Poetry Koan

Poetry Koan

By Free Association RadioArts
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Poetry Koan episodes

  • Episode 47: Peaches

    An episode inspired by two Wendell Berry poems:

    A MEETING

    In a dream I meet

    my dead friend. She has,
    I know, gone long and far,
    and yet she is the same
    for the dead are changeless.
    They grow no older.
    It is I who have changed,
    grown strange to what I was.
    Yet I, the changed one,
    ask: "How you been?"
    She grins and looks at me.
    "I been eating peaches
    off some mighty fine trees."

    EXCEPT

    Now that you have gone

    and I am alone and quiet,
    my contentment would be
    complete, if I did not wish
    you were here so I could say,
    “How good it is, Tanya,
    to be alone and quiet.”
    --
    LINKS:
    Jack Black's Peaches

    Bieber's Peaches

    Mahalia's Peaches

    Virgins? What Virgins? (Moslem Martyrs)

    Adam Phillips & Devorah Baum (Attention Seeking)

    Text version (with longer/better explanation of W.D. Hamilton's R-values!)


    19 min
  • Episode 46: The World’s Loneliest Whale Sings the Loudest Song

    An episode inspired by Noor Hindi's poem 🐳 The World’s Loneliest Whale Sings the Loudest Song 🐳


    The World’s Loneliest Whale Sings the Loudest Song & Other Confessions

    I won’t make metaphors out of fish.

    If I have to die, I choose the ocean. If I have to live, I choose you.

    You: Everyone I’ve ever mourned.

    I believe less & less of sunlight these days. I won’t die alone.

    To awaken crying is to awaken displaced. Ghost of your joy in the bathtub. A face in the mirror. Your nephew’s painting in the foyer.

    My mother cried in bedrooms growing up. I would study her for hours.

    In a study, researchers learned patients who cried less are likely to have dismissive attachment styles.

    Today, every bedroom in the house is mine. I stopped crying at age 12.

    As a child, I spoke a language no one understood.

    Research suggests loneliness increases cardiovascular disease.

    When my cousin died, she died alone. When the world collapsed around Darwish, he wrote of coffee and sex.

    When you held my body close to yours, I thought of clementines, sweet citrus, all the world’s lemons we’d temper with honey.

    The world’s loneliest whale sings the loudest song.

    This is what you’ll tell me the first time we meet.

    And I’ll think about the ocean. And I’ll think about you.

    I never learned how to swim. I’ve been drowning my whole life.

    Studies suggest drowning lasts 1-3 minutes. But I’ll never stop grieving.

    Scientists are still searching for the 52-hertz whale. But I swear he’s here. In my bedroom.

    And I can hear him. And he’s telling me I can stop.

    -Noor Hindi


    🐳


    The Loneliest Whale In The World

    The Tone Deaf Saltburn TikTok Dance Craze

    Noor Hindi - FPAC Speaker Series Presentation

    13 min
  • Episode 45: Breathless

    In this episode, I explore our longing for basic trust, weaving together poetry (Pat Schneider, Rilke), philosophy (the Stoical idea of Logos, Cosmic Indifference, Animism), and psychology (Ego Psychology, Object Relations, and the developmental impact of early relationships) in order to make sense of mistrust and the desire for deeper, authentic connections in our digital and fragmented world.

    I suggest that this existential trust, foundational to well-being, is often found in the poetics of objects, putting us on the path to discovering the You we need in our lives.


    SEGMENTS:


    (00:00) The Art of Online Personas: Decoding the Facade of Dating Profiles

    (03:00) Unveiling Basic Trust: Perspectives from A.H. Almaas on Digital Connections

    (04:35) Stoic Echoes in the Modern Psyche: Linking Logos to Basic Trust

    (05:18) Rational Cosmos, Illusion of Free Will: Stoicism's View on Life's Order

    (08:41) Embracing Cosmic Virtue: Stoicism's Guide to Harmonious Living

    (9:50) Cosmic Indifference versus Inherent Benevolence: A Philosophical Dilemma

    (10:41) Science and the Search for Universal Goodness: The Stoic Conundrum Faced With Camus' Absurd

    (12:46) The Formation of Self: Insights from Ego Psychology and Early Experiences

    (13:24) Decoding Personality: The Role of The Enneagram and MBTI in Ego Development

    (19:09) Assessing Basic Trust: A Basic Trust Assessment

    (21:58) Animism: Rebuilding Trust through a Connected Worldview?

    (25:20) Ordinary Things, Extraordinary Patience: Finding Connection in Animism?


    The Patience of Ordinary Things


    It is a kind of love, is it not?
    How the cup holds the tea,
    How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
    How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
    Or toes. How soles of feet know
    Where they’re supposed to be.
    I’ve been thinking about the patience
    Of ordinary things, how clothes
    Wait respectfully in closets
    And soap dries quietly in the dish,
    And towels drink the wet
    From the skin of the back.
    And the lovely repetition of stairs.
    And what is more generous than a window?


