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 (/ /)

Als Zarathustra dreissig Jahr alt war, verliess er seine Heimat und den See seiner Heimat und ging in das Gebirge. Hier genoss er seines Geistes und seiner Einsamkeit und wurde dessen zehn Jahr nicht müde. Endlich aber verwandelte sich sein Herz,—und eines Morgens stand er mit der Morgenröthe auf, trat vor die Sonne hin und sprach zu ihr also: „Du grosses Gestirn! Was wäre dein Glück, wenn du nicht Die hättest, welchen du leuchtest! Zehn Jahre kamst du hier herauf zu meiner Höhle: du würdest deines Lichtes und dieses Weges satt geworden sein, ohne mich, meinen Adler und meine Schlange. Aber wir warteten deiner an jedem Morgen, nahmen dir deinen Überfluss ab und segneten dich dafür. Siehe! Ich bin meiner Weisheit überdrüssig, wie die Biene, die des Honigs zu viel gesammelt hat, ich bedarf der Hände, die sich ausstrecken. Ich möchte verschenken und austheilen, bis die Weisen unter den Menschen wieder einmal ihrer Thorheit und die Armen einmal ihres Reichthums froh geworden sind. Dazu muss ich in die Tiefe steigen: wie du des Abends thust, wenn du hinter das Meer gehst und noch der Unterwelt Licht bringst, du überreiches Gestirn! Ich muss, gleich dir, untergehen, wie die Menschen es nennen, zu denen ich hinab will. So segne mich denn, du ruhiges Auge, das ohne Neid auch ein allzugrosses Glück sehen kann! Segne den Becher, welcher überfliessen will, dass das Wasser golden aus ihm fliesse und überallhin den Abglanz deiner Wonne trage! Siehe! Dieser Becher will wieder leer werden, und Zarathustra will wieder Mensch werden.“ —Also begann Zarathustra’s Untergang.

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 (/ /)

Mea culpa: "The Neural Lyre" was published in 1983, not 1994. Don't know why I said that!

Read today's poem here

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-William Paley's watchmaker analogy

-Problems with teleological arguments

-Brandon Carter's Anthropic Principle

-Multiverse/many worlds theory

-John Archibald Wheeler's Participatory Anthropic Principle

-"It from bit"

-George Berkeley's Idealism

-Vedanta Hinduism

-"The Anthropic Cosmological Principle"

-Barrow and Tipler's Final Anthropic Principle

-"The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov

-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's theology of the noosphere and omega point

-"Everything That Rises Must Converge" by Flannery O'Connor

-Turner's essay, "The Neural Lyre"

-Turner's book, "Natural Classicism"

-Turner's epic poems: The New World, Genesis, Apocalypse

-The transtemporal community of humanity

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 (/ /)

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 (/ /)

Soundtrack to this episode

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-The Beatles
-Beatles documentary "Get Back"
-"The Other Frost" by Randall Jarrell
-"Robert Frost: or, the Spiritual Drifter as Poet" by Yvor Winters
-"The Other Other Frost" by William Logan
-"The Themes of Robert Frost" by Robert Penn Warren
-"A History of Modern Poetry" by David Perkins
-Phalaecian hendacasyllabics
-Catullus I
-Plato's "Symposium"

Frost poems mentioned/discussed:
-The Road Not Taken
-Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
-Mending Wall
-Fire and Ice
-Nothing Gold Can Stay
-For Once, Then, Something
-Design
-Mowing
-After Apple-Picking
-Birches
-The Most of It
-The Silken Tent
-Come In
-Neither Out Far Nor In Deep
-To a Moth Seen in Winter
-Home Burial

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 (/ /)