Poetry Koan

By Free Association RadioArts

Poetry Koan episodes

January 29, 2023 Episode 47: Nadia
My last relationship - rescripted as a Romantic Comedy.
--
TODAY

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary's cage,
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight
on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants

from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,
holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,
well, today is just that kind of day.
-Billy Collins
--
Take this quiz to discover your primary love language: https://5lovelanguages.com/quizzes/love-language
Take this quiz to discover your Enneagram Personality style and wings: https://www.eclecticenergies.com/enneagram/test-2
For further info, please get in touch: cannabiskoan AT gmail.com
27 min
January 19, 2023 Episode 46: Object Relations
Vienna, 1884. A young man, highly intelligent, profoundly ambitious, but also nervy and anxious in character is stressing out about his life and prospects. He is something of a fearful over-thinker, which is to say an Enneagram Six in personality style, prone to panic attacks, depression, phobias, and various forms of paranoia. In this period of his existence, he is experiencing something that modern millennials often call their “quarter-life crisis”.
Little does he know at the time, that his quarter-life-crisis will provide him (as well as us) with a revolutionary new idea about consciousness and the mind. This idea will shape not only the rest of his momentous life, but also ours, especially when it comes to how we understand and perceive our selves.
--
A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
-Stephen Crane
47 min
January 14, 2023 Episode 45: The Rookie
"Hey Siri, other than buying weed from scallywags in my local park, what other avenues might you suggest I try in order to purchase this psychoactive dried plant matter?"
Enter stage left: Harrow School of Weed.
--
ROOKIE
You thought you could ride a bicycle
but, turns out, those weren’t bikes
they were extremely bony horses. And that wasn’t
a meal you cooked, that was a microwaved
hockey puck. And that wasn’t a book that was
a taco stuffed with daisies. What if
you thought you could tie your laces?
But all this time you were just wrapping
a whole roll of sellotape round your shoe and
hoping for the best? And that piece of paper
you thought was your tax return?
A crayon drawing of a cat. And your best friend
is actually a scarecrow you stole from a field
and carted away in a wheelbarrow.
Your mobile phone is a strip of bark
with numbers scratched into it.
Thousands of people have had to replace
their doors, at much expense, after you
battered theirs to bits with a hammer
believing that was the correct way
to enter a room. You’ve been pouring pints
over your head. Playing card games with a pack
of stones. Everyone’s been so confused
by you: opening a bottle of wine with a cutlass,
lying on the floor of buses, talking to
babies in a terrifyingly loud voice.
All the while nodding to yourself like
‘Yeah, this is how it’s done.’
Planting daffodils in a bucket of milk.
-Caroline Bird
35 min
January 13, 2023 Episode 44: The Stairway
So let’s say you’re a middle-aged man seeking to “get into” cannabis, but not living in a country where it’s available to buy legally, and no friends or acquaintance who use the substance anymore, what strategies for acquiring the drug might you wish to follow?
This episode of Cannabis Koan is sponsored by The Life You Can Save whose mission is to inspire more people to give to the most effective ways to tackle global poverty and suffering.
THE STAIRWAY
The architect wanted to build a stairway
and suspend it with silver, almost invisible
guy wires in a high-ceilinged room,
a stairway you couldn't ascend or descend
except in your dreams. But first--
because wild things are not easily seen
if what's around them is wild--
he'd make sure the house that housed it
was practical, built two-by-four by
two-by-four, slat by slat, without ornament.
The stairway would be an invitation
to anyone who felt invited by it,
and depending on your reaction he'd know
if friendship were possible.
The house he'd claim as his, but the stairway
would be designed to be ownerless,
tilted against any suggestion of a theology,
disappointing to those looking for politics.
Of course the architect knew
that over the years he'd have to build
other things the way others desired,
knew that to live in this world was to trade
a few industrious hours for one beautiful one.
Yet every night when he got home
he could imagine, as he walked in the door,
his stairway going nowhere, not for sale,
and maybe some you to whom nothing
about it need be explained, waiting,
the wine decanted, the night about to unfold.
-Stephen Dunn

