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When native Iowan turned Nebraskan Ted Kooser was named U.S. poet laureate in 2004, he was the first poet laureate named from the country’s Great Plains.

His poetry was described as modest, straightforward, stubborn, elegiac — and beautiful.

Now, Ted Kooser has written a big little book of elegy to the time and place and people who made him — who made a whole world of farm and field, gas station and pinochle game. A kind of love letter to the country’s heartland and his family’s place in it.

This hour, On Point: Ted Kooser, and a poet’s evocation of the past.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Ted Kooser joins us from Lincoln, Nebraska. A Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and former U.S. poet laureate, he’s a professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His new memoir is “Lights on a Ground of Darkness.”  You can read an excerpt here (pdf). And you can read selections of his poems here, here, and here. 

See Kooser read from his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection “Delights & Shadows” at the University of California-Santa Barbara in 2005:

The great English poet and romantic Lord Byron was a genius and a terror.

He could write sublimely: “She walks in beauty, like the night…” He could — and did — thrill and terrify. “Mad, bad and dangerous to know,” was one ex-lover’s immortal tag on Byron. “A second Caligula,” was another barb.

And yet, Byron’s magnetism, his passion, cut a wide swath through early 19th-century hearts and boudoirs — even politics. He was, perhaps, the first celebrity.

Irish novelist Edna O’Brien has written a loving new account of the lover-poet unbound. This hour, On Point: “Byron in Love.”

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Edna O’Brien joins us from London. She’s the author of many acclaimed novels, including The Country Girls Trilogy, each installment of which was banned and burned in her native Ireland, upon publication in the 1960s, for their frank portrayals of sex. Most recently, her novel “The Light of Evening” won the James Joyce Ulysses Medal. Her new book is “Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life.”

More:

The Poetry Foundation’s Byron page offers a good biographical essay, a bibliography, and a selection of Byron’s shorter poems.

Here’s a brief excerpt from Edna O’Brien’s “Byron in Love”:

Lord George Gordon Byron was five feet eight and a half inches in height, had a malformed right foot, chestnut hair, a haunting pallor, temples of alabaster, teeth like pearls, grey eyes fringed with dark lashes and an enchantedness that neither men nor women could resist. Everything about him was a paradox, insider and outsider, beautiful and deformed, serious and facetious, profligate but on occasion miserly, and possessed of a fierce intelligence trapped however in a child’s magic and malices. What he wrote concerning the poet Robert Burns could easily serve as his own epitaph – ‘tenderness, roughness – delicacy, coarseness – sentiment, sensuality . . . dirt and deity – all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay’.

He was also a gigantic poet, but as he reminds us, poetry is a distinct faculty and has no more to do with the individual than has the pythoness when she is off her tripod. Byron, off his tripod, becomes Byron the Man, who by his own admission could not exist without some object of love. His passions were developed very early and generated excitement, melancholy and foreboding at the loss that was bound to occur in the ‘terrestrial paradise’. He loved men and women, needing the ‘other’, whoever she or he might be. He had only to look at a beautiful face and was ready to ‘build and burn another Troy’.

The word Byronic, to this day, connotes excess, diabolical deeds and a rebelliousness answering neither to king nor commoner. Byron, more than any other poet, has come to personify the poet as rebel, imaginative and lawless, reaching beyond race, creed or frontier, his manifest flaws redeemed by a magnetism and ultimately a heroism, that by ending in tragedy, raised it and him from the particular to the universal, from the individual to the archetypal.

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Originally broadcast on April 1, 2008.

The world is too much with us, goes the sonnet. And in fourteen lines we’re off, into the “jewel box” of poetic form. How do I love thee? Death, be not proud. My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun.

For five hundred years and more, from Petrarch and Shakespeare to Ginsburg and Seamus Heaney, the sonnet has beguiled and teased and thrilled — and informed us on the human condition.

How do they do it? Many ways. “You jerk, you didn’t call me up,” starts one.

A new anthology tells the story. This hour, On Point: the making of the sonnet.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Edward Hirsch, a poet and essayist, is co-editor (with Eavan Boland) of the Norton anthology, “The Making of a Sonnet.”

Eavan Boland, co-editor of “The Making of a Sonnet,” is a poet and the director of the creative writing program at Stanford University.

Toni Morrison (Photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders)

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Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison has made American literary history with her greats “The Bluest Eye,” “Song of Solomon,” “Beloved.” She’s looked into the heart of race, violence, sexuality, suffering, redemption.

