Poetry Koan

Poetry Koan

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Poetry Koan episodes

  • Episode 55: Schubert's Ghost - Essence and Nihility

    This episode is about Schubert's awful and awesome bohemian life/music/death; a Victor Hugo sonnet from "Les Contemplations" ("La mort et la beauté sont deux choses profondes"); K.G. Nishitani on Nihility, sin and redemption; Fernando Pessoa's Fragment 363 (love, possession and illusion, the interplay of beauty and horror), with visuals courtesy of a walk around Rickmansworth Lake with Max listening to Sviatoslav Richter play Schubert's Piano Sonata No. 18 in G Major: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4o12iQ6n6Rs&ab_channel=SviatoslavRichter-Topic.

    27 min
  • Episode 56: i thank You God for most this amazing (e.e. cummings)

    i thank You God for most this amazing

    day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
    and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
    which is natural which is infinite which is yes
    (i who have died am alive again today,
    and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
    day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
    great happening illimitably earth)
    how should tasting touching hearing seeing
    breathing any--lifted from the no
    of all nothing--human merely being
    doubt unimaginable You?
    (now the ears of my ears awake and
    now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

    7 min
  • Episode 54: Poetry Is A Destructive Force (Awimbawe Chop Suey)

    Brigit Pegeen Kelly reads for Wallace Stevens' poem "Poetry Is A Destructive Force" and we then discuss.

    Poetry Is a Destructive Force
    That's what misery is,
    Nothing to have at heart.
    It is to have or nothing.
    It is a thing to have,
    A lion, an ox in his breast,
    To feel it breathing there.
    Corazón, stout dog,
    Young ox, bow-legged bear,
    He tastes its blood, not spit.
    He is like a man
    In the body of a violent beast.
    Its muscles are his own . . .
    The lion sleeps in the sun.
    Its nose is on its paws.
    It can kill a man.

    TOPICS COVERED: Acceptance, Aggression, Animal nature, Appetite, Blood as essence, Civilization's facade, Consumption, Destructive instincts, Dominance and submission, Ego and identity, Ethical paradoxes, Experiential essence, Fear and survival, Flesh consumption, Human-animal dichotomy, Hunger (physical and metaphorical), Inner violence, Innocence as facade, Instinctual heritage, Joy in presence, Killing for pleasure, Love and connection, Man as predator, Meat industry cruelty, Misery's depth, Moral contradictions, Nature of happiness, Nietzsche's philosophy, Pain and suffering, Pleasure principle, Poetry's power, Predatory behavior, Primal fears, Romantic love, Sacrifice and consumption, Sexuality, Social constructs, Suffering's universality, Survival instincts, Violence inherent in life, Vulnerability of being, Wagner and Beethoven (cultural references), Words vs. experience, Yorgos Lanthimos's "Poor Things"


    Sources and influences: BBC's "The Moral Maze," Frank O'Hara's "Lunch Poems," Nietzsche's writings on transformation and values, Yorgos Lanthimos's film "Poor Things". Music = Fela's Zombie, Tokens' Lion Sleeps Tonight, and System Of A Down's Chop Suey.

    23 min
  • Episode 53: Killing Rabbits (Seven Days/Shelter From The Storm)

    Are there any connections to be made between Miroslav Valek's poem Killing Rabbits (read here by the American poet Brigit Pegeen Kelly), and Craig David's R&B "banger" Seven Days from the year 2000?

    Many.


    Killing Rabbits

    On Sunday after breakfast,
    when air is halfway to ice,
    and thin flutes of mice
    squeak in the chimney.
    On Sunday after breakfast
    to walk on virgin snow
    to the hutches.
    For the pink right to remove your gloves.
    To stick them on the picket fence
    like freshly severed palms,
    and to blow smoke through the wire-net door.
    Then to insert a searching hand,
    and speak sweet words
    through smoke-stained teeth,
    cajolery, fine words,
    to pity a bit,
    to grab the skin firmly
    and to lift it from the cosy straw.
    On Sunday after breakfast
    to sniff ammonia.
    With your left hand to hold the head down,
    watch the ears turn purplish,
    tenderly to stroke the nape,
    blow on it,
    and suddenly with the right hand to strike the nape.
    Once more to feel on your hand
    the pushing off for the unrealised leap,
    to feel a heaviness in your hand,
    sweetness,
    to hear Rabbit Heaven open,
    and big clumps of fur falling down.
    Viennese blue,
    Belgium Giant,
    French Baron,
    Bohemian Skewbald Dappled.
    But even the mongrel with all kinds of blood,
    each dies as fast as the next
    and without a word.
    On Monday to have rings under your eyes, silent.
    On Tuesday to consider the lot of the world.
    On Wednesday and Thursday to invent
    the steam engine and discover stars.
    On Friday to think of others,
    but mainly blue eyes,
    all week to pity orphans
    and admire flowers.
    On Saturday to scrub yourself pink
    and fall asleep on her lips.
    On Sunday, after breakfast,
    to kill rabbits.

