Sean Carroll
speaker
26,727 appearances
49 recordings
4 series
first heard Apr 2024
last heard 4d ago
Sean Carroll’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 29 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 6.
Appearances
Indeed, he had a weekly poem appearing in a newspaper back where he was from.
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So what do I know?
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What does anyone know about what anyone actually does?
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Poetry plays a weird role in our society, right?
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It's both respected and kind of denigrated at the same time.
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It's a little bit
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prissy or whatever, but it's also really impressive when it's done well.
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And we don't spend a lot of our times these days sitting by the fire in the evening reading poetry to ourselves or to anyone else.
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But it's also important.
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You know, it's a distillation of language and imagery and thought into this really kind of elegant, rigorous art form.
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So today our guest is Elizabeth Alexander, who is a professional poet.
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In fact, she gained celebrity by being a poet who wrote and read a poem at Barack Obama's inauguration back in 2009.
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Currently, she's the president of the Andrew Mellon Foundation, so spreading the wealth to other people in the communities out there.
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But her new book, Signals Across Fast Distances, is a collection of essays and some artwork illustrations with the theme, one of the themes.
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There's a lot going on in the book.
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It's a short book, and this is the skill that a poet has.
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You can fit a lot into a short book.
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The theme of what poetry has to offer democracy in particular.
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So, of course, I became fascinated by this.
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The idea being that democracy involves people of different types and different values working together to form a society and poetry in the humanities more broadly can help us talk to other people, understand them, think about ourselves as well as to other people.
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Showing 21–40 of 26,727 · page 2 of 1337
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