Now, Toni Morrison — along with fellow literary greats Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, Nadine Gordimer, the late John Updike, and more — is looking directly at the role of the writer. At censorship and free expression and the importance of imagination’s free rein to a society’s fundamental health and growth.

This hour, On Point: A conversation with Toni Morrison on the power of the free word.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Toni Morrison joins us from New York. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, for her novel “Beloved.” She is editor of the new collection “Burn This Book: PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word,” which features essays from writers John Updike, Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer, Orhan Pamuk, and others. Her most recent novel, published in 2008, is “A Mercy.”

You can read excerpts from “Burn This Book” at the publisher’s website.

In this video Toni Morrison delivers her acceptance speech for the PEN/Borders Literary Service Award last December:

A detail from the manuscript of Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" (Univ. of Virginia). Click on the image to see the full page.

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In the era of the iPod, Americans can have anything they like, anytime, in their ears: hot music, the news, this show.

Jim Holt knows that, says it’s fine, but he’s stumping for something more. Something ancient. Something so old it’s new again: memorizing poetry.

Jim Holt (Photo: Chris Kallen)

He does it, all the time. He knows it may seem eccentric. Try it, he says, it’s a joy. A line or two a day, he says, and soon enough we’ve got a sweet gusher inside.

“She walks in beauty like the night.” “By this still hearth, among these barren crags.” Tennyson. Byron. Slam. It’s good for the heart and head, he says. Body and soul.

This hour, On Point: The poems we know by heart, and the unique pleasure of reciting from memory.

You can join the conversation. Have you tried it? What’s it do for you? Do you know a favorite poem by heart? Let’s hear it. Right here. Right now.

Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from New York is Jim Holt. He writes about science, humor, and philosophy for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and elsewhere. His recent essay “Got Poetry?” — about how and why he memorizes poems — appeared in The New York Times Book Review.

And from Hanover, N.H., we’re joined by Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and senior editor at The Atlantic.

A call to listeners:

We’re hoping you’ll bring your own favorites to the party. If you have a great poem you want to recite, from memory (no cheating!), then let’s hear it — call in this morning between 11am and noon Eastern, at 1-800-423-8255, and we’ll try to get you on.

And if you’ve got audio and/or video of yourself reciting poetry (from memory, not reading off the page), post the URL(s) in the comments section here.

Germaine Greer in 2007. Photo: Jonathan Ring.

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Germaine Greer was a hot, giant icon of the 1970s feminist uprising. She wrote “The Female Eunuch.” Rallied for gender revolution. Hit every hot button in the era of bra-burning and “hear me roar.”

Four decades later she’s still on fire. Still ready for revolution. Still standing up for women, even a woman who lived 400 years ago.

Anne Hathaway — not the movie star, but William Shakespeare’s wife — has had a bad rap, says Greer. She’s set out to set it right.

This hour, On Point: Feminist rebel and Renaissance scholar Germaine Greer, on Anne Hathaway — and women and the world now.

You can join the conversation. What’s your question for Germaine Greer? On feminism? Our times? Anne Hathaway?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Germaine Greer joins us from New York. Her book “The Female Eunuch” was a seminal text for the feminist movement in the 1970s. She is a scholar of Elizabethan drama, a professor emeritus at the University of Warwick, with a slew of titles to her name. Her book “Shakespeare’s Wife” came out in the U.S. last year. It’s now out in paperback.

Back in the day: Here’s Greer at New York’s Chelsea Hotel, July 1972…

(AP Photo)

Elie Wiesel attends the premiere of 'The Reader' at the Ziegfeld Theater on Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2008 in New York. (AP)

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Nobel Prize-winner Elie Wiesel was thrown in Auschwitz when he was fifteen. His father, mother, and younger sister died there, in the nightmare of the Holocaust.

He emerged, to make a life of powerful witness and remembrance. His memoir “Night” introduced millions to the horrors of the Nazi death camps.

Now, at 80, his moral investigation of that horror, and its aftermath, goes on. Elie Wiesel is still fighting for morality. Still fighting for remembrance.

This hour, On Point: Elie Wiesel and his new novel “A Mad Desire to Dance.”

