Reading and Writing

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

Check out Claire's music, art, and writing here: www.claireakebrandart.com
 
I chat with Claire about James Baldwin's novel Giovanni's Room. We swoon over a few of its best passages and reflect on some of its major themes: sexuality, masculinity, love and romance, Americans' strange concept of time, how to say "yes" to life, sources of hope, and much more. 

E. M. Forster, Passage to India

Check out my new book of poems here. 
 
Claire and I savor Forster's Passage to India, and talk about cross-cultural friendships, colonialism, nihilistic echoes, salvific One-ness, the importance of laughing even (or especially) at your most cherished beliefs, the power of merriment, and more. 

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Check out my new book of poems here. 
 
Claire and I wander through Calvino's Invisible Cities, and talk about the problem of language, the superstition of travel, parables, why humans love imagining their own absence, how to avoid living in an inferno, one of our favorite concluding paragraphs ever, and more. 

Kawabata, Snow Country

This week, Claire and I savor Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country, and talk about its dream-like quality, its fusion of opposites, ideas of emptiness, openness, oneness, beautifulness, its conception of love and death, and ask what the meaning of life is according to this novel. 

Jane Austen, Persuasion

Check out Claire's art, music, and writing here: https://www.claireakebrandart.com/
 
Claire and I swoon over one of our favorite novels, and talk about its narrative technique, its subtlety, the moral importance of being persuadable, the pitfalls of giving and taking advice, the value of traditions, the wisdom of not rebelling, and much else. 

Shakespeare: Four Soliloquies

Benjamin and I delight in four of our favorite Shakespeare soliloquies. We talk about the genre of drama vs. the lyric, why Shakespeare's language hasn't really aged, the power of lists, the relationship between thinking and speaking, Shakespeare's "infinite variety," turns in poems, how to let your poems teach you, and what it would mean to write as if your life depended on it--literally.  

Hamlet's To Be or Not to Be: a Close Reading

In this mini podcast, I take apart the most famous passage in English literature. I examine the formal and linguistic patterns or structures that help make this soliloquy beautiful and incantatory. I also ask how its content can help explain the passage's enduring fame, and how both its content and form can give all aspiring writers something to strive for. 

Andrew Marvell

Claire and I walk through Marvell's gardens, stumbling over melons, and chat about: irony vs sincerity, carpe diem, time's winged chariot, the power of imagination, daily falls from Eden, variation in prosody, and more. We briefly lament the difficulties of "Upon Appleton House," and ask how private a poem can get and still be great. Also, a fit of hubris comes over me, and I end up, for some reason, reading some of my own poetry.

John Keats

Danny and I try to load every rift of a brief conversation with Keatsian ore. We talk about the importance of beauty, lush imagery, vowel sounds, the form of the great odes, poetic empathy, and more. 

Tomas Tranströmer

My wife Claire Akebrand and I chat about why we love the poetry of Tomas Tranströmer. We talk about translation, "enigmatic" poetry, how poetry changes our perspective on life, the problem of "interpreting" poems, and more.