Open Windows Podcast

December can offer a full range of weather conditions in Connecticut, and the first week of this December here has seen two major storms, known as Nor'easters, marked by heavy rain and wind. Today I read poems about rain, including winter rain, by Matsuo Basho, William Shakespeare, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Carl Sandburg, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Creeley, and Ken Hada.  I end the program with one of my own poems.

December is a month of anticipation and waiting. It is not only the season of Advent that defines this month, with its promise of new light and its groundwork of redemption as the month concludes, but it is also a month that clearly frames the idea and fact of waiting as an essential parameter of human life. I read poems about waiting in that light by William Butler Yeats, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Galway Kinnell, Pablo Neruda, Alice Walker, and Walt Whitman.  I end the program with one of my own poems.

In my last program, as part of my focus on memory and on remembering November, I read poems about the results of struggle and adversity during this month. My youngest brother struggled and died in November, two years ago. I found a manuscript of poems at the bottom of one of the drawers in his desk, hidden under piles of other papers and folders. The book -- titled The Winds of Spirit Mountain --was published in 2019. I read several of the poems from his book today and end the program with one of my poems about my brothers.

As the November skies dull to a heavier gray, I have been thinking about the hard days we all have had and that we remember perhaps especially as the year draws to its close. So today I read poems about struggle and adversity by Shakespeare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Derek Walcott, Miller Williams, Lucille Clifton, Charles Bernstein, and Javier Zamora. I end the program with one of my own poems.

In my last program I read poems about El Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead in Mexico, which takes place in early November. Today I read poems about November more generally, by Thomas Hood, Thomas Hardy, Adelaide Crapsey, Robert Frost, Tomas Transtromer, and Rita Dove.  I end the program with one of my own poems.

In my last few  programs I read poems about various places as they are remembered and presented. I want to continue that trajectory today, but turn my focus instead to people we remember. That is especially poignant today, two days after the holiday celebration of El Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, in Mexico. I read poems by Lope de Vega, Davina Guadalupe Ponce Martinez, William Butler Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Maya Angelou, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Sherry Craven.  I end the program with one of my own poems.

As I have suggested in my past few programs, "remembering" and "memory" are major elements in the creation of poetry. Today I read poems about being poor in America, living in and remembering a place that, at least in the popular imagination, is a place where poverty and its consequences seem to be endemic in profoundly visible ways. That is, living in Appalachia. I read poems by Hayden Carruth, Jean Ruth Ritchie, Loretta Lynn, Billy Edd Wheeler, Lee Howard, and Wendell Berry.

As I have suggested in my past few programs, "remembering" and "memory" are major elements in the creation of poetry. Today I read poems about Oklahoma, focusing principally on poems that remember the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression there, and ending with a poem about contemporary Oklahoma. They are by Woodie Guthrie, Roy Turner, Langston Hughes, Donald Justice, Bruce Springsteen, and Ken Hada.

As I have suggested in my past few programs, "remembering" and "memory" are major elements in the creation of poetry. There are essential focuses or common themes that poems that include memories often use.  I took a look last time at remembered cities in general. Today I will read poems about San Francisco, by Vachel Lindsay, Robert Penn Warren, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Richard Brautigan, Nellie Wong, Adele Foley, and Diane di Prima.

As I have suggested in my past few programs, "remembering" and "memory" are major elements in the creation of poetry. There are essential focuses or common themes that poems that include memories often use. I take a look today at another one of those focuses, memories of places in our lives -- cities-- as sources of memory and as springboards for various thematic considerations. I read poems by Walt Whitman, William Blake, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, and Nijolė Miliauskaitė. I end the program with one of my own poems in which a city plays a visible and important role.

As I have suggested in my past few programs, "remembering" and "memory" are major elements in the creation of poetry. There are essential focuses or common themes that poems that include memories often use. I take a look today at another one of those focuses, memories of places in our lives -- farms -- as sources of memory and as springboards for various thematic considerations.  I read poems by Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, W.D. Ehrhart, and Timothy Murphy. I end the program with one of my own poems in which life on a farm plays a visible and important role.

