Mea culpa: Apologies for my faint audio in the beginning!

Soundtrack to this episode

Second soundtrack, because... I had to.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Thom Gunn and some of his literary interests (Henry James, George Macdonald, Saki, Ovid, etc.)

-My episode on Thom Gunn

-My episode on Timothy Steele

-Read The Classical Outlook!!

-Writing from experience vs. writing from ideas

-"Missing Measures" by Timothy Steele

-All the Fun's In How You Say a Thing, 2nd Edition!

-Desert Places by Robert Frost

-How form informs content

-The importance of rhythmic modulation

-"The Audible Reading of Poetry" by Yvor Winters

-"Versification: A Short Introduction" by James McAuley

-The 20th century metrical Renaissance

-Bring back verse epistles!

-Yvor Winters's criticism: pro and contra

-The Plain Style

-The Stanford School: Yvor Winters, Janet Lewis, J.V. Cunningham, Edgar Bowers, Helen Pinkerton, Thom Gunn, etc.

-X.J. Kennedy

-Palo Alto poets vs. San Francisco poets

-The Curious Case of Thom Gunn

-What Winters and Poe have in common

-The Smith, Wilson, Clark reading

-"Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of Steele"

-Waiting for the Storm by Timothy Steele

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 (it's Stephen Kampa!)

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Go read New Verse Review!

-Go listen to my talk on SLEERICKETS about Horace's Ars Poetica!

-Go listen to the mighty Fer de Lance!

-The Sleerickets Stephen Kampa episode

-Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason

-From Transcendental Idealism to Transcendentalism

-Romanticism as post-Kantian reaction

-Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, Freud, Coleridge, Emerson, etc. etc.

-Contemptus Mundi

-The inauthenticity of the nihilist everyman

-The Protestant anti-rationalist tradition

-Spooky Calvinist symbolism + German Romanticism + Hinduism 101 + Patriotism = Transcendentalism

-Death and Love conceived ornithologically

-More dialectical poems!


Text of poem:


Phenomena, Noumena, Startling Sparrows

Faced with the world mistaken for the world,

I’m not confused: it seems so sensible

To call the loose, cyclonic pulse of leaves

On sidewalks “physics,” and not a miracle.

I understand a prophet undeceives

Himself when, limping by the roadkill curled

Beside the curb, he thinks theodicy

Inadequate for even bestial pain,

Or when, dispersing the loud shroud of flies

That swaddles it, he wonders how the sane

Escape their own conclusions. Sense defies

Every compendium of mystery.

And if I’m senseless, then, for holding this

World most enlightening when its premises

Grow thinnest, I am glad to be struck dumb.

Look: fireflies punctuate the night with green

Epigrams on love, petunias keen

For the dead possum, and electrons hum

Concentric hymns to probability

While leaf-swirls sing in fractal harmony.

Best is this line of sparrows that have shown

Their utter distance from the disapproving

Caws of the crows by fleshing out a moving

Ellipsis leading into the unknown.

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

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray

-Portrait of the artist in a digital world

-The New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

-The decline and fall of poetry

-Four paths to pecuniary stability

-My episode on Amit Majmudar

-"Patronage" by Amit Majmudar

-Techno-feudalism

-The linger of poetic mystique

-Can Poetry Matter? by Dana Gioia

-Commissions for Occasional poetry

-From philanthropy to patronage

-"Brother, can you spare a dime?"

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 (/ /)