Poetry For All - Episodes Tagged with “Loneliness”

Episode 84: Ted Kooser, excerpts from Winter Morning Walks

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0500

In this episode, we offer close readings of poems from Ted Kooser's_ Winter Morning Walks: 100 Postcards to Jim Harrison_. Kooser's poems allow us to think about the poem as a social act, as a form of healing, and as a kind of meditation.

To learn more about Ted Kooser, visit his website.

If you like these poems that we discussed in this episode, please read Ted Kooser's Winter Morning Walks: 100 Postcards to Jim Harrison (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2001). Thanks to Carnegie Mellon Press for granting us permission to read these poems aloud.

Episode 75: Du Fu, Passing the Night by White Sands Post Station

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0400

What is a good life, and how do we make sense of the world when it seems like society is collapsing? In this episode, Lucas Bender joins us once again to discuss the work of Du Fu (712-770 C.E.), the great Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty. Luke helps us to see how Du Fu’s “Passing the Night by White Sands Post Station” can be read in multiple ways depending on how one translates each word of the poem. In doing so, he reveals the poem’s concerns with aging, disappointment, and the possibility of hope in difficult times.

Click here to learn more about Du Fu.

Lucas Bender is the author of Du Fu Transforms: Tradition and Ethics amid Societal Collapse (Harvard University Press, 2021).

To learn more about Luke Bender, visit his website.

Cover art: Wang Hui, Ten Thousand Li up the Yangtze River, Qing Dynasty. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Episode 67: Alex Dimitrov, Winter Solstice

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 20:00:00 -0500

In this episode, we read and discuss a poem that provides a powerful meditation on the longest night of the year.

To learn more about Alex Dimitrov, please visit his website.

Thanks to Copper Canyon Press for granting us permission to read this poem from Love and Other Poems.

During our conversation, we briefly allude to "Love," Dimitrov's wonderful poem that he continues to write each day. To read the original poem, you can check the American Poetry Review; and to read Dimitrov's additional lines on Twitter, you can follow him at @apoemcalledlove on Twitter.

Episode 64: Shakespeare, Sonnet 29

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 09:00:00 -0400

In episode 64, we talk about Shakespeare's sonnet 29, a poem about comparison and competition, leading the poet almost to despise himself before, by chance, he remembers his dear friend and is lifted by the deep joy of that relationship.

We link our discussion to present-day concerns about social media, the Surgeon General's warning about an epidemic of loneliness in this country, and a long-term Harvard study of happiness. Links below.

Here is the poem:

Sonnet 29

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Links to the Surgeon General's Warning about Social Media

https://www.npr.org/2023/05/23/1177626373/u-s-surgeon-general-vivek-murthy-warns-about-the-dangers-of-social-media-to-kids#:~:text=Social%20media%20can%20present%20a,a%20new%20advisory%20released%20Tuesday.

Various Links on the Harvard Happiness Study

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/04/over-nearly-80-years-harvard-study-has-been-showing-how-to-live-a-healthy-and-happy-life/

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/harvard-happiness-study-relationships/672753/

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/10/85-year-harvard-study-found-the-secret-to-a-long-happy-and-successful-life.html

https://www.reuters.com/markets/wealth/what-worlds-longest-happiness-study-says-about-money-2023-02-06/

Links:

Episode 45: Ben Jonson, On My First Son

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen — Wed, 23 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0400

In this episode, we look at Ben Jonson's elegy for his son who died of the plague at the age of 7. This poem is so brief, and yet, it manages to cross a lot of emotional terrain as Jonson struggles to understand the profundity of his loss.

Here is the poem:

On my First Son

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy.
Seven years tho' wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O, could I lose all father now! For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon 'scap'd world's and flesh's rage,
And if no other misery, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and, ask'd, say, "Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry."
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,
As what he loves may never like too much.

To learn more about the magnificent Ben Jonson, check this page on the British Library website.

To learn more about couplets, epigrams, elegies, and apostrophes, click this page on the Academy of American Poets website.