    --

    The image I've used for this episode was created by the Oracle after being shown a photograph I'd taken earlier on in the day of a cute little slug and spider duo hanging out together on my windowsill. I asked GPT to commemorate their loving connection through a portrait in the style of Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717).

    Maria Sibylla Merian's work is known for its unparalleled attention to detail, especially in her studies of insects and plants. Merian's work in the late 17th and early 18th centuries was groundbreaking, not only for its artistic beauty but for its scientific accuracy. She meticulously documented the life cycles of insects, making detailed observations that were far ahead of her time, integrating precise scientific detail with artistic elegance. Her dedication to capturing the minutiae of her subjects has left a lasting impact on both art and science, making her work an exceptional example of the fusion of detailed observation and aesthetic beauty.

    23 min
  • Episode 51: Things I Want Decided

    Inspired by Nader, Farritor and Schilliger's recent AI-assisted decryption of ancient texts, netting them the $1m Vesuvius Challenge Prize, I attempt to crack the code of a 1000 year old Japanese poem using Google's Gemini chatbot.

    I pose to Gemini the four cryptic questions in the form of a poem about love's paradoxes by Izumi Shikibu, whose work was celebrated by Kenneth Rexroth with the following words: “Of all the poets of the classical period, she has, to my mind, the deepest and most poignant Buddhist sensibility.”

    Can the latest Oogly Woogly Google tech finally solve riddles that have puzzled human readers and thinkers for centuries?

    --

    Things I Want Decided

    Which shouldn’t exist
    in this world,
    the one who forgets
    or the one
    who is forgotten?
    Which is better,
    to love
    one who has died
    or not to see
    each other when you are alive?
    Which is better,
    the distant lover
    you long for
    or the one you see daily
    without desire?
    Which is the least unreliable
    among fickle things—
    the swift rapids,
    a flowing river,
    or this human world?


    -Izumi Shikibu (tr. Jane Hirshfield)


    25 min
  • Episode 50: LABATYD

    An episode inspired by Tadeusz Dąbrowski's poem "Sentence", Nick Flynn's "Tattoo" and Jack Gilbert's "The Answer":


    SENTENCE

    It's as if you'd woken in a locked cell and found

    in your pocket a slip of paper, and on it a single sentence
    in a language you don't know.

    And you'd be sure this sentence was the key to your
    life. Also to this cell.

    And you'd spend years trying to decipher the sentence,
    until finally you'd understand it. But after a while
    you'd realize you got it wrong, and the sentence meant
    something else entirely. And so you'd have two sentences.

    Then three, and four, and ten, until you'd created a new language.

    And in that language you'd write the novel of your life.
    And once you'd reached old age you'd notice the door of the cell
    was open. You'd go out into the world. You'd walk the length and
    breadth of it,

    until in the shade of a massive tree you'd yearn
    for that one single sentence in a language you don't know.

    TATTOO


    You do know, right,

    that between the no-

    longer & the still-

    to-come

    you are being continually

    tattooed, inked

    with the skulls of

    everyone

    you’ve ever loved—the you

    & the you

    & the you & the you—you don’t

    sit in a chair, thumb

    through a binder, pick a

    design, it simply

    happens each time you

    bring your fingers to your face

    to inhale him back into you . . .

    tiny skulls, some of us are

    covered. You, love, could

    simply tattoo an open

    door, light

    pouring in from somewhere

    outside, you

    could make your body a door

    so it appears you

    (let her fill you) are made

    of light.


    THE ANSWER

    Is the clarity, the simplicity, an arriving
    or an emptying out? If the heart persists
    in waiting, does it begin to lessen?
    If we are always good, does God lose track
    of us? When I wake at night, there is
    something important there. Like the humming
    of giant turbines in the high-ceilinged stations
    in the slums. There is a silence in me,
    absolute and inconvenient. I am haunted
    by the day I walked through the Greek village
    where everyone was asleep and somebody began
    playing Chopin, slowly, faintly, inside
    the upper floor of a plain white stone house.


