 

Whatever our hopes or dreams or plans, life will inevitably have something else in store for us. If we can accept that, whatever it is, all the better.

You can read the poem here.

***

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Music Credit:

Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/  | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com