Soundtrack to this episode

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Listen to my talk on Melville here

-Listen to my poetry reading with Dan Brown here

-Outsider poetry

-The Education of Henry Adams

-Metrical hijinks

-The inherent negations of blindness

-"Durer: Insbrook, 1495" by Ern Malley

-"Lycidas" by John Milton

-Forging a new sensibility in identitarian poetry

Text of poem:

The Education of the Blind Poet; Or, Ars Poetica Ending with a Line from Milton

When I was 9 they taught me how to look

at someone as they spoke though I could see

nothing: it's polite they said & I was, look

I'm staring at the nothing of you, see?

My Nothing reader, pelted in your silence:

silent in History I drilled my lack

of stare into the history-shaped silence

of the confidential blackboard's black.

The teacher, standing slightly to its right

scrawled her timelines onto its cold chalk down.

See, teacher, have I not been studious: "Write

what's on the board." & I noted nothing down.

My No-Thing reader, ear pressed to the board

of words, how has your face become hers? mute

light stained her hair as she addressed the board,

& I presided over absence, mute.

All blind things learn to cleave to absence:

stiff-uniformed moles shoulder their chalk-blank dome

of earth. O Teacher to you I was absence,

you who'd only bring yourself to speak óf me

asking always Does hé need help? in a voice

hushed & mailed by its pity, pitywords

cringing between your jaws. I knew that voice

as my inheritance: these blind mouths full of words.

Support the show

BUY VERSECRAFT MERCH HERE.

Please subscribe, rate, and review! Thanks so much for listening.

You can leave me a tip, support the podcast, or request a commission here!

TikTok: @versecraft
Send me a note at: versecraftpodcast@gmail.com

My favorite poetry podcasts for:
Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets
Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says
The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight

Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet:
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)

Soundtrack to this episode

Text of poem:

The Last Act

‘Tis the god Hercules, whom Antony loved,

Now leaves him.

It is too often only close to death,

or utter failure, when the mind is held

to truth, we see the outlines of the gods,

those whom we loved but never realized.

Above us in a void burnt-out and cold,

at unfamiliar heights their forms return

like ghosts to move across the final night,

remote and unappeased in our collapse.

There is no bitterness in facing them.

The heart that fatally kept them deprived,

and saw them hostile to the living blood,

will pay in blood its error, every vein.

In what is not the gods are reconfirmed,

the candor of their presence briefly seen.

The tragedy leaves nothing else but that.

Then they are gone. The music underground,

the quiet terror of its shifting source,

its echoes vanishing moves in their place.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Come see my Melville lecture tomorrow on Zoom!

-New shirts!!

-The precariousness of literary preservation, and our inestimable losses

-My conversation with Tim Steele

-Wiseblood Books!

-Finlay's Collected Prose here and Collected Poetry here

-"The Wayward Thomist" by James Matthew Wilson (COMING SOON!)

-The gnosticism of Modernity

-"Science, Politics, and Gnosticism" by Eric Voegelin

-"Antony and Cleopatra" by Willy Shakes

-"The God Abandons Antony" by Constantine Cavafy

-The nature of the tragic

-Negative/Apophatic Theology (Via Negativa)

-"That We Should Not Be Considered Happy Until We Are Dead" by Michel de Montaigne

-Juan de la Cruz

-hamartia, hubris, sin

-Ananke and the Music of the Spheres

Support the show

BUY VERSECRAFT MERCH HERE.

Please subscribe, rate, and review! Thanks so much for listening.

You can leave me a tip, support the podcast, or request a commission here!

TikTok: @versecraft
Send me a note at: versecraftpodcast@gmail.com

My favorite poetry podcasts for:
Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets
Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says
The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight

Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet:
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)

Soundtrack to this episode

Link to poems!

Read the Classical Outlook poetry issue here!

NEW MERCH HERE

To receive a link to the Critical Path Symposium, follow the email link at the bottom right of this page

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Philip Walsh and Rachel Hadas!

-The Classical Outlook!

-Classical Reception Studies

-"44 Pastorals" by Rachel Hadas

-Prosimetra/Haibun

-"Prose of Departure" by James Merrill

-"Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms" ed. by David Lehman

-"Personal Best: Makers On Their Poems That Matter Most"

-In praise of postludes

-Rachel’s Euripides and Dionysiaca

-"Achilles and Odysseus” by Susan McLean

-“Mimesis” by Erich Auerbach

-“Imaginary Conversations” by Walter Savage Landor

-“The Songs of the Kings” by Barry Unsworth

-“Circe” by Madeleine Miller

-“The King Must Die” by Mary Renault

-“Iphigenia” dir. Michael Cacoyannis

-“The Silence of the Girls” by Pat Barker

-The Feminist re-telling of Classical myths trend

-“Liber Tertius Decimus” by Julia Griffin

-“After the Fall” by David Katz

-“The Mazemaker” by Michael Ayrton

-“Red Thread: On Mazes and Labyrinths” by Charlotte Higgins

-“Follow This Thread: A Maze Book to Get Lost In” by Henry Eliot

-“The House of Asterion” by Jorge Luis Borges

-“The Fall of Icarus” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

-“Musee des Beaux Arts” by W.H. Auden

-D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths

-“Theseus and the Minotaur” by Edwin Muir

-“Megalopolis” dir. Francis Ford Coppola

-The Classical Outlook takes Princeton!

Support the show

BUY VERSECRAFT MERCH HERE.

Please subscribe, rate, and review! Thanks so much for listening.

You can leave me a tip, support the podcast, or request a commission here!

TikTok: @versecraft
Send me a note at: versecraftpodcast@gmail.com

My favorite poetry podcasts for:
Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets
Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says
The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight

Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet:
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)