Open Windows Podcast

I continue my late summer hiatus and now present a few programs that were the least listened to during the past two and a half years, with the hope that I might inspire some additional interest in them. My program today is about how heaven may be used in poetry as an essential structural motif and as part of an organizing metaphoric and thematic literary frame. The program takes a look at various depictions of heaven in the work of four Lithuanian poets – both in their pagan and in their Christian iterations – and in three of my own poems.

I continue my late summer hiatus and now present a few programs that were the least listened to during the past two and a half years, with the hope that I might inspire some additional interest in them. My program today continues my consideration of how poets use references to the senses as essential structural motifs and as parts of organizing metaphoric and thematic literary frames. This program – about the sense of smell – takes a look at the possible meanings of smell, in their various explications, and how they might be used in poetry to create mood and modulate tone. I read and consider two of my translations of Lithuanian poems, each of which presents different perspectives on smell, and a poem by Jamie Stern. I end the program with two of my own poems.

I continue my late summer hiatus and now present a few programs that were the least listened to during the past two and a half years, with the hope that I might inspire some additional interest in them. My program today -- originally broadcast -- is the second program in which I focused on New England urban poets and the complex range of human issues unfolding in urban settings.  I read poems by Julia Alvarez, Ocean Vuong, Richard Wilbur, Martin Espada, and Maya Williams.

It's late summer and I continue time my short hiatus, replaying a few of my most popular programs during these weeks (and starting next week the least popular, with the hope that they might find some rekindled interest). Today’s program --originally broadcast in December 4, 2019 -- considers poetry as a counterpoint and antidote to the misuse of power, and how poetry is a source of truth in the face of the corruption and lies that political power – and especially today – succumbs to.  I begin with a consideration of the Elizabethan idea that poetry rouses us to virtue and then include an excerpt from President John F. Kennedy’s remarkable speech – delivered on the occasion of the dedication of the Robert Frost Library – on the role of poetry and of the artist in a free society.  I read poems by Robert Frost, Michelle Hartman, Brazilian poet Ferreira Gullar, Michael Casey, and Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert to illustrate that poetic exhortation to truth. 

It's late summer and time for a short hiatus, so I will be replaying a few of my most popular programs in the next few weeks (and after that, the least popular, with the hope that they might find some rekindled interest). Today’s program, which dates back to March 2019, focuses on longing, love, pagan romantic relationships, and the Odyssey. It includes my translations of poems by Lithuanian poets Sigitas Geda and Judita Vaičiūnaitė.  It ends with two poems of my own from my book The Kingfisher's Reign (2012).    

It's late summer and time for a short hiatus, so I will be replaying a few of my most popular programs in the next few weeks (and after that, the least popular, with the hope that they might find some rekindled interest).  Today’s program is about poems written about other works of art. Such poems are part of a long literary tradition called the “ekphrastic tradition” and they provide a different perspective on how we might experience works of art generally. The program includes a brief literary history of the form, including comments about Homer’s The Iliad, Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and Pictures from Brueghel by William Carlos Williams. It also includes my translations of ekphrastic poems by three Lithuanian poets as well as two of my own ekphrastic poems.

To continue my discussion of poetry as a transformation of experience that is a product of the lyrical imagination, and to wrap up my consideration of surrealist and magical realist poetry, I read poems from my book Three White Horses.    

To continue my discussion of poetry as a transformation of experience that is a product of the lyrical imagination, I follow up my consideration of surrealistic poetry with examples of magical realist and fantasy poems. These three threads are layerings of the essential core of imaginative writing and affirm how poetry is a form of transformative aesthetic expression that enables us to explore the world beyond the limits and constraints of what we individually know about it. I read poems by Pattiann Rogers, Elise Cowen, Benjamin Péret, David Gascoyne, William Butler Yeats, and Kerry Shawn Keys.  I end the program with one of my own poems. 

