Versecraft

Read our four poems here! (Note: It may take a little while to load!) 

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Sleerickets
-Poetry Says
-Matthew Buckley Smith
-Alice Allan
-Cameron Clark
-Primordial
-My Robert Bridges episode
-Robert Fagles
-Shane McCrae
-Parallelism
-"The Truly Great" by Stephen Spender
-"Paradise Lost" by John Milton
-Three approaches to poetic composition: Vatic, Cognitive, Exploratory
-"Egg and Dart" by Matthew Buckley Smith
-On the nature of the gods
-"Science, Politics, and Gnosticism" by Eric Voegelin
-Amor Fati
-Thomas Ligotti
-Giacomo Leopardi
-"Cold Turkey" by Joshua Mehigan
-The irony-rich blood of Australian poetry
-Alice's original concluding couplet: "My girls, good girls, too good for marrying/ too good to love a broken-hearted king"
-Serious Australians: Murnane, Murray, and (the entirely real) Malley. 

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 (/ /)

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Autobiographical vs. Confessional 

-"Poetry As Confession" by M.L. Rosenthal

-"Life Studies" and "The Dolphin" by Robert Lowell

-"Genesis" by Delmore Schwartz

-"The Dream Songs" by John Berryman

-Other Confessional pioneers: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, W.D. Snodgrass

-Functions of Confessionalism: Therapy and Social Awareness

-Alternatives to Confessionalism

-"The Sorrows of Young Werther" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

-"Min Kamp" by Karl Ove Knausgard

-"Neo-Confessionalism: Whose Commodity Am I, Anyway?" by Virginia Konchan

-The Identitarian Turn 

The 8 Points:

1. Confessionalism is an exercise in self-absorption.
2. Confessionalism encourages self-absorption and idol worship in its readers.
3. Confessionalism, by privileging extremes of feeling, cultivates a culture of hyper-emotionalism.
4. Confessionalism airs details of the private lives of others without their consent.
5. Confessionalism restricts the possibilities and expectations of the lyric "I."
6. A culture of Confessionalism places unfair pressure on aspiring writers to expose and focus on their personal details for popularity and recognition.
7. Confessionalism, by privileging authenticity above all, makes craftsmanship an afterthought.
8. Confessionalism, by privileging the particular, makes universal insight an afterthought.

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 (/ /)

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-The Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize! 

-Regional pronunciations

-The Israel-Gaza War ("Avenge, O Lord, Thy Slaughtered Saints....")

-Who Is A Jew?

-Judaism: Ethnic, Social, Ritualistic, Theological, Artistic

-Maimonides' 13 Articles of Faith

-The Cosmological Argument

-Life's Will-To-Order

-The meaning of "Follow Nature."

-We are both masks and mouths of God

-The Jobean vision

-Klezmer and Chazzanut

-The Miltonic sonnet

-The sour-sweetness of consciousness

-When does humanity begin?

-Living the apian way 

Text of poem:

Rosh Hashanah

Now to commemorate our species’ birth,

take up the apple, sign of sapience,

sour as much as sweet, divide and rinse

it in the gold which is the sweet of labor’s worth. 

For well we know the sixth day of the earth

was not our dawn—our kind could not commence

until Eve grasped. The cleft from innocence,

and then the toiling to redeem the dearth

of good one finds in looking on one’s soul—

this is to be human. Pluck the fruit,

the flowering of conscience, root and bole

of suffering, and, like the alchemist bee,

work the mind’s dark nectar and transmute

it into gold that sweetens, pays for Eden’s tree. 

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:

-My experience in New York's formalist bohemia

-James Matthew Wilson and his books

-Jacques Maritain & Etienne Gilson

-The iambic decameter effect

-Broken-backed lines

-"The Castle of Thorns" by Yvor Winters

-"The Slow Pacific Swell" by Yvor Winters

-"Mother Carey's Hen" by David Yezzi

-My episode on the above poem

-Encountering water as chaoskampf

-John 13 and 14

-Keats' notion of the "mansion of many apartments"

-"Before the Law" by Franz Kafka

-Paganism as spiritual childhood

-The Univocity vs. Analogy debate between Scotus and Aquinas

-Matthew 4 and 14

-The fisher can't fish himself!

-We should all be more like that giant monster of God, Behemoth

-Job 40

-Edgar Bowers and Sturge Moore

-Baptized in the Sublime

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

No more Versecraft until October! Sorry :( 

BUY SHIRTS

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Matthew comes for my prosodic neck (mea culpa: his reading was first foot trochee, feminine ending).

-Rabbi Neil Blumofe brings up Pirkei Avot

-Susan Spear and Catherine Chandler

-David Yezzi!

-Yezzi's new Anthony Hecht biography, Late Romance

-Matthew interviews David here

-Yezzi's new Selected, More Things In Heaven

-Mother Carey, Mater Cara, Stella Maris

-Metrical schemes and ambiguous scansions

-Salty mirages

-The Tao of the petrel

-Stoicism, Marcus Aurelius, "Following Nature"

-The Post-Symbolist Method

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. 

