We talk about the life-affirming poems of Adam Zagajewski.    Check out my new book of poems here.  And listen to Claire's new album here. 

Check out Claire's music, art, and writing here: www.claireakebrandart.com   Claire and I have one of my favorite discussions about a very under-read book. We talk about the relationship between America and money, love and money, obsession, greed, expectations vs. reality, imagination vs. fantasy, nature, beauty, truth, hoarse-voiced entertainers on sub-par cruises, and lots more. 

Check out Claire's music, art, and writing here: www.claireakebrandart.com   In this episode, I present a recording from a class in which students and I discuss Frost's masterpiece, "Home Burial." 

Check out Claire's art, music, and writing here: https://www.claireakebrandart.com/   Claire and I talk about the strange wonderful pleasure of this book, focusing on the first 250 pages. More Cervantes discussions to come!

"Everything that is is holy." Translation: CLAIRE IS BACK!!!!!!

Some students and I walk through Hopkins' poem, celebrating its particular pleasures and insights, as well as talking in general about how easy it is to access the strange mysterious power of a poem. 

Who's there? Who are you? Why are you here? What is it all for? Are these the right questions? Can we even know? 

I yammer on for a while about how inadequate any theory of poetry is, and then I think I end up outlining a tentative theory of poetry. Oops.   

I aim for a brief glimpse of the grandeur of these ancient scriptures, and think out loud about their central message: all is one. Along the way I ramble about death, unity, grief, the Self, the transcendent vs. the immanent, and more. 

In this episode, I talk for an entire hour as if I know something. I make many statements that have the cadence of "understanding," but mostly I'm just rambling about a very beautiful and fascinating book, The Book of Chuang Tzu. And the worse thing of all is that Claire--the only reason these recordings are worth listening to--isn't even here to stop me from rambling! 

Claire and I swoon over our favorite bits of Romeo and Juliet, and discuss why this play is not a cautionary tale of unbridled passion and the excesses of youth, but rather a hymn to the redemptive powers of love itself. 

Claire and I celebrate this under-read hidden gem, the first novel in Durrell's "Alexandria Quartet." We wander through topics like love, sex, memory, time, prose style, modernism, and much more. 

Claire and I weep over the end of Dante's sublime poem and try to describe, in some small way, the power of his mystical vision of unity for the modern reader.

Claire and I climb the mountain of purgatory with Dante and Virgil and talk about pride, love, morality, freedom, pleasure, Christ, grief, trials, suffering, and lots lots more. 

Claire and I walk with Dante and Virgil through hell. Along the way, we talk about all manner of things: pity, sin, reading, love, exploration, tradition, heresy, truth, and most of all why Dante is important to us, just two common readers, in the 21st century. 

Claire and I fall under the spell of Shakespeare's Macbeth, and walk through some of our favorite moments in this play. Among other things, we talk about the dangers of the imagination, the nature of paradox and truth, the cyclical nature of tragedy, the milk of human kindness, the motif of blood, and the way Macbeth (and all of us) are torn between this life and the idea of the next. Along the way we ask if there are any glimmers of hope to be found in this, Shakespeare's darkest ode to...

Claire and I swoon over one of our favorites, Conrad's Heart of Darkness. We talk about how and when to approach great books, what makes Conrad a master prose stylist, how this work subverts too-easy dichotomies of light and dark, Kurtz as a distillation of Europe, why Marlowe stays loyal to him, the horror of existence, the evil in every human heart, the dark power of nihilism, and what glimmers of light, if any, this novella offers as a source of hope. 

Claire and I chat about our love for another ancient religious text, the Tao Te Ching. We talk about doing noble things simply, and simple things nobly. We also discuss ideas like emptiness, peace, humility, immateriality, fate, balance, how this text could be relevant for artists, writers, and parents, and what it could look like to live "the Way." Loosey-goosey, loosey-goosey...

Claire and I use Emerson's life-changing essay(s) to think out loud about genius, inspiration, instinct, truth, authority, failure, beauty, good and evil, history, the literary tradition, appropriation, America, and more. 

Claire and I savor our favorite bits of the Meditations, and talk about the unity of all things, living in the moment, bearing our trials nobly, accepting pain as a part of life, how to think about change, what the duty of humans is, and much more. Also, Nietzsche somehow sneaks in to help us push back on some of Marcus Aurelius' claims, and to ask if Marcus Aurelius loves life enough, when forgetting is important and when it isn't, and how to find a balance between acceptance and hope.     

Happy 80th Birthday Bob Dylan!!!

Claire and I celebrate the Hindu epic scripture the Bhagavad Gita. We talk about the indescribability of the divine, what it means to perform worship and feel awe, the unity of all things, the divinity inside each of us, the doctrine of karma, and many practical injunctions on how to live, including detaching ourselves from the fruits of our actions, meditation, selfless service, praise, and whether or not there might be something good about the extremes of desire and passion and pain. 

Claire and I talk about Steinbeck's novella The Pearl, and consider the genre of parable, the downside of dreams, the risks of interpretation, the poisonous nature of desire, our exile from Eden, the dangers of wealth and fame, utopian thinking, Hamlet's claim that "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so," and more. 

A few final thoughts.