An episode from 3/29/22: Another two-part episode. The first is a reading of five poems, and my favorites from this batch are Robert Lowell’s “Bobby Delano,” an unforgettable poem about adolescence, and Anne Finch’s “A Nocturnal Reverie,” whose blank verse meditation looks ahead to Wordsworth like few other poems. John Clare’s “An Invite to Eternity,” Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s “A Summer Evening’s Meditation,” and Edmund Spenser’s famous Garden of Adonis, from The Faerie Queene, round out the rest. In the second part (starting at about 42:00), I read from Eudora Welty’s ⁠One Writer’s Beginnings⁠, and Helen Keller’s ⁠The Story of My Life⁠. Both, in their own way, are about each writer’s earliest discovery of words. Don’t forget to support Human Voices Wake Us on Substack, where you can also get our newsletter and other extras. You can also support the podcast by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. Any comments, or suggestions for readings I should make in later episodes, can be emailed to [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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