Order Versecraft merch here! 

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Matthew's new book, Midlife! 

-Joshua Mehigan and his books, The Optimist and Accepting the Disaster

-Josh's interview on SLEERICKETS

-American Naturalism

-Josh's poem Down In the Valley

-Sponges 101

-Parapraxis, aka "The Freudian slip"

-Venice by Herman Melville 

-The gang and I talk The Pathetic Fallacy on SLEERICKETS

-Monism, Pantheism, Mysticism, oh my!

-Zen and the art of microbe filtration

-Everything is connected, man! 

-Learning how to be and not to be mortal.

-The Hindu Asrama system

-Accepting our disaster

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 (/ /)

Topics discussed in this episode include: 

 E.M. Forster

“The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” by Edward Fitzgerald

Thomas Hardy

W.H. Auden

“Troilus and Criseyde” by Geoffrey Chaucer

“Vis and Ramin” by Gorgani

“Wisdom and Wilderness” by Dick Davis

Thom Gunn

Yvor Winters

Fulke Greville

Edgar Bowers

Mozart vs. Haydn

“The Creation” by Joseph Haydn

“Requiem” by W.A. Mozart

“Symphony 9” by Franz Schubert

“Requiem” by Michael Haydn

The Creative and the Erotic

The Spirituality of Old Age

William Wordsworth

“The Poetry of Sturge Moore” by Edgar Bowers (thanks Shane!)

Atheism and Morality

Embracing Nothingness 

“A Personal Sonnet” by Dick Davis

Text of poem:

A Personal Sonnet

How strange this life is mine, and not another,
this jigsaw... each irrevocable piece.
That bad, unfinished business of my brother,
dead at nineteen; my gadding years in Greece
and Italy; life lived, not understood;
a sunset in Kerala, when it seemed
the sun had risen on my life for good.
All this was real, but seems now as if dreamed.

The presences I've loved, and poetry--
faces I cannot parse or paraphrase
whose mystery is all that they reveal;
the Persian poets who laid hands on me
and whispered that all poetry is praise:
these are the dreams that turned out to be real. 

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 (/ /)

Buy Versecraft merch HERE

Read text of poem HERE

Topics discussed in this episode include: 

-No Versecraft next week! :(

-R.S. Gwynn

-On late-bloomers in poetry

-What Krishna meant

-The life-changing power of the unicorn tapestries

-The Amy Clampitt Residency Program and Virginia Konchan 

-The "Tails To Heads" Maneuver.

-"The Eumenides" by Aeschylus

-We're gonna need to see some Id

-Pathos, Bathos, and whoever the other musketeers are...
-Alicia Stallings' wonderful essay on the Parthenon,  "Frieze Frame" 

-I just really wanted an excuse to say "apotropaic"

-Every culture on earth seems to have beef with snakes

-The cultural appropriation of Chaos

-You Kant always get what you want

-The deep logic of tragedy

-We are ourselves both god and monster. 

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 (/ /)

Order Versecraft merch HERE

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Varieties of Modernism: The Big Six

-Formalism and Cosmic Rebellion

-Wilbur's audacious sanity

-The Idea Of Literary Celebrity At Key West

-Accent vs. Stress 

-Measuring my stress levels 

-And isn't it ionic... don't you think? 

-The temptation to see ourselves in Nature

-"I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud" by William Wordsworth

-"The Garden" by Andrew Marvell

-Wilbur's version of Altered States

-Or maybe, Wilbur's version of Go Into The Water

-God dreams of fishes

-Nature itself is the strangest thing you could imagine

Read the text of the poem here

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 (/ /)

Get Versecraft merch HERE! 

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-"T.S. Eliot: The Illusion of Reaction" by Yvor Winters

-Les poetes maudites Tristan Corbiere et Jules Laforgue

-When Eliot was taken to Pound town

-The objective correlative and its problems

-This is basically what East Coker is

-The "Logic" of Imagery (Crane: "Well, one of us is going to have to change!")

-Nancy Drew And The Curious Case of Why Eliot Thinks He's A Classicist

-The Dissociation of Sensibility 

-"Life is difficult, so like... poetry should be difficult, man!" 

-The fallacy of imitative form

-"Sweet Caroline" just sounds better than "Sweet Jacobean"

-A forbidden fruit a day keeps Dr. Jesus away

-Every rose has its thorn, except Mary's

-From Satan's creature to God's preacher

Text of poem:

East Coker IV

The wounded surgeon plies the steel

That questions the distempered part;

Beneath the bleeding hands we feel

The sharp compassion of the healer's art

Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease

If we obey the dying nurse

Whose constant care is not to please

But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,

And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

The whole earth is our hospital

Endowed by the ruined millionaire,

Wherein, if we do well, we shall

Die of the absolute paternal care

That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

The chill ascends from feet to knees,

The fever sings in mental wires.

If to be warmed, then I must freeze

And quake in frigid purgatorial fires

Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

The dripping blood our only drink,

The bloody flesh our only food:

In spite of which we like to think

That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—

Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

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 (/ /)