Christmas in Wales (Photo: Flickr/Richard0)

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Welsh poet Dylan Thomas was known for his wild carousing and his wild, wonderful use of language.

If you know “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” you know Dylan Thomas. Welsh actor Catherine Zeta Jones named her son for him. Actor Richard Burton was buried with his poems in hand.

One of his poems — a prose poem of vignette and memory — goes back to the sweet, humble, funny hours of his own childhood Christmas.

That work has leapt to the stage. We’ve got the actors in our studio.

This hour, On Point: Dylan Thomas and “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” on stage. 

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

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us in our studio are…

Burgess Clark, playwright and director of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” a joint production by the Boston Children’s Theatre and the Boston Playwright’s Theatre. He adapted the Dylan Thomas poem for the stage.   The Boston Globe called it “superlative.”

Stephen Libby, actor playing the adult Dylan Thomas.

Adam Freeman, actor playing the young Dylan Thomas.

Margaret Ann Brady, actor playing the mother.

Steven Gagliastro, actor playing the father.

Meagan Hawkes, actor playing Auntie Dosie.

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:

Writer Nicholson Baker has taken on phone sex, Adolf Hitler, John Updike, and presidential assassination. In his new novel, he takes on poetry.

Nevermind plot. Baker’s never cared much for that. He’s got a nerdy poet. A failed romance. An overdue introduction for a poetry anthology. That’s about it.

His anthologist-poet protagonist knows how to crack the whip of language. Ezra Pound: a “blustering bigot,” he says. Former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins: “A charming, chirping crack whore.”

Mostly, Baker’s anthologist does very little, but he thinks, marvelously, about poetry. About rhythm and rhyme and meter — the march, the work song, the nursery rhyme, the limerick — and the meaning of it all.

This hour, On Point: Nicholson Baker on his new novel, “The Anthologist.”

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

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Nicholson Baker joins us from Portland, Maine. He’s written seven previous novels, with his precise and playful stream of consciousness style, and four works of nonfiction. “Vox,” looks at phone sex. “Checkpoint” at assassination. “Human Smoke” controversially cast Churchill and FDR as World War II aggressors. His new novel is “The Anthologist.” You can read an excerpt here.

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.

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.

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.” 

Author Katy Lederer

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“Money is a kind of poetry,” the great Wallace Stevens once wrote.

Lately, the great American money centers have looked, if anything, like tragic poetry. Meltdown. Mayhem. Fall from grace.

Katy Lederer was a poet in the belly of the beast — an Iowa Writers’ Workshop grad who for six years worked for one of the world’s biggest hedge funds. While they bet billions, she took notes — and wrote poetry.

Now, she’s quoting Goethe, Galbraith, Nietzsche and Kant from the land of leverage and the lush life.

This hour, On Point: The hedge-fund poet, and verse in the ruins of high finance.

You can join the conversation. Masters of the universe, did you find poetry in the bubble? In the billions? What do we learn when we open the books on money?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Katy Lederer joins us from Atlanta. She is the author of the poetry collections “The Heaven-Sent Leaf” and “Winter Sex,” and the memoir “Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers.” She worked from 2002 to 2008 as a recruiter at D.E. Shaw, one of the world’s biggest hedge funds. She is currently a poetry editor of Fence magazine, a literary and arts journal.

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

Here are two poems by Katy Lederer, from her new collection, “The Heaven-Sent Leaf”:

Me, a Brainworker

Me, a brainworker toiling in pristine white hallways.
Abnormal, aboriginal, endemic to this site.
Some people sell their wares outside.
In the pulsating light of Times Square they are singing.
In their noses and nipples, the glinting of rings.
Let us call them unoriginal.
Let us call them all these awful things.
The busy unoriginals are throwing out their trash,
But on this lovely parchment they are writing priceless poems.
They suppose that by such rendering they’ll be remembered after death.
They suppose that by such influence their souls will sing eternally.
In the hallways, we are killing time,
Its blood now thick and lurid on the freshly painted walls.

. . .

The Heaven-Sent Leaf

The speculation of contemporary life.
The teeming green of utterance.

To feel this clean,
This dream-éclat.

There is, in the heart, the hard-rendering profit.
As if we were plucking the leaves from the trees.

Let us think of the soft verdure of the spirit of this age as now inside
           of us and swollen by spring rain.
To imagine oneself as a river.

To imagine oneself as a stretch of cool water,
Pouring into a basin or brain.

And if one knows one is not free?
One crawls from the back of the head to the river

And places one’s pinky oh so cautiously in.

“Me, a Brainworker” and “The Heaven-Sent Leaf” by Katy Lederer, reprinted from “The Heaven-Sent Leaf” © 2008 by Katy Lederer. Reprinted by permission of BOA Editions, Ltd. www.boaeditions.org

Kay Ryan, 16th U.S. Poet Laureate. Photo: Library of Congress

Californian Kay Ryan will be the new poet laureate of the United States.

It’s a title that sounds very grand for a poet whose verse can be so compact and grounded.

But Kay Ryan’s ground goes deep. To fundamental questions of life, and how we live it — what we share and what we hold.

In her poem “The Well or the Cup,” she asks:

How can
you tell
at the start
what you
can give away
and what
you must hold
to your heart.
What is
the well
and what is
a cup. Some
people get
drunk up.

(“The Well or the Cup,” from “The Niagara River,” 2005.)

This hour, On Point: A conversation with the newly-named poet laureate of the United States, Kay Ryan.

-Tom Ashbrook

* * *

Guest:

Kay Ryan, joining us from San Francisco, has just been named the nation’s 16th Poet Laureate, and officially takes up her post in the fall. The author of six books of poetry, including “The Niagara River,” “Say Uncle,” and “Elephant Rocks,” she received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from The Poetry Foundation in 2004.

* * *

Links:

Here are some of the poems Kay Ryan read for us during the show:

“Blandeur” (with audio, at The Poetry Foundation).

“A Cat/A Future” (and other poems, posted at The New York Times)

“The Niagara River” (with audio, at the Academy of American Poets)

“Dutch” (at the Library of Congress)

“The Fabric of Life” (at The Poetry Foundation)

You can read — and listen to — many more poems by Ryan at The Poetry Foundation and the Academy of American Poets.

]]> http://www.onpointradio.org/2008/07/poet-kay-ryan/feed 0 http://www.onpointradio.org/2008/04/the-making-of-sonnets http://www.onpointradio.org/2008/04/the-making-of-sonnets#comments Tue, 01 Apr 2008 15:00:00 +0000 Wen Stephenson http://www.onpointradio.org/2008/04/the-making-of-sonnets/

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 new 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.

Eight hundred years ago this week, in the mountains of a Persian-speaking realm now known as Afghanistan, a great mystic poet of the Islamic world — and now the whole world — was born. In his lifetime, Jalaluddin Rumi and his family fled before invading Mongols, across what’s now Iran and into Turkey.

Today, his ecstatic, sensual poetry of love and spiritual seeking fills volumes of the hottest-selling poetry in America. Where contemporary Islam can look severe, Rumi looks lush, sounds gorgeous, and reads like heaven.

This hour, On Point: the great mystic. Reading Rumi at eight hundred.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

James Morris, professor of theology at Boston College.

Fatemeh Keshavarz, chair of the department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis and author of “Jasmines and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran.”

Coleman Barks, author of “Rumi: Bridge to the Soul,” “The Essential Rumi,” “Rumi: The Book of Love,” and others collections.