This is Episode 30 of Poems to Live Well By.

Today’s poem is “The Journey” by Mary Oliver. 

Mary Oliver, who died in January 2019, was a beloved American poet whose simple lines, crafted out of the natural world and our place within it, always bring powerful pictures to our minds and empowering encouragement to our hearts. [This is the second time a Mary Oliver poem features on this podcast. Search in your podcast player for Episode 2, “Snowy Night”.]

This poem, “The Journey”, is about hearing the call to the life we know we must lead, and about answering that call, and about the journey between those two moments.

You can read the poem here.

Music Credit:

Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

This is Episode 33 of Poems to Live Well By.

Today’s poem is A Piper by Seumas O’Sullivan.

Seumas O’Sullivan was an Irish poet and literary editor whose work covered the turbulent first half of the 20th century in Ireland, decades of uprising and independence, of civil war and the growing pains of a new country. 

He was well acquainted with the Irish literary scene, being friends with — and sometimes showcasing the work of — the likes of James Joyce, WB Yeats and the young Patrick Kavanagh. This poem, “A Piper”, was later set to song by a number of composers, including Ivor Gurney and Michael Head. It is a simple but moving ditty on the power of music to stop us in our tracks and transport us, momentarily, to a place where we belong.

You can read the poem here.

Music Credit:

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

This is Episode 32 of Poems to Live Well By.

Today’s poem is “Do Not Be Ashamed” by Wendell Berry.

Wendell Berry is an American poet who has published more than 30 collections from 1964 to the present. His work was described by Andrew Angyal, a professor of English and environmental studies, as having “a commitment to the reality and primacy of the actual world”, a world where “nothing exists for its own sake, but for a harmony greater than itself which includes it”. 

Berry’s focus, then, is on the full breadth of the universal: on the world around him and the people within that world. 

This poem “Do Not Be Ashamed” is, I think, about the pressures to conform to the modern world. It was written in 1967, but its resonance, its way of speaking to me and you, its encouragement to find our voice even when doing so separates us from the safety-in-numbers that exists in unthinking compliance, is every bit as relevant today as it was more than half a century ago.

You can read "Do Not Be Ashamed" here.

This is Episode 31 of Poems to Live Well By.

Today’s poem is Landmarks by Breda Wall Ryan, an Irish writer and poet who deserves wider attention.

She has published two collections of poetry, In a Hare’s Eye and Raven Mothers. Her poems are full of powerful imagery, and she often brings the lives of women into sharp focus.

This poem, “Landmarks”, is a poem about place and memory and the connection between the two. You can read the poem here.

[A short note on the text: There are a number of Irish or Gaelic phrases in the poem. The first is lios, which means a ringfort or fairy fort, commonplace in old Irish fields where human culture stretches back thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of years. The other Irish phrases are a list of the names of fields. In the Irish landscape, every field always had a name.]

Music Credit:

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

This is Episode 30 of Poems to Live Well By.

Today’s poem is not, strictly, a poem. But some of the greatest poetry has always been written by songwriters. The boundary between song and poetry is a flimsy one, and just because these words are better known in song does not mean they don’t contain every essence of poetry too. Today’s poem, or song, is “The Best Day of my Life” by Tom Odell and Laurie Blundell. (I believe Odell is the writer of the words and Blundell the producer and musical composer, but both are listed as the songwriters.)

Odell’s lyrics often touch on the challenges of living in the modern world: pursued by expectations, trying to keep up with a fast pace, trying to carve out one’s own place in the world. You only have to read some of the comments posted beneath his official music videos on YouTube to see what his words mean to so many people.

To hear Tom Odell perform this song live, see this deeply moving rendition on the Jools Holland Hootenanny show on the BBC on New Year's Eve 2022, where he combines "The Best Day of My Life" with another of his songs, "Another Love".

Music Credit:

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

This is Episode 29 of Poems to Live Well By.

Today’s poem is "Spring and All", by William Carlos Williams

You can read the poem here.

John Cleese, of Monty Python fame, wrote a well-received book called Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide recently. There’s a conversation between Cleese and Iain McGilchrist, who has been both a practising psychiatrist and literary professor, and who has written vital books on the brain and the mind, including The Master and his Emissary, about the right-left brain divide. In the conversation they discussed poetry and Cleese said, "You shouldn’t try to explain a poem. You should experience it."

If my introductions to the poems I read five days a week here ever come across as an explanation, please feel free to ignore me, and just experience the poem instead.

William Carlos Williams was an American poet whose work spanned the first six decades of the 20th century. In a way he is similar to Wallace Stevens, in that he combined poetry with the professions (Stevens was a legal executive, Williams was a practicing doctor at a New Jersey Hospital for 40 years), but Williams’s poetry is sometimes seen as a little more accessible, maybe a little less complex, but in many ways no less powerful.

This poem, "Spring and All", is a poem about the stirring of the earth in the after-winter. One of the things it speaks to me is how occasional bleakness is always temporary, and always replaced by some new energy of life.

Music Credit:

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

This is Episode 28 of Poems to Live Well By.

Today’s poem is "Forgetfulness" by Billy Collins.

You can read the poem here.

Billy Collins is an American poet, formerly New York State poet and Poet Laureate of the United States in the early 2000s. He has published 17 collections. 

This poem, "Forgetfulness" is lighthearted, but as serious as it gets too, as it considers the processing of ageing, of what is happening in our mind. As always, you’re invited to read the poem, and to allow it to speak to you however it speaks to you.

Music Credit:

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

This is Episode 27 of Poems to Live Well By.

Today’s poem is "Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward", by Anne Sexton,

You can read the poem here.

Anne Sexton was an American poet. She struggled with mental illness for much of her life, underwent extensive psychoanalysis treatment and therapy, and took her own life at the age of 45 in 1974. Her poetry is raw. Indeed, she started to write as a therapeutic outlet to ease her struggles.

This poem, "Unknown Girl in a Maternity Ward", places the reader in as a new mother in a hospital bed, having given birth to a baby who she knows will be taken from her.

Music Credit:

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

This is Episode 26 of Poems to Live Well By.

Today’s poem is “Weakness” by Alden Nowlan.

You can read the poem here.

Alden Nowlan was a Canadian poet, who died at the age of just 50 in 1983. He was taken out of school at the age of just 10 as his family saw academic education as a waste of time, but he soon discovered the power of reading and hitchhiked 20 miles every weekend for books. It was a secretive pursuit, however. Nowlan once said: "I wrote (as I read) in secret. My father would as soon have seen me wear lipstick."

Nowlan’s father is the central figure in this poem, “Weakness”, which captures a single moment in a complex rural life, when weakness is to be stamped out, but still there is a kernel of love and care.

Music Credit:

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

This is Episode 25 of Poems to Live Well By.

Today’s poem is “Rain” by Edward Thomas.

You can read the poem here.

TS Eliot once said that poetry communicates before it’s understood. I encourage you, with every poem on this podcast, to let it speak to you how it speaks. However it lands for you, let it land.

The poem may seem at first reading to be excessively downbeat—about solitude, about suffering, about the dissolution of love, the inevitability of death. 

If that comes across, it’s perhaps understandable—Thomas wrote it while training to go to France with the British Army during World War I, where he was killed in action at the Battle of Arras at Easter 1917. Still, there is some tone of hopefulness within the bleakness, a hope that encourages us to embrace everything about life, including death itself.

Music Credit:

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