    TOPICS COVERED: Alienation; Analytical preparation; Ashberry's trees; Authenticity; Birth and self-discovery; Boundaries of essence; Communication dynamics; Confinement vs. liberation; Consciousness; Contemplation of existence; Cosmic symbolism; Cultural backgrounds; Daily Mail controversy; Deciphering life's language; Developmental path; Disorientation and discovery; Emotional reactivity; Enlightenment and insight; Estrangement and alienation; Ethical boundaries in therapy; Experience of reading a poem; Exploration of self; Expression and concealment; Fowles' "The Magus"; Genie metaphor; Gilbert's "The Answer"; Goldilocks metaphor; Human existential trajectory; Identity construction; Illusion of continuity; Individuality vs. collective unconscious; Intercostal nerves and pain; Interpersonal misunderstanding; Interpretation of symbols; Introspection and growth; Kabbalah and symbolism; Language as a cage; Language's role in suffering; Liberation magic; Life-defining tattoos; Linguistic clichés; Locked cell metaphor; Masson's "Final Analysis"; Merwin's trees; Misunderstanding as growth; Mystic union with God; Narrative construction; Neurological aspects of communication; Personal biases; Physical and mental isolation; Poetic inspiration; Potential for exploitation; Psychoanalytic dynamics; Ramanujan's trees; Recycled materials of past experiences; Relational nuances; Revelation of self-awareness; Rites of passage; Self-awareness dawning; Semiotics of Hebrew letters; Silence and bliss; Social contexts; Spiritual symbolism; Stafford's "The Interior Castle"; Symbolic language complexity; Symbolic realm's labyrinth; Symbols interpretation; Tattoo as therapeutic act; Therapeutic boundaries; Transformation through language; Unraveling of human story; Vulnerability and humility.

    [⁠Transcript of episode⁠]

    43 min
  • Episode 49: Variations on the Right to Remain Silent

    Being an Anne Carson megafan (looking forward to her new collection Wrong Norma published this month) I decided to spend an evening with an artefact she created in 2016 called Float comprising 22 chapbooks held together in whatever order you choose to read them in, one of which is an essay that I’m about to read here.

    This essay, "Variations on the Right to Remain Silent", is also linked to my favourite poem in Float which can be found in the chapbook Candor, written originally for a performance piece with dancer Rashaun Mitchell.


    COULD I

    If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself. Consider a person standing alone in a room. The house is silent. She is looking down at a piece of paper. Nothing else exists. All her veins go down into this paper. She takes her pen and writes on it some marks no one else will ever see, she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name.


    I've called "Variations on the Right to Remain Silent" an essay, but I prefer to think of it as An Event, or a kind of Performance - or a weird and delightful lecture.

    If you’re anything like me, finding such a koan is usually followed by an overwhelming desire to share. Hence. 


    POEMS REFERRED TO IN THIS EPISODE:

    Fragment 286

    In spring, on the one hand,
    the Kydonian apple trees,
    being watered by streams of rivers
    where the uncut garden of the maidens [is and vine blossoms
    swelling
    beneath shady vine branches,
    bloom.
    On the other hand, for me Eros lies quiet at no season.
    Nay rather,
    like a Thracian north wind
    ablaze with lightning,
    rushing from Aphrodite
    accompanied by parching madnesses,
    black, unastonishable,
    powerfully,
    right up from the bottom of my feet [it] shakes my whole breathing being.

    -Ibykos (translation by Carson)


    Tubingen, January

    Eyes talked over
    to blindness. Their—
    riddle is the purely
    orginated"—, their
    memory of
    swimming Hölderlintowers, gull-
    whirredaround.

    Visits of drowned joiners to

    these
    diving words:
    Came,
    came a man,
    came a man to the world, today, with
    the lightbeard of
    the prophets: he could,
    if he spoke of this
    time, he
    could,
    only stammer and stammer,
    over-, over-
    againagain.
    ("Pallaksch. Pallaksch.")


    -Paul Celan (translation by Carson)

    TOPICS/THEMES:


    Adam and Eve,

    Aphrodite,

    Artistic representation and interpretation,

    Authenticity and translation,

    Bacon, Francis,

    Catastrophe as a creative force,

    Celan, Paul,

    Cliché and its avoidance,

    Communication barriers,

    Consciousness and self-awareness,

    Divine versus human language,

    Greek lyric poetry,

    Historical and cultural translation,

    Hölderlin, Friedrich,

    Immortality and the divine,

    Individual versus authority conflict,

    Joan of Arc,

    Language's limitations and potential,

    Madness as a method of understanding,

    Metaphorical versus literal interpretation,

    Mythology's influence on art and literature,

    Nature of reality and perception,

    Personal identity and expression,

    Power of silence and absence,

    Rembrandt,

    Relationship between language and thought,

    Role of the translator,

    Sacred versus profane knowledge,

    Struggle against conventional norms,

    Subjectivity of experience,

    Untranslatability and the ineffable,

    Violence and its representation

    54 min
  • Episode 48: You See, I Want A Lot

    An episode inspired by two Dalton Day poems: "Love Poem" and "An Understanding" (from the chapbook Overlay).

