Poetry Koan

Jun 15 2024 54 ep. 36 mins 7
Poetry Koan Podcast artwork

A poem in the shape of a person talks to a person in the shape of a poem.

  Arts
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Episode 55: Schubert's Ghost - Essence and Nihility

Jun 15 2024 27 mins  
This episode is about Schubert's awful and awesome bohemian life/music/death; a Victor Hugo sonnet from "Les Contemplations" ("La mort et la beauté sont deux choses profondes"); K.G. Nishitani on Nihility, sin and redemption; Fernando Pessoa's Fragment 363 (love, possession and illusion, the interplay of beauty and horror), with visuals courtesy of a wa

Episode 54: Poetry Is A Destructive Force (Awimbawe Chop Suey)

Mar 02 2024 22 mins  
Brigit Pegeen Kelly reads for Wallace Stevens' poem "Poetry Is A Destructive Force" and we then discuss. Poetry Is a Destructive Force That's what misery is, Nothing to have at heart. It is to have or nothing. It is a thing to have, A lion, an ox in his breast, To feel it breathing there. Corazón, stout dog, Young ox, bow-legged bear, He tastes its blood, no

Episode 53: Killing Rabbits (Seven Days/Shelter From The Storm)

Feb 18 2024 22 mins  
Are there any connections to be made between Miroslav Valek's poem Killing Rabbits (read here by the American poet Brigit Pegeen Kelly), and Craig David's R&B "banger" Seven Days from the year 2000? Many. Killing Rabbits On Sunday after breakfast, when air is halfway to ice, and thin flutes of mice squeak in the chimney. On Sunday after breakfast to walk

Episode 52: The Orchard

Feb 13 2024 12 mins  
All we need is love. For something and/or someone. Also poetry.

Episode 51: Things I Want Decided

Feb 09 2024 24 mins  
Inspired by Nader, Farritor and Schilliger's recent AI-assisted decryption of ancient texts, netting them the $1m Vesuvius Challenge Prize, I attempt to crack the code of a 1000 year old Japanese poem using Google's Gemini chatbot. I pose to Gemini the four cryptic questions in the form of a poem about love's paradoxes by Izumi Shikibu, whose work was celebrated by Ken

Episode 50: LABATYD

Feb 06 2024 42 mins  
An episode inspired by Tadeusz Dąbrowski's poem "Sentence", Nick Flynn's "Tattoo" and Jack Gilbert's "The Answer": SENTENCE It's as if you'd woken in a locked cell and found in your pocket a slip of paper, and on it a single sentence in a language you don't know. And you'd be sure this sentence was the key to your life.

Episode 49: Variations on the Right to Remain Silent

Feb 01 2024 53 mins  
Being an Anne Carson megafan (looking forward to her new collection Wrong Norma published this month) I decided to spend an evening with an artefact she created in 2016 called Float comprising 22 chapbooks held together in whatever order you choose to read them in, one of which is an essay that I’m about to read here. This essay, "Variations on the Right to Remain Silent&quo

Episode 48: You See, I Want A Lot

Jan 30 2024 27 mins  
An episode inspired by two Dalton Day poems: "Love Poem" and "An Understanding" (from the chapbook Overlay). All poems referenced in the episode (in order of appearance): YOU SEE I WANT A LOT You see, I want a lot. Perhaps I want everything: The darkness that comes with every infinite fall And the shivering blaze of every step up. So many live on and want noth

Episode 47: Peaches

Jan 26 2024 18 mins  
An episode inspired by two Wendell Berry poems: A MEETING In a dream I meet my dead friend. She has, I know, gone long and far, and yet she is the same for the dead are changeless. They grow no older. It is I who have changed, grown strange to what I was. Yet I, the changed one, ask: "How you been?" She grins and looks at me. "I been eating peaches off some migh

Episode 46: The World’s Loneliest Whale Sings the Loudest Song

Jan 20 2024 12 mins  
An episode inspired by Noor Hindi's poem 🐳 The World’s Loneliest Whale Sings the Loudest Song 🐳 The World’s Loneliest Whale Sings the Loudest Song & Other Confessions I won’t make metaphors out of fish. If I have to die, I choose the ocean. If I have to live, I choose you. You: Everyone I’ve ever mourned. I believe less & less of sunlight these days. I