You can join us. Has Elie Wiesel been your guide through the moral implications, the nightmare, of the Holocaust? What’s your question for him today?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Elie Wiesel joins us from St. Petersberg, Florida. Author, activist, Holocaust survivor, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Wiesel is professor of humanities at Boston University and is one of our era’s greatest thinkers on modern morality, and its failings. His new novel is “A Mad Desire to Dance.” You can read an excerpt at RandomHouse.com.

Wiesel has spoken out recently on the Bernard Madoff scandal, which cost him — and many others — dearly. See a transcript of his comments about Madoff on today’s show.

Edgar Allan Poe, daguerreotype 1848

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Edgar Allan Poe, master of the macabre, was born two hundred years ago this week. In the youth of the new country, he scared the daylights out of 19th-century Americans with his horror wrapped in gothic romance.

In “The Raven,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and more, he keyed in lush and early on violence, madness, spiritual doubt, terror. He was father of the detective story and the gory thriller.

Poe was a tortured soul, his death a bizarre mystery. From Sherlock Holmes to Stephen King to CSI, his work still echoes — like the tell-tale heart — in our culture today.

This hour, On Point: Master of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe, at 200.

You can join the conversation. Did you, do you, love Poe? All that gothic romance, murder, horror? What was he tapped into? Do you see it all around us in our popular culture today?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

J. Gerald Kennedy, professor of English at Louisiana State University. He’s been thinking and writing about Edgar Allan Poe for 35 years. He’s author of many books and articles on Poe, most recently “The Portable Edgar Allan Poe” and the Oxford “Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe.”

Stephen Rachman, professor of English at Michigan State University. He’s co-editor of “The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe” and president of the Poe Studies Association.

Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, professor of English at College of the Holy Cross and author of “Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism.”

More links:

The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore has complete texts of Poe’s works, and much more.

The Poe Museum in Richmond, where Poe lived and worked, documents his life and career and offers a special site devoted to the Poe bicentennial celebration.

Watch Vincent Price recite “The Raven” (from YouTube):

Three hundred years ago this year, 1709, saw the birth of Samuel Johnson — essayist, poet, critic, epic talker, dictionary writer, high moralist, and brutal wit.

He grew up huge and plagued with afflictions: blind in one eye, deaf in one ear, horribly scarred from infancy, a twitching, muttering, explosive sufferer of Tourettes.

He knew poverty and despair, and lived through both to become the most quoted English speaker after Shakespeare. If you know the quip that second marriage is “the triumph of hope over experience,” you know Samuel Johnson. Or that “patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.” Or that “a decent pension for the poor is the true test of civilization.” Or that “no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” All Johnson.

Boswell left him famous like no other with his Life of Johnson. A new biography goes for the whole man. This hour, On Point: Samuel Johnson, at 300.

You can join the conversation. Three hundred years on, are you still switched on by Samuel Johnson? By his mind, his suffering, his wit, his compassion? His stands on slavery? Capital punishment? Life? Share your thoughts.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Berkeley, California, is Jeffrey Meyers. He’s the author of many biographies, most recently “Samuel Johnson: The Struggle.”  You can browse inside the book here.

And with us from Hanover, New Hampshire, is Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and a senior editor at The Atlantic.

When it comes to bad-boy cultural icons, you’ve got trigger-happy Rambo, and then you’ve got Rimbaud.

But only one was a poet. Only one shook and shaped poets and performers from Burroughs and Kerouac to Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Patti Smith and punk rock.

Arthur Rimbaud was the rebel, vagabond and drop-out dreamer who tore up centuries of French poetry and threw Paris on its ear — and did it with poetry written by the time he was nineteen. Then he dropped the pen and took off for Africa.

This hour, On Point: Biographer Edmund White on the wild-child poet rebel, Rimbaud.

You can join the conversation. Can you quote “The Drunken Boat”? The lines from Burroughs to Kerouac to Patti Smith and Jim Morrison that bow to Rimbaud?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Joining us from New York is Edmund White, novelist, critic, and biographer. He wrote “A Boy’s Own Story,” lived for years in Paris, and won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1993 for his biography of Jean Genet. His latest novel is “Hotel de Dream: A New York Novel.” His new biography is “Rimbaud: the Double Life of a Rebel.” 

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Two and a half thousand years ago, a man named Herodotus wandered the ancient world, trying to make sense of the great war between the Greeks and Persians that had shaped his times.

He gathered wild tales of fabulous creatures and arrogant kings and queens. He also heard of the very real clash of the armies of Xerxes and the Greeks, of the Spartans of “300″ fame, of two great cultures colliding in battle.

