Versecraft

Mea culpa re line 8: I confusedly combined both possible readings-- this is either acephalous hexameter or first foot anapest iambic pentameter.  

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Write to me about classes! 

-The Error by Don Paterson

-Idealism, Nominalism, Transcendental critique

-Plato, Plotinus, Ockham, Kant

-Paterson's band, Lammas

-His many books

-Michael Donaghy

-Blank Verse by Robert B. Shaw, and the 3 Types

-Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil"

-Pseudo-Dionysius and the Via Negativa

-Plotinus's plenum meets Nagarjuna's vacuum (sunyata)

-God as Eclipse (and my episode/poem on this idea)

-Auto-martyrdom on Yggdrasil

-Beholding the Nothing That Is

Text of poem:

Phantom V

We come from nothing and return to it. 

It lends us out to time, and when we lie

in silent contemplation of the void

they say we feel it contemplating us. 

This is wrong, but who could bear the truth.

We are ourselves the void in contemplation. 

We are its only nerve and hand and eye. 

There is something vast and distant and enthroned

with which you are one and continuous,

staring through your mind, staring and staring

like a black sun, constant, silent, radiant

with neither love nor hate nor apathy

as we have no human name for its regard. 

Your thought is the bright shadows that it makes 

as it plays across the objects of the earth

or such icons of them as your mind has forged.

The book in sunlight or the tree in rain

bursts at its touch into a blaze of signs. 

But when the mind rests and the dark light stills,

the tree will rise untethered to its station

between earth and heaven, the open book

turn runic and unreadable again,

and if a word then rises to our lips 

we speak it on behalf of everything. 

Support the show

VISIT MY WEBSITE HERE.

BUY VERSECRAFT MERCH HERE.

VISIT THE VERSECRAFT SUBSTACK HERE.

Please subscribe, rate, and review! Thanks so much for listening.

You can leave me a tip, support the podcast, or request a commission here!

TikTok:  @versecraft
Send me a note at: [email protected]

My favorite poetry podcasts for:
Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets 
Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says
The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight 

Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet: 
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)

Mea culpa: Several times I refer to "Sunlight" as "Sunshine." Blame it on the LSD (which was called "Orange Sunshine"). 

Text of poem here

Topics discussed in this episode include: 

-Let me know what you think I should teach!

-On The Morning Of Christ's Nativity by John Milton

-The Gas Poker by Thom Gunn

-The Movement

-Syllabics as gateway drug

-Lucy In the Sky With Demanding Forms

-Thom Gunn, Renaissance man

-Golding's Metamorphoses

-Philosophical religions

-A cursory and woefully incomplete history of Platonism

-Adonais by that son-of-a-Bysshe Percy Shelley

-An Essay On Man by Alexander Pope

-Plato's Symposium (see the famous Diotima section)

-Christmas Day 2023 was the day I learned the sun was green

-Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens 

-A song of experience in search of deeper innocence

Support the show

VISIT MY WEBSITE HERE.

BUY VERSECRAFT MERCH HERE.

VISIT THE VERSECRAFT SUBSTACK HERE.

Please subscribe, rate, and review! Thanks so much for listening.

You can leave me a tip, support the podcast, or request a commission here!

TikTok:  @versecraft
Send me a note at: [email protected]

My favorite poetry podcasts for:
Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets 
Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says
The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight 

Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet: 
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)

Text of poem here.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-The universecraft 

-Shout out to the Aussies!

-Tim Tams SLAM, y'all

-Alice Allan, Poetry Says, and our episode on Gwen Harwood

-The Australian Augustans: Hope, McAuley, Stewart

-Paul Valery's "Le Cimitiere Marin"

-Tertius paeon reviewed

-The ocean motif, and my episodes on JMW's Through the Water and Yezzi's Mother Carey's Hen

-Quickness, Fastness

-Why graveyards are killer 

-In Soviet Russia, bones wear YOU.

-The jack-o-lanterns of our labor

-Love as the light upon the waters of death

Support the show

VISIT MY WEBSITE HERE.

BUY VERSECRAFT MERCH HERE.

VISIT THE VERSECRAFT SUBSTACK HERE.

Please subscribe, rate, and review! Thanks so much for listening.

You can leave me a tip, support the podcast, or request a commission here!

