An episode from 3/3/24: Tonight, I read from a handful of what I call “visionary” poems. After an introductory section of familiar nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets, I go back to the sources of those, which are found in religious scripture and myth: W. B. Yeats: “The Second Coming” T. S. Eliot: sections from The Waste Land and “East Coker” Walt Whitman: the first section of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” William Wordsworth: from the thirteenth book of The Prelude William Blake: from his long poem Milton The first chapter of Ezekiel (from the JPS audio Tanakh) A speech from Euripides’s Bacchae, tr. William Arrowsmith Part of the eleventh book of the Bhagavad-Gita, tr. by Amit Majmudar in his Godsong I close the episode with a reading that will not surprise long-time listeners. You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or 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. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. 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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