Poetry For All
Finding Our Way Into Great Poems
Displaying all 6 Episode of Poetry For All with the tag “restlessness”.
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Episode 75: Du Fu, Passing the Night by White Sands Post Station
August 7th, 2024 | Season 6 | 18 mins 16 secs
aging, chinese poetry, loneliness, nature poetry, night, poetry in translation, restlessness, world poetry
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, 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.
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Episode 63: Rumi, Colorless, Nameless, Free
August 29th, 2023 | Season 6 | 29 mins 56 secs
13th century, ghazal, guest on the show, islam, joy, poetry in translation, restlessness, rhymed verse, spirituality, surprise, wonder, world poetry
In this episode, poet and translator Haleh Liza Gafori joins us to closely read and discuss a poem by Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī (1207-1273 CE), one of the greatest of all Sufi poets. We discuss the poetic constraints of the ghazal form, Rumi's encounters with the divine, and the significance of his friendship with Shams, a man who transformed his life and poetic practice.
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Episode 54: Carl Phillips, To Autumn
November 21st, 2022 | Season 5 | 24 mins 47 secs
21st century, autumn, black history month, city, free verse, guest on the show, intimacy, lgbtqia month, nature poetry, night, ode, restlessness, spirituality
In this episode, we talk with David Baker about "To Autumn" by Carl Phillips, exploring the way Phillips masterfully achieves a sense of intimacy and restlessness in a lyric ode that tosses between two parts while incorporating the sonnet tradition.
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Episode 42: Robert Hayden, Frederick Douglass
February 23rd, 2022 | Season 4 | 17 mins 58 secs
20th century, anger, black history month, blank verse, gratitude, hope, repetition or refrain, restlessness, social justice and advocacy, sonnet
In this episode, we offer a close reading of "Frederick Douglass," a poem in which Hayden channels the prophetic energies of his subject in order to imagine what freedom might one day mean.
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Episode 14: George Herbert, The Collar
February 1st, 2021 | Season 2 | 18 mins 24 secs
17th century, anger, christianity, narrative, restlessness, rhymed verse, spirituality, surprise
In this episode, we look at "The Collar"--a famous single-stanza poem, playing with meter, rhythm, and rhyme by the seventeenth-century priest and poet, George Herbert.
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Episode 7: John Donne, Holy Sonnet 14
October 14th, 2020 | Season 1 | 15 mins 54 secs
17th century, christianity, intimacy, restlessness, rhymed verse, sonnet
This week we look at one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets from the seventeenth century. This famous poem (#14, "Batter my heart") turns a poetic tradition of love and longing to religious ends, earnestly seeking God and questioning whether union with God will ever be achieved.