As I have suggested in my past few programs, "remembering" and "memory" are major elements in the creation of poetry. There are essential focuses or common themes that poems that include memories often use.  I take a look today at another one of those focuses, memories of places in our lives -- today, mountains -- as source of memory and as springboard for various thematic considerations.  I read poems by Li Po, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Gary Snyder, and Joni Mitchell. I end the program with two of my own poems in which mountains play a visible and important role.

As I have suggested in my past few programs, "remembering" and "memory" are major elements in the creation of poetry. There are essential focuses or common themes that poems that include memories often use.  I take a look today at another one of those focuses, memories of places in our lives. I begin with one of those places -- the ocean -- as source of memory and as springboard for various thematic considerations.  I read poems by Matthew Arnold, Emily Dickinson, Robert Lowell, Pablo Neruda, and Penelope Pelizzon.  I begin the program with two of my own poems about the ocean.

As I have suggested in my past few programs, "remembering" and "memory" are major elements in the creation of poetry. There are essential focuses or common themes that poems that include memories often use. I take a look today at another one of those focuses, memories of people in our lives, particularly in our lives when we were children. This week I read poems about friends  -- especially as friends are remembered -- by James Wright, Derek Walcott, Arisa White, and Vytautas Bložė. I end the program with one of my own poems.

As I have suggested in my past few programs, "remembering" and "memory" are major elements in the creation of poetry. There are essential focuses or common themes that poems that include memories often use.  I take a look today at another one of those focuses, memories of people in our lives, particularly in our lives when we were children. This week I read poems about family -- especially as families are remembered -- by Ogden Nash, William Wordsworth, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Michael Luis Medrano, John Yao, and Ruth Stone.  I end the program with one of my own poems.

As I have suggested in my past few programs, "remembering" and "memory" are major elements in the creation of poetry. There are essential focuses or common themes that poems that include memories often use.  I take a look today at another one of those focuses, memories of loss and especially the loss of home. I read poems by Nijolė Miliauskaitė, Elizabeth Bishop, Abraham Lincoln, Zeina Azzam, and Rainer Maria Rilke.  I end the program with one of my own poems.

As I suggested in my program last week, "remembering" and "memory" are major elements in the creation of poetry. There may be some essential focuses or common themes that poems that include memories use.  I take a look today at another one of those focuses, memories of childhood. I read poems by William Blake, Dylan Thomas, William Matthews, Seamus Heaney, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Mary Oliver. I end my program with two of my own poems.

As I suggested in my program last week, "remembering" and "memory" are major elements in the creation of poetry. There may be some essential focuses or common themes that poems that include memories use.  I take a look today at one of those focuses, a theme that may be a principal dimension of what we write about, and that is love remembered because it has, somehow, been lost. I read poems by William Butler Yeats, Pablo Neruda, Sylvia Plath, Lorraine Henrie Lins, Algirdas Zdanys, and Susana Cuartas.   I end my program with two of my own poems.

My program today is about memories, things and people and events remembered. I try to affirm what I believe about the act of writing: that we shape the world through texts and use those texts to present or to hide truths. Those truths, in this context, are often things we remember and shape into something we can grasp and understand and accept or reject.  Once they are on the page, they can be directed and controlled, much more than they ever were as they were unfolding. I read poems by William Shakespeare, Robert Lowell, Hugh Seidman, David Breeden, Patricia Goodrich, and Li Nan.  I end my program with two of my own poems about the remembering.

I continue my programs about summer, today considering the silence and stillness of summer nights. A lovely quiet, a certain silence, outside, late at night, after midnight especially, fills the summer night air. It may be interrupted, here and there, now and then, by a passing and typically unexpected noise that we hear through open windows. The poems I read consider that: poems by Paul Simon, Cole Porter, T.S. Eliot, Ken Hada, Kerry Shawn Keys, and Antanas A. Jonynas. I end my program with two of my own poems about the silences of a summer night.