In the process, he did something that had never quite been done before. He wrote history. A new translation shows we’re still learning from it.

This hour, On Point: re-reading Herodotus, “Father of History.”

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Robert Strassler, editor of “The Landmark Thucydides” and the new book “The Landmark Herodotus.” He is president of Riverside Capital Management Corp.

Sen. Barack Obama greets supporters at a primary night rally in Raleigh, N.C., on May 6, 2008. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

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Live from Denver and the Democratic National Convention.

Hillary Clinton has spoken — in a powerful appeal last night to Democrats to support the rival who bested her in a landmark contest for American history.

Now, the week’s spotlight begins to turn fully toward Barack Obama — contender, phenomenon, African-American, and very possibly the next president of the United States. Against centuries of American experience, African-American experience, this is vast.

This hour, live from Denver: African-American writers Maya Angelou, Ishmael Reed, and Alice Walker on Barack Obama and this American moment.

You can join the conversation. What does Obama’s nomination — his life, his rise, his color, his challenge ahead — mean for black America? For all America? What do you make of this moment in America’s race history? We look forward to hearing from you.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us first, to look at last night’s speech from Hillary Clinton and more, is Gwen Ifill. She’s the host of Washington Week from PBS and senior correspondent for the NewsHour. Her forthcoming book is “The Breakthrough: Politics in the Age of Obama.”

With us from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is Dr. Maya Angelou. One of America’s most renowned writers, she is one of only two poets in U.S. history — herself and Robert Frost — to read at a new president’s inauguration: Bill Clinton’s in 1993, when she read this poem. She is professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University and author of numerous books, including “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” Her latest book, “Letters to My Daughter,” is out on September 23.

Joining us from San Francisco is Ishmael Reed. A renowned poet and essayist, his cultural criticism has appeared in The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Baltimore Sun, and many other publications. His “New and Collected Poems” was published in 2006. His new book, “Mixing It Up: Taking on the Media Bullies and Other Reflections,” has just been published. He publishes the literary magazine Konch. His piece “Going Old South on Obama” appeared in Counterpunch in January.

And with us from Mendocino, California, is Alice Walker. One of America’s leading literary voices, she’s the author of poetry, essays, and fiction, including her 1983 novel, “The Color Purple,” which won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. Her piece “Obama is the change that America has tried to hide” appeared in The Guardian in April.

Multimedia:

Watch last night’s speech by Hillary Clinton at the 2008 DNC

Doris Lessing at the 2006 Cologne Literature Festival in Germany. Photo: Elke Wetzig

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Literary icon Doris Lessing won a Nobel Prize at 87 — and now, at 88, she says she’s written her last book.

It’s called “Alfred & Emily.” It’s about her parents. About their lives as they were — deeply scarred by World War I and played out as British colonials in outback Rhodesia. And about what their lives might have been without the trenches and blood and death of that war.

Deep in her years, Doris Lessing has a reputation these days as a brilliant, prickly, tough customer. But in this book, she is all powerful empathy and imagination. This hour, we reach out to London for a conversation with Doris Lessing.

You can join the conversation. What’s your question for Doris Lessing? Do you have a lifelong relationship with her work? What does she stand for, to you? Did you cheer when she won the Nobel Prize? Have you ever tried to imagine how your parents’ lives might have been different? We look forward to your thoughts.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Doris Lessing joins us from London. Winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature, she is author of “The Golden Notebook,” published in 1962, and more than 50 other books, including novels, story collections, poetry, science fiction, and nonfiction. Her new book is “Alfred & Emily,” which she has announced will be her last.

More links:

Read an excerpt from “Alfred & Emily” at HarperCollins.com.

Dorris Lessing: A Retrospective offers a good biography and information on her works.

You can read her Nobel Lecture, “On not winning the Nobel Prize,” at NobelPrize.org. You can also watch it on video.

]]> http://www.onpointradio.org/2008/08/doris-lessing/feed 10 http://www.onpointradio.org/2008/06/hot-summer-books http://www.onpointradio.org/2008/06/hot-summer-books#comments Mon, 02 Jun 2008 15:00:00 +0000 Wen Stephenson http://www.onpointradio.org/2008/06/hot-summer-books/

Every book lover knows the thrill. A hot summer day. A porch swing, a hammock, a long curve in the beach — and a great, transporting read.

