Poems For People Who Hate Poetry

Send us a textHappy Easter! On Sunday Morning Poetry #3 I'm reading the poem "Sailing to Byzantium" by William Butler Yeats. This is a poem often thought to be about Yeats' views on life after death. But I believe it's about Art as a religion, and, specifically, about the idea of reincarnation or "resurrection in our natural lives."The coward dies many deaths, but the brave man dies but once." Julius Caesar.How can we worship reincarnation if we are an humanist atheist? How can we appreciate the death and rebirth of our own selves?Well listen in.I'll be discussion:The story of Easter according to Christianity (Christ's resurrection)The story of DemeterThe Rape of PersephoneThe story of Dionysus (Bacchus)The Eleusinian MythsCiceroThe Dionysian festivalAnd of course a converse with verse with Sailing to Byzantium.

Send us a textLast week we discussed Wallace Stevens poem "Sunday Morning," and how to create a secular "church." In his poem he rejects Christian Doctrine and celebrates the actualities of human life and the physical universe as fulfilling man's needs without any compensating hope of immortality.His solution is essentially to enjoy the sensual world and to live in harmony with nature. A good message for sure, but he neglects one critical component of the human condition: pain, suffering, misery, evil: CHAOS.Matthew Arnold in Dover Beach grapples with a similar theme to Stevens', which is the impossibility (in the eyes of the poet) of holding any religious faith. But Arnold loses his faith for a much different reason.

Send us a textPeterson's 2nd rule is "Treat Yourself Like Someone You are Responsible for Helping." What is it about people that makes many of us more likely to take care of our pets and less likely to take care of ourselves? Or why are so many of us willing to dole out sound advice but not take it? We tell our loved ones that it's important to exercise regularly, as we sit around eating burgers and failing to exercise. If we are to take care of any entity in the world, it seems we will do the worst job in taking care of ourselves. In this episode I discuss the relation to Peterson's profound rule by diving into The Myth of Prometheus and Pandora Ayn Rand's theory of Epistemology Leonard Peikoff's "Objectivism the Philosophy of Ayn Rand" Richard Mitchell's "The Gift of Fire," And T.S. Eliot's The Little Gidding poem I hope by the end of this you will respect Your Promethean gift.

Send us a textIn this inaugural episode of Sunday Morning Poetry I go through the poem "Sunday Morning" By Wallace Stevens. This humanist poem rejects Christian doctrine while celebrating spiritual values. How can an atheist pray? Poetically

Send us a textFor thousands of years the West has inculcated a "mind-body" or "soul-body" dichotomy. This is the idea that the body is inferior to the spirit, or consciousness. This dichotomy has given us religious ascetics who destroy their own bodies as well as sadism. In modern America it has given us a bizarre coyness and bashfullness to our own nudity.In this poem by Walt Whitman, he glorifies the body as equal to the soul. The poem is a song to the body electric, or our bodies that vibrant with the music of poetry.My guest, Alex Spenser of wordswithwings.com, and I had a really fun converse with verse with this poem. We also talked about the nature of art, how art affects our lives, the practicality of painting and poetry and literature. At one point in the poem Whitman talks about sex and we could not help but discuss modern male/female relationships, particularly with regards to feminism.

Send us a textKubla Khan is a Trip man, for real. It's not surprising to hear that Coleridge was on drugs when he wrote this.I chatted with a fellow podcaster, Rhys Morgan from socialgoodpodcast.com. Rhys lives in Birmingham—England! We've never met, but we swapped travel stories (both real and metaphorical) and conversed with this trippy verse, man.Enjoy as we go to middle earth with Good ol Coleridge!

Send us a textI had the pleasure of sitting down with local San Antonio poet, Rohn Bayes.We talked about Whitman's great, short poem "A Noiseless Patient Spider," and how its metaphor "takes you places."That, after all, is the etymology of metaphor--to take you some where. This particular metaphor is special to poets, writers, and creators of all sorts. Anyone who has every created "filament, filament, filament!" can sympathize with the meaning of this poem.Stay tuned till the end for a special performance of an unread poem by Rohn Bayes.

Send us a textEpithalamium is a song you would sing outside the doors of newlyweds - love poems.Today I discuss the nature of poetry, romantic relationships, cheating, and the secret life of Pablo Neruda with guest, Cristina Sanchez.She introduced me to this poem, and I really enjoyed it. If you haven't read Neruda before, it's worth your time.

Send us a textI believe that wisdom comes through suffering not smiles. Today I talk with the host of the TalentGrow Show, Halelly Azulay. Halelly is an author, speaker, facilitator, and leadership development strategist and an expert in communication skills and emotional intelligence.We talked quite a bit about emotional intelligence and how poetry could improve one in that area. We also delved into this wonderful poem by Henley.

Send us a textBuck up Buckaroo! I love Westerns. I often wonder if the death of the western has led to some of our confidence problems today. In this episode I compare Jordan Peterson's Rule Number 1 "Stand Up Straight WIth Your Shoulders Back" to the westerns of the 1939 to 1969 era as well as to the poem Horatius by Macaulay. I'll discuss Ayn Rand and the mind/body integration How the wester American hero illuminates Peterson's number one rule A full analysis of the rule with reference to movies like Rio Bravo, Red River, The Searchers, Hondo, True Grit, The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy And the Sundance Kid and why Clint Eastwood is a horrible human being for creating High Plains Drifter. The second half of the program is a reading of the poem Horatius followed by an in-depth converse with verse where I lay out the story and analyze it from a Petersonian perspective. Enjoy!