    All poems referenced in the episode (in order of appearance):  

    YOU SEE I WANT A LOT

    You see, I want a lot.

    Perhaps I want everything:
    The darkness that comes with every infinite fall
    And the shivering blaze of every step up.

    So many live on and want nothing

    And are raised to the rank of prince
    By the slippery ease of their light judgments

    But what you love to see are faces

    That do work and feel thirst…

    You have not grown old,

    And it is not too late to dive
    Into your increasing depths where life
    Calmly gives out its own secret.

    -Rilke

    LOVE POEM

    Every now & then like a gazillion cicadas

    dig their way out of the dark earth
    & they are screaming against the air,
    against the very thing they have clawed
    their way into, & the time we call summer
    is stitched with this terror, this gratitude
    for knowing something will happen
    & still having some sense of awe
    when it actually does, & what I'm saying is,
    I feel like that, even when I don't.

    -Dalton Day

    AN UNDERSTANDING

    Because howling

    is scary we
    begin to cover
    our eyes.

    Because covering

    our eyes
    is scary we
    begin to go underground.

    Because going underground

    is scary we begin to talk to each other.
    Because talking to each other
    is scary we
    begin to howl.

    One time,

    I knew your name.
    I said it to you every night.
    It sounded like
    AOOOOOOOOO
    AOOOOOOOOO
    AOOOOOOOOO.

    -Dalton Day

    STOP THINKING AND END YOUR PROBLEMS

    How do I know that it’s “good”? I can’t compare it to anything.

    I think it’s largely unconscious, feels like a collective decision, not a chain of events.
    I think you just have to let it wash over you, like pain.
    I think of it as a very dramatic form of giving up.
    (It is pitch black outside, not the colour black but rather a complete absence of light.)
    I think it’s related to how you pick up your friends’ speech patterns. But more unsettling and intense.
    I just think it’s weird to sit around waiting to develop a sixth sense.
    I think it’s fooling yourself into thinking you’re thinking.
    I think it’s philosophical and physical and have not gotten a good answer.

    Everything reminds me of it, but I don’t know what “it” is.

    -Elisa Gabbert (remixed version | full poem)

    --

    LINKS: 

    Saved By A Poem (Kim Rosen)

    Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (David Abram)

    The Wheels On The Bus (Noodle & Pals Version)

    Drop It Like It's Hot (Snoop Dogg)

    Brown Cicada Being Made To Scream By A Human Animal

    Going Sane (Adam Phillips)

    Dvořák: Gypsy Melodies, Op. 55, B. 104 - IV. Songs My Mother Taught Me (Arr. Soltani For Solo Cello and Cello Ensemble)

    I Want A Little Sugar In My Bowl (Nina Simone: Live Version | album track)

    Transcript

    --

    TOPICS COVERED IN THIS EPISODE (in alphabetical order):

    Abram, David; Appetite; Awakenings; Becoming Animal; Being; Buddhism; Carnal Knowledge; Cicadas; Cloned Voices; Consciousness; Creativity; Dalton Day; Death; Desire; Disappointment; Disconnection; Dreams; Ego; Elisa Gabbert; Emergence; Emotion; Empathy; Enlightenment; Essence; Existentialism; Expression; Fear; Fulfillment; Gwyneth Paltrow; Healing; Hot Yoga Teachers; Human Experience; Identity; Imagination; Indigenous Tribes; Inevitability; Insights; Instinct; Intellectual Curiosity; Introspection; Joy; Knowledge; Language; Learning; Liberation; Life; Longing; Love; Love Poem; Mastery; Meaning-Making; Memory; Misfits; Music; Nature; Neurons; Nursery Rhymes; Pain; Passion; Perception; Philosophy; Poem; Poetry; Practice; Psychoanalysis; Psychotherapy; Reciprocity; Reflection; Relationships; Resonance; Rilke, Rainer Maria; Rituals; Rosen, Kim; Samsara; Self-Awareness; Self-Improvement; Shamanism; Sheffield; Social Dynamics; Somatic Memory; South-East Asia; Speechify; Spiritual; Suffering; Symbolism; Terror; Therapy; Thought; Transformation; Transcendence; Understanding; Utterance; Validation; Vision; Voice; Wanting; Workshop; Yoga; Zen.

    28 min

About Poetry Koan

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A poem in the shape of a person talks to a person in the shape of a poem.