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Tag Archives: poetry

August 5, 2022: Summer of Kites 2022

We launch into this episode with our monthly roundup of prison disturbances, as compiled by Perilous Chronicle.  Afterwards, we have audio from a prisoner, Paul Lee, reporting on a massive transfer of inmates back in February from Pontiac, Illinois correctional facility to Centralia Correctional Center due to an ongoing black mold problem, which had been accumulating at the facility for …

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Interchange – The Presence of Pessoa – Part Two with Richard Zenith

When will you come, O Hidden One Portuguese dream of every age, To make me more than the faint breath Of an ardent God-created yearning? Ah, when at last will you, Returning, turn my hope into love? In the aftermath of the death of his father (by tuberculosis) and in the face of losing his mother to another country and …

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Interchange – Presenting Pessoa: 1915

This is the first of two shows on Fernando Pessoa, perhaps the greatest modern Portuguese poet, who proclaimed himself greater than Luís Vaz de Camões, author of The Lusiads, an epic fantasy of the adventuring, marauding, slaving, nation published in 1572. And in a like manner, Pessoa strives to better, or at least equal, another so-called national epic, in this …

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Interchange – The Vivisector Inside: On the Experimenting Animal

Today we repeat our May 25th episode with poet, dramatist, essayist, and novelist, Thalia Field. This Extended Version of “Captivating Animals” with Thalia Field includes a discussion of Émile Zola and his attempt to recreate in fiction the scientific methodology of the Positivists and Claude Bernard; a reading of a medical journal article on the “insanity” of antivivisectionists; the tragedy …

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Interchange – Writing Radicals: Mike Gold, Ann Petry, and Thomas McGrath

Today’s show is a somewhat altered version of a program that first aired on November 3rd, 2015, called Tracking Subversives with the noted scholar of the “literary Left,” Alan Wald. According to Wald, the aim of the literary radical is “to endow history with meaning.” Wald has published a trilogy of books brought out by the University of North Carolina …

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Interchange – Of Her Kind: Radcliffe’s Messy Experiment in Women’s Liberation (May 19, 2020)

(Original air date: May 19, 2020) In the United States of the 1950s there was a struggle over the very idea of what it would mean to be an American. After World War II, an American could ride high on military power and new technologies. But the Cold War and Nuclear Anxiety undermined the very real economic prosperity being experienced …

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Interchange – Fixing the Stars: Sylvia Plath at the Edge of Sight

Our opening song is “Stardust,” a song written by Indiana native Hoagy Carmichael and here performed by Dave Brubeck off the live album Jazz at Oberlin recorded in May of 1953. In June of that same year Sylvia Plath would find herself in New York as an intern at Mademoiselle magazine. In August she would attempt to end her life …

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Interchange – How to Be Anti-Fascist: Muriel Rukeyser and The Life of Poetry

Today we feature the radical work of Muriel Rukeyser, whose poetics treatise, The Life of Poetry, first published in 1949, can be called an anti-Fascist manifesto. We struggle at times to place Rukeyser inside our understanding of politics and poetry as she herself struggled to not be placed – like Thoreau, she did not wish to be regarded as a …

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Interchange – Five Days in Spain: Muriel Rukeyser and the Revolutionary Muse

In 1936, twenty-two-year-old Muriel Rukeyser, who had just won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book Theory of Flight, was suddenly (almost accidentally) in Spain as a journalist to cover the Olimpiada Popular, or People’s Olympiad, a protest event against the 1936 Berlin Olympics presided over by Hitler and the Nazi Party. Intended to take place in Barcelona, …

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Interchange – Out of a Brick Throat: How Poets and Poetry Matter

Our opening song is “Ezz-thetic,” from the 1961 release Ezz-thetics by George Russell. In the conversation to come we’ll make reference to the American modernist poet Ezra Pound, and what the literary scholar Hugh Kenner termed “The Pound Era” in his 1971 book. Pound is perhaps best known for the poetic movement he named Imagism and for his endlessly expanding …

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