    -Pat Schneider


    The Inner Rose


    Where is there for this inner
    an outer? Upon which hurt
    does one lay such fine linen?
    And which heavens are reflected within them,
    upon the interior seas
    of these open roses, these carefree ones, see:
    how loose in looseness
    they lie, as if a trembling hand
    could never tip them over.
    They can hardly hold themselves
    erect; many allow themselves
    be filled all too full and flow
    over from inner space
    into the days, which, ever
    more and more full, close in upon themselves,
    until the entire summer becomes
    a chamber, a chamber in a dream.


    -Rainer-Maria Rilke (tr. Mitchell)


    Resources and Reference:

    -⁠Facets of Unity⁠ (A.H. Aalmas)

    -In Our Time: Marcus Aurelius (Radio 4)

    -The Handbook of Contemporary Animism (edited by Graham Harvey)

    -Graham Harvey’s Animist Manifesto

    -Michal Zerkowski's article about Irving Hallowell's research on the Ojibwe animism

    -The Perception of The Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill (Tim Ingold)


    Music:

    -⁠Breathless⁠ (Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds)

    -⁠Chips & Dip⁠ (Sam Greenfield)

    -⁠With You ⁠(Teenage Fanclub)

    -⁠Nocturnes & Meditations ⁠(Matt Tondut) ⁠-Goldberg Variations, BWV 988: Variation 1 (Arr. for Harp)⁠ - Parker Ramsay

    ⁠-When Everything Fades⁠ (Matt Tondut)

    31 min
  • Episode 44: Insanity

    Primarily an excuse to play you Tindersticks' gorgeous "Travelling Light", but also an attempt to unravel in 15 minutes the world of referential delusions, where ordinary events assume personal significance in ways that cross the boundary between quirky beliefs and mental disorders.

    Meet, my ex-client 'Eric' and his unshakable notion that love signals are being played to him, and him alone, from a DJ's playlist who professes to have no romantic interest in him at all.

    The poem mentioned in the episode is this one by Elizabeth Bishop:


    One Art

    The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
    so many things seem filled with the intent
    to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
    Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
    of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
    The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
    Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
    places, and names, and where it was you meant
    to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
    I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
    next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
    The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
    I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
    some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
    I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
    —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
    I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
    the art of losing’s not too hard to master
    though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

    20 min
  • Episode 43: Loving What Is

    Parallels drawn between Marcus Aurelius's Meditations and Byron Katie’s Loving What Is, with a nod to the Philosopher King’s son, Commodus (“a bit of a shit” - Cassio Dio, History of the Roman Empire).


    Also, some late Wallace Stevens, doing "The Work”.


    The Plain Sense of Things

    After the leaves have fallen, we return

    To a plain sense of things. It is as if
    We had come to an end of the imagination,
    Inanimate in an inert savoir.
    It is difficult even to choose the adjective
    For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
    The great structure has become a minor house.
    No turban walks across the lessened floors.
    The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
    The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
    A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
    In a repetitiousness of men and flies.
    Yet the absence of the imagination had
    Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
    The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
    Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence
    Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
    The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
    Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
    Required, as a necessity requires.

    17 min
  • Episode 42: Ravenous Want

    Our desire for meaningful communication with an inner or outer You in W.S. Graham's What Is The Language Using Us For, and Maureen McClane's Open Sky.


    OPEN SKY

    open sky—
    what you want?
    what you want I
    want for you, want
    whatever you want
    when you say you want
    everything under the sky—
    is that what everyone wants
    never to die—
    what you want?
    what you want I
    want for you, want
    what you want
    when you say you want
    never to die
    except when you want
    nothing—
    what you want?
    nothing's something
    to want, something
    annihilating,
    something beyond want
    that stops at nothing—
    ravenous want

    4 min
  • Episode 41: A Song For You

    An exploration of Rilke's poem "⁠Du im Voraus verlorne Geliebte⁠," ("You Who Never Arrived"), alongside Leon Russell's "⁠A Song for You⁠," and Martin Buber's book ⁠I and Thou⁠, delving into themes of elusive love, the intricacies of human connection, and the profound nature of both inner and outer I-You-ness. 

    (00:00) "⁠You, In Advance, Lost Beloved⁠” 

    (01:30) Only You (1994 Romantic Comedy - ⁠watch on YouTube⁠)

    (03:39) The "Mission" of Rilke's "Du Im Voraus" & The Duino Elegies

    (07:52) Learning Rilke on Walks in the Kent Countryside in 2019

    (09:19) Rilke's Death at The Age of 51: Slain By A Rose?

