Lyric Life

John Haines wrote some of the most gorgeous, "natural landscape" poetry in U. S. literary history. The heir of Frost and maybe even Whitman, he took on his Alaskan world and transformed it into something mythic. This small lyric poem is not about the "outback" where he made his life. Rather, it's about an urban world turned upside down by a giant snowfall--about the ways the natural world can still interrupt the civilized myth we all believe, about the ways that our precarious perch in our urban lives can give way under the weight of something as light as snow. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, for a reading and exploration of this provocative and evocative poem.

Pádraig Ó Tuama's gorgeous meditation on being is a fit lyric poem for this year of Covid--or really, for any year, for any moment, when the human question is not what you do, nor even who you are, but simply how you go about being. Not the business of being. The rest of it. The silence of it. The peace of it. The best lyric poetry opens up a space for being. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I explore this quiet and comforting meditation by a contemporary Irish poet and truth-teller.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti's strange, broken poem, "Constantly Risking Absurdity" risks all the absurdity imaginable: a poem published in 1958, that uses Old English poetics (think "Beowulf") to explain the way the creative act risks the death of "Beauty" in the "empty air of existence." It's a haunting tribute to what it takes to make something, to create something, to find yourself risking it all for beauty, whether at your computer, in the studio, in the gardens, or in the kitchen.

Gerard Manley Hopkins' gorgeous sonnet "Hurrahing in Harvest" is a testament to the way language itself remakes the world--in Hopkins' case, infusing it with the stuff of divinity. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, on this episode of LYRIC LIFE in which I look over this beautiful piece of nineteenth-century poetry--and grant you permission to hoard as many books as you like.

Edna St. Vincent Millay's haunting and daunting (and blessedly short) lyric poem "Spring" may be the poem we need right now: an expression of post-World War I PTSD, told by a speaker out of sync with the seasons, out of step with the world. It feels like this moment. It reads like this moment. Join me, Mark Scarbough, as I explore the wild truth that Millay appears to convey so easily--although there's never anything easy about telling the truth.

Here's the oft-anthologized, oft-assigned Wallace Stevens poem, "The Emperor of Ice-Cream." I recorded an episode on this poem--and then trashed it because the poem kept me up at night. I soon realized that the way I've always seen it doesn't make sense of it, leaves me wanting more. So here's the poem and what it means and how what it means changes with each day--like ice cream. Here today, gone in a flash.

Zoe Leonard's 1992 prose poem has been making the internet rounds again--and it has hit me between the eyes. I'm glad I found it now. I couldn't have heard it when it was written. But it lands in my gut and makes me realize how much a great writer can imagine a better world--and how much I want to live in that world. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, for a fast episode about a monumental piece of writing, as true now as when it was written.

Sylvia Plath's early poem "Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea" shows her already working at an extremely advanced level in poetry. This poem is always read as some sort of debate between reality and the imagination. And I hesitated on it for months because I was trapped in that academic expertise. But the poem is actually an imaginative and even ironic engagement with the world, a gorgeous piece of craft from a young poet already at the top of her game.

I've started a new podcast, WALKING WITH DANTE. I want to take a slow walk through Dante's masterwork, the greatest work in Western literature (hey, let me have it!), a long poem that most people call THE DIVINE COMEDY, but that he just called COMEDY. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, on this brand-new show. I promise to be a good guide. I promise you won't get lost. Don't worry: it's just a walk across the known universe. But we're going slow. We'll rarely be out of breath. Rarely. And what a treat, to walk slowly through COMEDY. Because life is all about the happy ending. You just have to get there, step by step.

Wallace Stevens' late poetry is charged with quantum reality: fragmented, expansive, and always drawn toward the hope of a unified field. In this poem, "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm," Stevens details the ultimate reading experience--in which the reader becomes the book, the book becomes the world, and the reader is still left wanting the perfect reading experience. Join Mark Scarbrough as he explores this deceptively simple poem in which desire is the worm in the system--because desire is the system.

Here's an early poem by Wallace Stevens, part of his HARMONIUM collection, "Disillusionment at Ten O'Clock." It's an imagistic poem about both the failure of the imagination and its success--and about why poetry matters (particularly after that last episode about Marianne Moore's "Poetry"). Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I dance with and around this short but complex poem by one of the United States' best poets.

What more could anyone say about Moore's poetry? Especially about this poem, the bane of Literature 101--and a poem that's too often presented as far simpler than it is. Even the famous "definition" of poetry--"imaginary gardens with real toads in them"--isn't as obvious as it first seems. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I work my way through this seductive, elliptical poem by one of the United States' best modernist poets.

Literature: so innocuous, right? Except it's not. On this episode of Lyric Life, I take on Blake's "The Lamb," a companion piece to his poem "The Tyger"--and a companion episode to the one on this podcast about that other poem. There, I told you a conversion narrative. Here, in a poem about innocence, I tell you some of the rest of my story: a descent into hell. Literature's not innocuous. It's dangerous. Every word of it.

Stephen Dunn's poem about a guardian angel who walks off the job--and then comes back--is a lyric poem for this moment, for a time when chaos rules, when the bad seems to overwhelm the good, when the question of why you do right when it doesn't seem to matter is a question that none of us can avoid. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, in this episode of Lyric Life for a lyric poem that's so true, it hurts--in all the right ways.

Molly Fisk's gritty, honest poem, "Dark Rum & Tonic," is about what you get when you finally grow up, when you get older, when you've been through the wreck and come out the other side. You get invisibility. And much more. You get the chance to talk to yourself. To see yourself. And to write yourself. Join me for a gorgeously crafted poem about the losses we face--and the human ways we survive.

I've danced around Sylvia Plath--or around her absence on this podcast--for a long time, mostly because I can't stand the way people approach her poetry. This early poem shows exactly the sort of poet she was: a master at her craft, not just the object of pity or ire. This poem about coming home is brilliant: evocative, shattering, and finally, yes, shattered, too. It's a great place to start to see Plath, not as a biography, but as an artist.

Denise Levertov's evocative, small, oblique prayer is an amazing piece of craft: an honest statement of the gray that is adulthood but also a wily little game in which she works us readers around and around and finally into the gray, almost without our knowing it. She gets us to the place of "I don't know" before we even know it and so accomplishes exactly what lyric poetry should: she surprises us with truth in language AND truth in form.

Here's one of the most anthologized poems out there, almost a cliché by this point. Yet William Blake's "The Tyger" is my conversion story. I can locate the moment I ditched one life and started another right in these words. Because that's what words can do. Should do. Will do.

Poem #374 is in some ways a companion poem to the last poem on this podcast, #373, "This world is not Conclusion." They appear on facing pages of one of her hand-written booklets--but this poem is fuller, more visualized, a crazy world of fashion and flowers, the essence of summer. Which inevitably ends. And ends right where it should: in the poet's lap.

Dickinson's magnificent poem "This World is not conclusion" stands as a statement of doubt in a world of faith, or of faith in a world of doubt, or of a different kind of faith in a world where everyone's so very certain. The poem is mostly a testament to her skill as a skilled writer of nuance, irony, and voice.