TikTok:  @versecraft
Send me a note at: [email protected]

My favorite poetry podcasts for:
Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets 
Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says
The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight 

Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet: 
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)

Songs discussed in The Rainbow Mythos include:

Tarot Woman (lyrics here)

Rainbow Eyes (lyrics here)

Catch The Rainbow (lyrics here)

The Man On The Silver Mountain (lyrics here)

The Temple Of The King (lyrics here)

Stargazer (lyrics here)

A Light In The Black (lyrics here)

Topics discussed include:

Brian Brodeur's new book, Some Problems With Autobiography

Katie Hartsock's new book, Wolf Trees

My episode on Brian Brodeur

Poetry lyric vs. Song lyric

Poetic vs. Mythopoetic

C.S. Lewis on George Macdonald

Juke-box musicals

A brief history of the mighty Dio

An Angel Is Missing by Ronnie and the Redcaps

Elf, Deep Purple, Rainbow, and Ritchie Blackmore

Black Sabbath, Dio, and Heaven & Hell

The rainbow motif

The myth of Icarus

The tragedy of civilization

The wheel keeps turning

Support the show

VISIT MY WEBSITE HERE.

BUY VERSECRAFT MERCH HERE.

VISIT THE VERSECRAFT SUBSTACK HERE.

Please subscribe, rate, and review! Thanks so much for listening.

You can leave me a tip, support the podcast, or request a commission here!

TikTok:  @versecraft
Send me a note at: [email protected]

My favorite poetry podcasts for:
Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets 
Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says
The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight 

Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet: 
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)

Text of poem here

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Romanticism, Modernism, and The Lyric

-Defining ourselves against the vices of our age

-Historical problems with Lyric

-Modernism as pharmakon

-T.S. Eliot's essay, Andrew Marvell

-T.S. Eliot's essay, The Metaphysical Poets

-Marvell's Horatian Ode

-Marvell's Country House poem, Upon Appleton House

-Marvell's "Collige, Virgo, Rosas" or "Carpe Diem" poem, To His Coy Mistress

-Paradise Lost 

-An anatomy of Marvell's style

-La Corona by John Donne (my episode on Donne here)

-A Wreath by George Herbert (my episode on Herbert here)

-Stichic vs. Strophic

-On Mr. Milton's Paradise Lost by Marvell

-The selfish heart of the artist

-The Faerie Queene 

-Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins

-The terrifying prodigality of God

Support the show

VISIT MY WEBSITE HERE.

BUY VERSECRAFT MERCH HERE.

VISIT THE VERSECRAFT SUBSTACK HERE.

Please subscribe, rate, and review! Thanks so much for listening.

You can leave me a tip, support the podcast, or request a commission here!

TikTok:  @versecraft
Send me a note at: [email protected]

My favorite poetry podcasts for:
Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets 
Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says
The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight 

Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet: 
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)

Text of poem here

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-The Stafford Challenge

-The Kiowa people

-Frederick Goddard Tuckerman

-Winters and Bowers

-"The Death Of Sitting Bear"

-"House Made Of Dawn"

-"The Way To Rainy Mountain"

-The Native American Renaissance

-Mixed meter, mixed KINDS of meter

-Remember, catalexis = without final unaccented syllable (opposite of acephaly)

-The inadequacy of language

-How should we mourn?

-The anecdote of the goose

-The Most Of It by Robert Frost

-The Conference of the Birds by Farrad Ud-din Attar (translated by Dick Davis!)

-Pythagorean mysticism

-The Tyger by William Blake 

-You have to feel it to believe it

-The poet's task 

Support the show

VISIT MY WEBSITE HERE.

BUY VERSECRAFT MERCH HERE.

VISIT THE VERSECRAFT SUBSTACK HERE.

Please subscribe, rate, and review! Thanks so much for listening.

You can leave me a tip, support the podcast, or request a commission here!

TikTok:  @versecraft
Send me a note at: [email protected]

My favorite poetry podcasts for:
Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets 
Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says
The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight 

Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet: 
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)

Text of poem here

 Mea culpa: When I said "fearful," I meant "fearsome"

L'esprit d'escalier: "Above the boneyard burn its golden eyes" has a similar euphony to Donne's famous: "A bracelet of bright hair about the bone."
 

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Anthony Hecht's new Collected Poems, edited by Philip Hoy

-David Yezzi's new biography of Hecht, Late Romance

-The caprice of the canon

-Frost, Hawthorne, and Puritan allegory

-"Dramatic" line breaks

-Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath

-The diction of the male gaze

-The Sleerickets episodes (Part 1 and Part 2) with myself, Matthew, and Alice on Hecht's essay, "The Pathetic Fallacy."

-Sextod

-Sin as the mother of death (see Paradise Lost)

-Sex as prayer

-The connotations of magnesium

-Leda and the Swan by W.B. Yeats

-A Barred Owl by Richard Wilbur

-The symbology of owls

-What fell beast is this?

