An episode from 9/22/26: Tonight, I read three new poems that were just published over at The Brazen Head: “London, 1943,” “Shtetl, 1803,” and “Cleveland, 1988.” You can read the poems here. Since I’ve spent so much time writing longer narrative poems, earlier this year I suddenly wanted to see what it would be like writing smaller narratives—anything from fifty to a few hundred lines. These three poems are each attempts, in their own way—stories about love, war, childhood, religion and loneliness—to discover how that might be done. I end the episode reading the first part of a much longer poem (unpublished and unfinished) on the seventeenth-century English witch, Liz Mollard. Mollard lived in London during the plague and fire of 1665-1666. I hope through all four pieces listeners can hear a through-line to something new.Many thanks to Liam Guilar, the poetry editor at The Brazen Head, for taking the three poems he did; he has written a trilogy of narrative poems himself, which you can find here.The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. I also have a YouTube channel where I share poems and excerpts from these books, mostly as YouTube shorts.Email me at [email protected].

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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