Multi-Verse: A Perspective on Poetry
Multi-Verse: A Perspective on Poetry
Christopher Hynes
When was the last time you wrote a poem? Or studied a poem, or read one? Or even thought about poetry at all? Chances are, more recently than you think, particularly if you listen to popular music, if you read, or even watch Netflix. If this podcast has a central idea, it is that poetry still has a place in connecting humans to a shared experience, and that exploring the ideas of poetry outside of university and high school classroom yields something more rich and meaningful. Let’s take poetry off the page and give you something to think, rather than just read.
Episode 5 - [as freedom is a breakfastfood] by E.E. Cummings
Where to find meaning in this muddle of confusion, in the way our brain clings to binary reasoning and heuristics and paradoxes? This week’s poem points us towards a conclusion that perhaps meaning is in the act of merely existing.
Jun 15, 2023
8 min
Episode 4 - After Collecting the Autumn Taxes, by Bao Juyi
Authority, identity, causality, being able to view your role and privilege through the lens of another - these all feels like very modern, very meta concerns. But are they? Around roughly 800 CE, in China's Tang dynasty, Bao Juyi wrestled with these same concerns, with both an incisiveness and lightness that might be instructiveness for our modern, digitally fractured culture.
May 30, 2023
9 min
Episode 3 - When You Are Old, by WB Yeats
Yeats and the important of voice, or how to turn a quiet moment of reflection into a journey through time and space, and yet you never feel like you left your rocking chair.
May 17, 2023
6 min
Episode 2 - Le Pont Mirabeau, by Guillaume Apollinaire
What is the power of symbolic language, particularly about so old a topic as love and heartbreak?  Passent les jours et passent les semaines            Ni temps passé      Ni les amours reviennent Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine            Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure            Les jours s’en vont je demeure
May 3, 2023
6 min
Ep 1 - ’Tell The Truth But Tell It Slant’ by Emily Dickinson
For the inaugural episode of the Multi-Verse podcast, we look at poem 1263 by the inimitable Emily Dickinson, and ask about our relationship to the truth.
Apr 21, 2023
4 min