-Edificiary chakras

-Hughes the murderous crow

Support the show

VISIT MY WEBSITE HERE.

BUY VERSECRAFT MERCH HERE.

VISIT THE VERSECRAFT SUBSTACK HERE.

Please subscribe, rate, and review! Thanks so much for listening.

You can leave me a tip, support the podcast, or request a commission here!

TikTok:  @versecraft
Send me a note at: [email protected]

My favorite poetry podcasts for:
Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets 
Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says
The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight 

Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet: 
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)

Text of poem here.

Mea culpa: Please read "tercets" for "triplets"
 

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-J.V. Cunningham (see my episode on him here)

-The Tribe of Ben (Jonson)

-Check out Dan's books here!

-The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets

-Accentual or Accentual-Syllabic?

-Macro-rhythmic modulation

-The soul of wit?

-My episode on Emily Dickinson

-God Is Dead!

-The Lascaux cave paintings

-Genesis 2:7

-Allegory of the Cave 101

-The cry of Sex-Birth-Grief

-Ecclesiastes

-Voltaire (who was actually not an atheist, but a deist)

-"Mere Christianity" by C.S. Lewis

-"Is Theology Poetry?"  by C.S. Lewis

Support the show

VISIT MY WEBSITE HERE.

BUY VERSECRAFT MERCH HERE.

VISIT THE VERSECRAFT SUBSTACK HERE.

Please subscribe, rate, and review! Thanks so much for listening.

You can leave me a tip, support the podcast, or request a commission here!

TikTok:  @versecraft
Send me a note at: [email protected]

My favorite poetry podcasts for:
Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets 
Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says
The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight 

Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet: 
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)

Text of poem here

Topics mentioned in this episode include:

-Jungenstil, The Vienna Secession, The Belle Epoque

-Leonie Adams (see my episode on her here)

-The hard-hearted bravado of early 20th century American poetry by women

-The double twist of the hybrid sonnet

-Spondees and dactyls

-Theodore Roethke (see my episode on him here)

-"Ode On The Death Of Pius XII" by A.D. Hope

-See my episode on A.D. Hope here

-The bitterness of beauty to the grieving, and the beauty of grief.

-"The Wasteland" by T.S. Eliot (see my episode on Eliot here)

-"Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens (see my episode on Stevens here)

-Heraclitus and The Buddha

-To die, or to die into greater life? 

Support the show

VISIT MY WEBSITE HERE.

BUY VERSECRAFT MERCH HERE.

VISIT THE VERSECRAFT SUBSTACK HERE.

Please subscribe, rate, and review! Thanks so much for listening.

You can leave me a tip, support the podcast, or request a commission here!

TikTok:  @versecraft
Send me a note at: [email protected]

My favorite poetry podcasts for:
Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets 
Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says
The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight 

Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet: 
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)

Read our four poems here. (Note: The file may take a while to load!)

Topics mentioned in this episode include:

-My David Yezzi episode
-Ryan Wilson
-Three kinds of formal poets: puzzle solvers, natural rhymers, aesthetes
-Paul Celan
-Literary Matters
-John Berryman's "Dream Songs"
-Wait Until Dark
-Object Permanence (here's Matthew's poem on the subject!)
-"The Uncanny" by Sigmund Freud
-The gnosticism of disability
-The spiritual mimesis of architecture
-Abbot Suger
-The aesthetics of tourism
-New York's Art Deco skyscrapers
-Frank Lloyd Wright
-The "Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body" topos (see Marvell's example)
-Rainer Maria Rilke
-The recently deceased Louise Gluck
-The anti-Romantic thesis behind the Romantic anti-hero
-"Paradise Lost" by John Milton
-"Brand" and "Peer Gynt" by Henrik Ibsen
-My turophilia and background as a fromagier
-Making mozzarella with Dave in Colorado
-An enthusiastic endorsement of raw milk
-Illegal cheese!
-The world of fragrances and parfumerie
-The amber accord
-Not that Richard Burton, this one
-An invitation to psychedelic druidcraft

Support the show

VISIT MY WEBSITE HERE.

BUY VERSECRAFT MERCH HERE.

VISIT THE VERSECRAFT SUBSTACK HERE.

Please subscribe, rate, and review! Thanks so much for listening.

You can leave me a tip, support the podcast, or request a commission here!

TikTok:  @versecraft
Send me a note at: [email protected]

My favorite poetry podcasts for:
Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets 
Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says
The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight 

Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet: 
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)