podcasts, poems for my family, poetry mojo
Listening time: under 4 minutes. I discovered this poem in my early twenties, possibly while first living and studying in China where I also got to know the poems of Osip Mandelstam.  I loved its blithe life-loving adventurism, its disdain for danger and death, its...
poetry mojo, writing & writers
Harold Bloom’s comment on Hart Crane (1899-1932) is all the more poignant knowing that Crane considered some of his major work to have been a failure, suffered recurring bouts of alcoholism, and appears to have committed suicide when he jumped overboard a ship...
podcasts, poems for my family, poetry mojo
Listening time: 3 minutes. Surely one of the sweetest love poems of all time (alongside this one), in which Adam and Eve enjoy each other’s company in perfect accord. These lines of Milton lift you on the wing of an inventory of beauty, then daringly repeated...
podcasts, poems for my family, poetry mojo
Listening time: under 5 minutes. One of the greatest love poems in English, this was written by Michael Drayton (1563-1631) the night before he died. Drayton was a friend of Shakespeare and a student of Spenser. I can think of few more dignified and moving...
podcasts, poems for my family, poetry mojo
Listening time: under 3 minutes.The lovely opening line of this poem by William Carlos Williams creates a surprising contrast between the stillness of a rose and the tumult of war. The rest of the poem picks up, in rhythm and imagery, on the rose, filling out like a...
poetry mojo, writing & writers
A telling comment by Christopher Isherwood on W.H. Auden’s approach to revising his poems. It makes one wonder how many scholars have wasted hours peering deeply into some poem of ‘celebrated obscurity’ which was never more than an accretion of lines...