    (10:38) The Main Ideas Behind Buber's Book Ich und Du (I and Thou)

    (13:25) Split Brain Personalities

    (15:00) GPT-4's Enneagram Nursery Rhyme Inspired By "⁠This Little Piggy⁠"

    (15:56) The Left-Hemisphere "I" Narrator Vs. the Right-Hemisphere "Self"

    (18:15) Primate Evolution in the Great Rift Valley: From Forest Dwellers to Survivors of the Savannah

    (20:48) Greed is Good? (⁠watch clip on YouTube⁠)

    (21:40) The Emergence of the 'I' in Human Evolution

    (23:10) Present-Focused Animate Consciousness vs. Conceptual Consciousness

    (24:17) Social Interactions and Survival in Early Human Communities

    (25:28) Theory of Mind

    (31:03) Conceptual Self-Description and Mental "I"-Focused Time Travel

    (32:27) The "I" as Podcaster, the Self as Listener 

    (35:25) The Story Behind Leon Russell's "A Song For You"

    (37:54) Analysis of Russell's Vocal Style 

    (39:51) Leon Russell's Childhood and Struggles With Disability

    (44:25) Evolutionary Human Lifespan Limits

    (44:35) Vulnerability

    (47:54) The Desire To Be "Seen Through"

    (52:00) Buber's Three Spheres of I-You Relating

    (53:20) Podcasts As Messages In A Bottle

    (55:35) Finding You in Slug Trails and Solitary Spiders 

    (56:30) Samuel Barber's ⁠Agnus Dei⁠ "You"

    (57:00) Hello/Goodbye


    --

    [Du im Voraus]

    Du im Voraus

    verlorne Geliebte, Nimmergekommene,
    You, the loved one lost
    in advance, you who never arrived,
    nicht weiß ich, welche Töne dir lieb sind.
    I don’t even know what sounds you like best.
    Nicht mehr versuch ich, dich, wenn das Kommende wogt,
    zu erkennen. Alle die großen
    Bilder in mir, im Fernen erfahrene Landschaft,
    Städte und Türme und Brücken und un-
    vermutete Wendung der Wege
    und das Gewaltige jener von Göttern
    einst durchwachsenen Länder:
    steigt zur Bedeutung in mir
    deiner, Entgehende, an.
    so I try to discern you. All the great
    images in me—the landscape widening far off,
    cities and towers and bridges and un-
    suspected turns in the path
    and the forcefulness of those lands
    once intertwined with gods:
    they all mount up in me to signify
    you, forever not here.
    Ach, die Gärten bist du,
    You are the gardens.
    ach, ich sah sie mit solcher
    Hoffnung. Ein offenes Fenster
    im Landhaus - , und du tratest beinahe
    mir nachdenklich heran.
    With such hope
    I saw them. An open window
    in the country house–, and you almost
    stepped out pensively to meet me.
    Gassen fand ich, -
    du warst sie gerade gegangen,
    und die Spiegel manchmal der Läden der Händler
    waren noch schwindlich von dir und gaben erschrocken
    mein zu plötzliches Bild.
    I found streets, —
    you had just walked down them,
    and sometimes the mirrors in the merchants’ shops
    were still drunk with you and with a start
    reflected my too-sudden image.
    Wer weiß, ob derselbe
    Vogel nicht hinklang durch uns
    gestern, einzeln, im Abend?
    –Who knows
    if the same birdsong did not ring through both of us
    yesterday, each of us alone, at evening?


    1 hr
  • 50: Episode Sabbath

    I love it when a plan comes together, don't you?

    This is the final episode of my personal Cannabis Koan, giving thanks to three people who were instrumental in helping me redefine and recalibrate my relationship with The Green One.

    --

    Marijuana, Cognition, Psychosis, Addiction: Mind & Matter podcast episode

    Decoding Cannabis: Aerez Batat's podcast

    Consciously High: Aerez's online program designed to help people change  their relationship with cannabis.

    Sabbath and the Art of Rest: Ezra Klein's discussion with Judith Shulevitz about what it means to rest and revitalize each week.


    17 min
  • Episode 48: Nobody's Fault

    Do you want to hear the happiest bass-line ever recorded? Here you go!

    --

    KINDNESS

    Before you know what kindness really is

    you must lose things,
    feel the future dissolve in a moment
    like salt in a weakened broth.
    What you held in your hand,
    what you counted and carefully saved,
    all this must go so you know
    how desolate the landscape can be
    between the regions of kindness.
    How you ride and ride
    thinking the bus will never stop,
    the passengers eating maize and chicken
    will stare out the window forever.

    Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness

    you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
    lies dead by the side of the road.
    You must see how this could be you,
    how he too was someone
    who journeyed through the night with plans
    and the simple breath that kept him alive.

    Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

    you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
    You must wake up with sorrow.
    You must speak to it till your voice
    catches the thread of all sorrows
    and you see the size of the cloth.
    Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
    only kindness that ties your shoes
    and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
    only kindness that raises its head
    from the crowd of the world to say
    It is I you have been looking for,
    and then goes with you everywhere
    like a shadow or a friend.

    -Naomi Shihab Nye

    --

    Enneagram Four & Nine in relationship: https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/relationship-type-4-with-type-9

    20 min

About Poetry Koan

From the publisher's feed

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