Lyric Life

What if we need other people, not to make life more meaningful, but to make it less so? What if life alone becomes fraught, difficult, and, well, "allegorical," as Kenyon puts it, when we're left alone? What if the danger of quarantine is not too little meaning but too much?

We read this poem at our Passover seder every year, a meditation on what it is to be human, on the work it takes to put one foot in front of the other, even when you're looking at dry land. That work is harder than you think. And more human.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough for a conversational, evocative poem, ostensibly about gin, but really about the nature of time--and the final compensation we get in this life. Not causality, not reason, not rationality, but something more winsome, more redemptive.

There's no better love poet that e e cummings. He continually pushed beyond cliché to find the surprising ways love makes sense--and doesn't. Join me as I explore one of his most beautiful love poems about the ways we indwell each other even when the universe is screaming the message "apart."

A poem that has stuck with me since I first saw it in The New Yorker back in 2003, Robert Pinsky's "Antique" shows the bombast of love, the way we (almost have to) mythologize it--and the collapse of that myth-making into a shared moment of beauty, one between the view and the beloved, one between the poet and us.

Dickinson's meditation on the safety of the grave is a theological bombshell. The members of the resurrection sleep safe in their tombs. But when you make your life about safety, don't you miss out of the mad chaos of time and the world itself? And what if the resurrection doesn't come? You're still safe. And cold. Listen in for my take on this incredibly volatile and well-crafted poem.

Philip Levine's deceptively simple "The Simple Truth" lays out what makes us human: the ability to taste simple boiled potatoes, seasoned with butter and salt. It has been a part of my life for decades now. It is lodged in my soul. I can't wait to share it with you.

Emily Dickinson's short poem, the third of the four she sent to Thomas Wentworth Higginson to begin their relationship, is a salvo right across his bow. She either takes apart his misogyny, or his elite editorial status, or both, and more--because, after all, this is Dickinson's writing. It never says just one thing--except her rage at and acceptance of her situation.

Elizabeth Bishop's poem is a funny (or maybe sardonic) take on loss, a world-weary glance on pain that is too quickly over-dramatized. Except I bought her advice whole-heartedly. I once set out to live this poem. With varying results. Including, ultimately, this podcast.

Stevens' poetry is always weird, strange, elliptical. He may even surpass himself in this poem about an empty jar set in the wilderness of Tennessee. What does this jar do? Nothing less than bring meaning to the world. Or maybe rob it of all meaning.

Luke Kennard's very contemporary poem almost overwhelms its reader with imagery--until the poem makes a strange turn into story, incipient, vague, but visible, connecting back to itself and to "us," the ones made of nothing but dust.

Keats takes the wonder and awe of a translation of Homer gives to introduce himself to the world--and to prove that great poetry undoes itself at every turn. This early sonnet, as ambitious as anything he ever wrote, tests the very limits of his medium, poetry, by encoding gaps in its own thoughts, sentences that require the reader to fill them in--and finally, to leave us in a place of silent community, the way the best poetry should, once it exhausts language.

With this second in a mini series on the poems Emily Dickinson sent to Thomas Wentworth Higginson (see episode 30 for the first one in this series), let's try to understand why she claims dreams recede. Or is it heaven that recedes? Or maybe poetry? Or Dickinson herself? This poem is a confusing interpretive knot--like the poet herself. Perhaps that's why she sent it to the man she wanted to become her "preceptor."

Ellen Bass's haunting poem "Indigo" is as raw and honest a poem as I've read in a long time. It twists and turns to end at a place no one could predict, from sexual fantasies to the most real and horrifying moment a person can have with a family member. It's somehow still comforting and gorgeous, real and honest, painful and gorgeous. In other words, it's a testament to the fact that poets can say what no one else can.

I've always interpreted this old chestnut, a sonnet by Keats, as the poet's response to gorgeous things: they make me think I'm going to die. But what if the poet was more clever than that? What if he encoded his politics into these short, fourteen lines. What if the answer to the Grecian statuary is to find in it both an aesthetic experience and a political one?

One of the first lyric poems Dickinson sent to her correspondent and friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, this small sixteen-liner offers a glimpse of this almost inscrutable poet at work and begs the reader to enter the poetic space with her--before, of course, leaving the reader all alone in the emptiness. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I offer another episode on LYRIC LIFE devoted to one of my all-time favorite poets, Emily Dickinson. This one was of the first poems she chose to circulate beyond her family. It's a glimpse into her world, her work--and a playful push away, too.

What's left when the communication between a poet and his reader is finished? Understanding? Compassion? No, loneliness, the beating heart of every work of art that seeks to bridge the gap between its creator and its audience. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I take a stroll through one of my favorite poem's by one of New England's best poets. I've been here: the writing teacher, the students, the gap between us, created, formed, and even nurtured. How do you reach across?

Smith's intensely physical metaphysical poem (is it a lyric? an ode?) is an exploration of the noise we call the universe, the background sound around us, including the kids screaming upstairs loud enough to shatter the good crystal. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I read through and explore this fabulously skeptical and whimsical poem about all those ultimate things, including the sheer racket of chopping onions.

Percy Bysshe Shelley is angry--angry at the disenfranchisement, political unrest, authoritarian rule, and top-down rot in the England of his day. But he might as well have been talking about ours, predicting us almost two hundred years ago. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, in reading and thinking about this provocative sonnet, less a lyric poem than a primal scream about the injustice of the world, set directly in his historical moment and yet ever so prescient.

Ruth Bavetta's almost-sonnet is a vibrant plea, not for the contemplative life where matins are told at dawn, but for bread-making, that most organic art which grows in the poem to an almost ecstatic embrace of the world around her. What could be better?