Maybe it’s lords and ladies that first took you there. Or Spanish romance. High plains gunfire. Down and dirty spies. High-blown history. Distant lands.

This hour we’re asking top book mavens for their recommendations this summer. We’ve got a white tiger, and fear and yoga in New Jersey. Black flies, a black dove, Gandhi, Churchill, and 1434.

This hour, On Point: Great summer reads, ‘08.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Tim Smith, buyer and manager of Schuler Books and Music in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Liesl Schillinger, contributor to The New York Times Book Review.

Deirdre Donahue, book reviewer for USA Today.

Donald Ray Pollock grew up in a town called Knockemstiff, Ohio. Now he’s out with a debut collection of short stories called “Knockemstiff” that makes Lake Wobegon look like a candy-apple dream.

Here is a ragged, dark, downside vision of American small town life, where runaways and drunks set the tone and the smell through an open door, he writes, is “like a closet full of bad times.”

Forget the apple pie. Pollock gives us snakebite and steroids and a sorrow to make Flannery O’Connor wince.

This hour, On Point: Dark and twisted with Donald Ray Pollock and “Knockemstiff.”

- Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Donald Ray Pollock, author of the debut short story collection, “Knockemstiff.”

Sunshine State humorist and novelist Carl Hiaasen knows a lot about Florida and human nature. What he didn’t know was just how ugly his own nature could get when he put it back on the golf course.

Decades after Hiaasen laid down his golf clubs as a young father, he picked them up again at fifty-something. It wasn’t pretty, but the wickedly funny author of “Strip Tease,” “Nature Girl,” “Skinny Dip” and “Sick Puppy” has made it a good laugh.

This hour, On Point: Florida humorist Carl Hiaasen on sand traps, long drives, getting older, and going back to golf.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Carl Hiaasen, columnist and novelist. His new book is “The Downhill Lie: A Hacker’s Return to a Ruinous Sport.”

The Sean Bell case in New York has thrown a big spotlight on American big-city police and policing. An unarmed man on the morning of his wedding day — no crime, no offense –cut down in a hail of 50 police bullets, and last week all officers cleared in the case.

Peter Moskos is watching closely. The Harvard-trained sociologist spent a year on the beat, as a cop on the toughest streets of Baltimore. Now he’s telling what he saw. The heroism, and the madness.

This hour, On Point: Out of the ivory tower and into the squad car. We’re on the beat and in the heat with Peter Moskos.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Peter Moskos, professor of law, police science and criminal justice administration at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and author of “Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District.”

Perfumes are more than a scent. They are a state of mind — at least that what all the ads tell us.

A little dab here and you’re picnicking in fields of wild flowers, or experiencing the blush of first love. A spritz there and you’re rolling in satin sheets, and feeling oh so Hollywood. Dab your wrist, and you’re on a tropical paradise, without leaving the office.

But how do you really know how all these perfumes really smell on you?

The authors of a new book on perfumes with whom we speak today have traveled the world and sniffed the world’s best and worst.

This hour, On Point: A perfume primer guaranteed to stir your soul and senses.

-Jane Clayson

Guests:

Luca Turin, a biophysicist and perfume critic, is co-author of the new book, “Perfumes: The Guide.”

Tania Sanchez, a writer and perfume critic, is co-author of “Perfumes: The Guide.”

Marcel Proust may have said it best. “I believe,” said the great French novelist, “that reading, in its original essence, is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”

Now, neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf says yes, but it’s more than that. The human brain, she says, is endlessly pliable. A generation of research that began on the humble squid shows that the very act of reading itself actually shapes the human brain. And reading has shaped our history, our culture, our civilization.

Now, in the digital age, we are reading less. She sees devolution.

This hour On Point: reading, Proust and the squid.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Maryanne Wolf, professor of child development at Tufts University and author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain”

Constance Steinkuehler, professor of educational communication and technology, University of Wisconsin at Madison

Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly.

Man walks into a restaurant and asks: “How do you prepare your chickens?” And the cook responds: “Nothing special really. We just tell them they’re gonna die.” Bada boom. The human condition in a two-line joke about chickens.

Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein see philosophy today all over the world of humor. A world where Woody Allen and Wittgenstein, Seinfeld and Socrates could have a great time cracking wise. Their new book of high philosophy and low humor is a surprise bestseller.

This hour On Point: the authors of “Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes.”

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Thomas Cathcart, co-author of the new book “Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes.”

Daniel Klein, co-author of the new book “Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes.”