40 min
December 27, 2022 Episode 43: Like Someone In Love
Why do we habitually use mind-altering substances and strategies in ways that are not always healthy? Here's a very simple explanation which holds in some way (I believe) for all of us. Cannabis, and non-cannabis users alike.
--
THE DOOR
Go and open the door.
Maybe outside there’s
a tree, or a wood,
a garden,
or a magic city.
Go and open the door.
Maybe a dog’s rummaging.
Maybe you’ll see a face,
or an eye,
or the picture
of a picture.
Go and open the door.
If there’s a fog
it will clear.
Go and open the door.
Even if there’s only
the darkness ticking,
even if there’s only
the hollow wind,
even if
nothing
is there,
go and open the door.
At least
there’ll be
a draught.
-Miroslav Holub
26 min
December 25, 2022 40. Rilke's Panther & The Cage of Self: Part III (Longing)
What might the essence of Rilke’s Egoic soul reveal to us, if we tried to put it into words, using all our knowledge of the poems transmitted through an Ich, Rilke’s Ich (aka Ego), over many years, as well as the letters, and notebooks, and biographies we have of him to guide us? This might also include our ability, now a century after Freud, to apply everything we have learnt in the last 100 years about the mechanism, or the Operating System of the Ego, the Self?
The word that I find best describes both the Panther’s predicament as well the predicament of Rilke’s Ich, is LONGING. It is this painful, and somewhat absurd emotional fixation that this episode mainly focuses on by examining the following three poems:
THE PANTHER
His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly--. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.
-Rainer Maria Rilke (tr. Stephen Mitchell)
YOU WHO NEVER ARRIVED
You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me—the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods—
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.
You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house—, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon,—
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back
my too-sudden image. Who knows? perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening.
-Rainer Maria Rilke (tr. Stephen Mitchell)
LOVE DOGS
One night a man was crying,
Allah! Allah!
His lips grew sweet with the praising,
until a cynic said,
"So! I have heard you
calling out, but have you ever
gotten any response?"
The man had no answer to that.
He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.
He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,
in a thick, green foliage.
"Why did you stop praising?"
"Because I've never heard anything back."
"This longing
you express is the return message."
The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.
Your pure sadness
that wants help
is the secret cup.
Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.
There are love dogs
no one knows the names of.
Give your life
to be one of them.
― Jalal Al-Din Rumi (tr. Coleman Barks)
--
Transcript: http://stevewasserman.co.uk/rilkes-panther-the-cage-of-self/
30 min
December 24, 2022 Episode 42: Teenage Dirtbag
The highs and lows of teenage dirtbag Arthur Rimbaud.
--
SENSATIONS
Through blue summer nights I will pass along paths,
Pricked by wheat, trampling short grass:
Dreaming, I will feel coolness underfoot,
Will let breezes bathe my bare head.

Not a word, not a thought:
Boundless love surging through my soul,
And I will wander far away, a vagabond
In Nature—as happily as with a woman.

-Arthur Rimbaud (1870)

45 min
December 23, 2022 Episode 41: Soul & Body
We are all addicted to something.
--
THE JOURNEY
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around
and inside you
kept shouting
their bad advice –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do –
determined to save
the only life you could save.
-Mary Oliver

It is incumbent on all of us
to care for the passage of our souls—
for how grievous our fate when death arrives,
disjoining the siblings,
once going together,
body and soul!
-Anonymous (from: Soul & Body, an Anglo-Saxon poem from the 10th Century)

13 min
November 10, 2022 Episode 41: The Resignation of Trees
RESIGNATION
I like trees because they seem more resigned to
the way they have to live than other things do.
Willa Cather
Here the oak and silver-breasted birches
Stand in their sweet familiarity
While underground, as in a black mirror,
They have concealed their tangled grievances,
Identical to the branching calm above
But there ensnared, each with the others' hold
On what gives life to which is brutal enough.
Still, in the air, none tries to keep company
Or change its fortune. They seem to lean
On the light, unconcerned with what the world
Makes of their decencies, and will not show
A jealous purchase on their length of days.
To never having been loved as they wanted
Or deserved, to anyone's sudden infatuation
Gouged into their sides, to all they are forced
To shelter and to hide, they have resigned themselves.
-J.D. McClatchy
--
Transcript: http://stevewasserman.co.uk/resignation-by-j-d-mcclatchy-2/
29 min
November 06, 2022 Episode 40: Rilke's Panther & The Cage of Self - Part III (Longing)
What might the essence of Rilke’s Egoic soul reveal to us, if we tried to put it into words, using all our knowledge of the poems transmitted through an Ich, Rilke’s Ich (aka Ego), over many years, as well as the letters, and notebooks, and biographies we have of him to guide us? This might also include our ability, now a century after Freud, to apply everything we have learnt in the last 100 years about the mechanism, or the Operating System of the Ego, the Self?
The word that I find best describes both the Panther’s predicament as well the predicament of Rilke’s Ich, is LONGING. It is this painful, and somewhat absurd emotional fixation that this episode mainly focuses on by examining the following three poems:
THE PANTHER
His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly--. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.
-Rainer Maria Rilke (tr. Stephen Mitchell)
YOU WHO NEVER ARRIVED
You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me—the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods—
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.
You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house—, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon,—
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back
my too-sudden image. Who knows? perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening.
-Rainer Maria Rilke (tr. Stephen Mitchell)
LOVE DOGS
One night a man was crying,
Allah! Allah!
His lips grew sweet with the praising,
until a cynic said,
"So! I have heard you
calling out, but have you ever
gotten any response?"
The man had no answer to that.
He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.
He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,
in a thick, green foliage.
"Why did you stop praising?"
"Because I've never heard anything back."
"This longing
you express is the return message."
The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.
Your pure sadness
that wants help
is the secret cup.
Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.
There are love dogs
no one knows the names of.
Give your life
to be one of them.
― Jalal Al-Din Rumi (tr. Coleman Barks)
--
Transcript: http://stevewasserman.co.uk/rilkes-panther-the-cage-of-self/
30 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.

Share Poetry Koan

Sign up to save your podcasts

Poetry Koan

Poetry Koan episodes

About Poetry Koan