To follow up on my comments last week about differences between poetry as a recording of experience and poetry as a transformation of experience, I read surrealistic poems to affirm the importance of getting beyond the self-indulgent confessional voice that dominates (and, as I suggested last week, that suffocates) so much contemporary poetry. I read poems by André  Breton, Hans Arp, Andrei Codrescu, Helen Ivory, Philip Lamantia, James Tate, and Joyce Mansour.  I end the program with one of my own poems.

I consider differences between poetry as a recording of experience and poetry as a transformation of experience and focus on poems about exploration in various forms. In those contexts, I read poems by Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, Theodore Roethke, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Michael Jennings, and Lauren Camp. I end the program with one of my own poems.

As I discussed in my program last week, highways lead us to new destinations and to new discoveries there, so today I reconsider one such recent destination and read poems about Maine and about the ocean by Robert Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Pam Burr Smith, George Oppen, and Louise Bogan.  I end the program with three of my own poems.

The search for something new, the act of going somewhere, is a foundational part of our country's identity and poets have explored its attractions and impacts. Today I read poems about highways and roads and journeys, about leaving a place and going to a different place to find something new, by Walt Whitman, Willie Nelson, James Wright, James Applewhite, Gregory Corso, and Bruce Springsteen. I end the program with one of my own poems.

To celebrate midsummer and the summer solstice -- and the mix of pagan and Christian elements in some of those celebrations, particularly in Northern Europe -- today I read poems about John the Baptist and about Salome by Vachel Lindsay, Conrad Aiken, Thomas Merton, Ai, Carol Ann Duffy, Eric Pankey, and Dorothy Parker.  I end the program with one of my own poems.

I talk about the translation of poetry today because I have a new book of my translations now available. It is titled Alternating Masks: Selected Poems of Kornelijus Platelis and is the comprehensive translation into English of poems by the most acclaimed contemporary Lithuanian poet and one of the most accomplished of contemporary European poets. So I read my translations of Platelis' poems to celebrate the appearance of this new book. 

In my program last week, I talked about how monuments create symbolic significance in our lives. They are objects specifically made to create such meanings. Today I consider how we endow things of the natural world with symbolic significances. I use the cormorant as an example of imposed symbolic meaning on natural objects and read poems by Robinson Jeffers, Eavan Boland, Kobayashi Issa, Macdara Woods, Li-Young Lee, and Christopher Isherwood. I begin the program with two of my own poems.

Poets and other writers have considered the role of monuments in human society and human history. So today, to commemorate Memorial Day, and to follow up on my concluding poem about a Civil War monument from last week's program, I read poems about monuments by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, and Gordon Henry. I end the program with one of my own poems.

To follow up on last week's program about one of the joys of my childhood, I read poems about being a boy, about boyhood, including positive memories and some that are less so. I include poems by Ken Hada, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Matthews, e.e. cummings, Gary Snyder, Robert Bly, and Gwendolyn Brooks. I end the program with one of my own poems.

The wonderful colors of May -- beginning with delicate greens and then deepening to fuller textures and hues blossoming everywhere -- are one of the reasons why May is my favorite month. Lilacs are another. To celebrate the return of all of the natural joys of May, I read poems about lilacs by Walt Whitman, Amy Lowell, Philip Levine, John Hiatt, and Kornelijus Platelis. I end the program with one of my own poems.

Today, as an adjunct to my programs last fall about poverty, and to continue my look at poetry inspired by immigration, I read poems about the conditions and destinies of working people. They are by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Philip Levine, Kenneth Patchen, Langston Hughes, Rose Pastor Stokes, and Bob Hicok. I end the program with one of my own poems.

Today, as a continuation of my focus on immigration, and in celebration of Cinco de Mayo, I read poems by Chicano poets Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Sandra Cisneros, Juan Felipe Herrera, Tino Villanueva, and Daniel A. Olivas, and by Mexican poets Octavio Paz and Carmen Boullosa.