Send us a text We discuss rule number one in Dr. Jordan B. Peterson's book "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos." The rule is "Stand Up Straight with Your Shoulders Back." it seems simple, but there is a lot to discuss in this chapter. What do lobsters have to do with human confidence? Do men need to be dominant to get the girl? What about women? And most importantly why do we need to to follow laws and rules in the first place? What if we just "live and let live." In this we will bring up a famous poem by AE Housman, "The Laws of God, The Laws of Men," The laws of God, the laws of man, He may keep that will and can; Now I: let God and man decree Laws for themselves and not for me; And if my ways are not as theirs Let them mind their own affairs. Their deeds I judge and much condemn, Yet when did I make laws for them? Please yourselves, say I, and they Need only look the other way. But no, they will not; t

Send us a textAre you reluctant to give up a passion? When is it time to let go? Does giving up on one stage of your journey inevitable to moving toward the next?These are some of the questions Stephanie Scheller and I discuss in our fun little conversation with the great poet Robert Frost.

Send us a textIn this poem Walt Whitman suggests we build a new race of men in America. Who better to converse with this verse than an engineer!

Send us a textIs it honorable to die for one's country?War has always been sold to the public as an honorable and glorious thing. Is there anything honorable about death? Wilfred Owen in his famous anti-war poem draws a terrifying description of the realities of war in order to counter the propaganda urging young men to fight for their country. After all "it's the honorable thing to do."

Send us a textSo an Atheist and a Catholic enter a podcast studio...I had a great time and a great conversation with Eric Robert Morse, author of The Juggernaut: Why the System Crushes the Only People Who Can Save it."This poem by William Blake was great fodder for a much larger discussion: What is the ideal society and how does one build it.What I found most interesting in this discussion was that eventually we got to the point where we were discussing out methods of thinking. This is the most critical aspects of coming to conclusion. If one person see the world as concretes disconnected from abstractions or vice versa or somewhere in between that makes it hard to converse. Yet we figured it out and by the end came to some interesting conclusions on how an atheist and a Catholic can come to some serious agreements.Enjoy.

Send us a textMy friend Sean Doherty and I discuss the famous WWI poem "I saw a man this morning" by Patrick Shaw Stewart.Hopefully no one listening to this podcast, including the men reading it, will ever have to go to war. Yet, it is an activity that is apart of us. It was once believed that war was necessary to bring out our deepest virtues.Sean is a man of peace. He wrote a peace poem campaign and sent it to every US Senator in the hopes of spreading the message that war is not the answer.Our discussion is challenging and deep as we converse with this verse. We ask questions like when is war necessary? Should we be in the Middle East? What are the justifications of war? And, once there, what do we do?

Send us a textHow do you tell a child that he is dying?This poem terrified me. It made me never want to have a child. What if this were to happen to my child? Literature cannot solve all of our problems, but it can be a salve to many of them. In talking to my old high school friend, Dr. Lamar Johnson, about this emotional issue, I came to appreciate the grandiosity of life and our role in society. Dr Johnson is a pediatrician who has to think about how to deliver terrible news to people. How do you cope? How do you convey this experience? For me, it was a cathartic moment. That's poetry.Dr. Johnson and I conversed with the verse. And we also talked more broadly about life, philosophy, how to tell the truth, race relations, culture and oh so much more.

Send us a textA Physics teacher and I converse with William Ernest Henley's beautiful poem, Invictus.We converse in depth with this poem and I learn a lot from Alex.One big question we cover is "what is a terrible event that has occurred to you and how did you overcome it?"

Send us a textThis was my first LIVE IN-PERSON interview and I had a blast. I hope Jake had a blast too!We talked about a lot. Our poem was "A Poison Tree" by William Blake. (yaaay JAKE chose BLAKE!) We opened the discussion with some spiked egg-nog and the mass exodus from blue states to red and then discussed why Jake, like myself, is a poetry hater.Then we dug deep to investigate why this poem in particular spoke to a cloistered West Texas boy.We got into the problems with building your life around a fake persona, the masks we wear and how they destroy us, the destructive power of repression and even some movie recommendations.*Full disclaimer: Listening to this I must apologize to Jake because I was quite loopy. I was at the beginning stages of a fever and had only gotten around 4 hours sleep the night before. In a desire to be at the top of my game I downed two caps of dayquil a few hours before his arrival. Oh then I drank a red bull right before he arrived. Oh and then we had bourbon... So if

Send us a textTonight I read "Twas the Night before Christmas." Why did the Protestant Reformers, The New England Puritans and the Communist Soviets all HATE Christmas and St Nick? They squashed it and did all they could to bury it. Yet in America it took hold and morphed into something special.Often, to understand an idea we must see what happens when our enemies destroy it. This does happen in history. This is not a podcast about the war on Christmas. Instead, it is an episode about how the magic was taken away, and how I hope to help you bring it back.