A short poem told from the perspective of a traveler who stops to watch the snow fall, and, in doing so, reflects on the conflict between man and nature and the wishes and obligations we face in our lives.
Written by Robert Frost, 1922.
Read by Shane Morris.
In ‘A Voice Above The Linn’ Lawrence collaborated with the renowned poet John Burnside, who contributed four beautiful new poems to segment its chapters.
In 2016 Robbie Lawrence first travelled to a remote stretch of coastline in the west coast of Scotland, to Linn Gardens, which lies at the head of Cove Bay on the west side of Rosneath peninsula. The gardens had been run for fifty years by Jim Taggart, an avid botanist and gardener.
Jim discovered that the region’s subtropical climate allowed him to grow plants and flowers from all over the world. His endeavours led to the estate being covered in an intricately plotted web of ferns, bamboos, Magnolias and Rhododendrons. As Jim got older, his son Jamie took over the more physical elements of maintaining the garden, including travelling abroad to research and gather new plants. On one such journey, to the northern mountainous region of Vietnam, Jamie disappeared. His body was found years later, he had evidently fallen in one of the mountain’s higher passes.
“When I first met Jim, who by this point was well into his 80s, he told me that he decided to keep the garden going as a memorial to his son. Over the past few years, I went back to visit Jim and document the garden as it passed through the seasons. Despite his age, Jim would bound around the garden, occasionally stopping to provide a lengthy anecdote about a particular fern or tree. Last summer, Jim passed away at the age of 84.” – Robbie Lawrence
“Je Viens” is a Cinematic Poem Short Film In Tignes, France Directed by Franck Pinel.
Filmed, Edited and Directed by: Franck Pinel (FKY)
Music by: Steven Gutheinz
Written by: Samuel Revol
Narrated by: Siméon Revol & Laure Revol
English Translation by: Madeleine Barter
“Between the desert peaks and the wild plains, Itinerary of the man alone; poisoned, in love, alive.”
I invite you on the trails of Tignes in Savoie, under the August sun, to breathe the fresh air! A little vastness, horizons blurred to forget for a few moments our confined lives.
A first FKY / Srevol collaboration, with a text written for the film, and read by a young Simeon with a rocky voice.
I Approach
Tightrope walking earthling
Lying heavily on rock
I look for your softness
Your suspended caresses
In my solitude, I approach
My bones follow your tracks
Along smoke-filled banks,
Burns under your sun
My masterful soul
In my solitude, I approach
My wings poisoned
by oily molecules
accept my sorrow
my ghostly pardon
In my solitude, I approach
Tightrope walking earthling
With smoky soul, I approach
I burn in your softness
Masterful earth
—————————————
Je viens
Funambule terrien,
Aimanté à la roche,
Je cherche tes douceurs,
Tes caresses suspendues.
Dans ma solitude, je viens
Mes os suivent ta piste,
Aux rivages enfumés
Je brûle sous ton soleil
Mon âme de capitaine
Dans ma solitude, je viens
mes ailes empoisonnées
de molécules pétroliennes
accepte mon désolé
mon pardon fumigène
Dans ma solitude, je viens
Funambule terrien,
A l’âme enfumée je viens
Je brûle dans ta douceur,
Terre capitaine
Tignes is a group of villages that form a high-altitude ski resort in the French Alps, near the Italian border. With nearby Val d’Isère, it’s part of the Espace Killy ski area, linked by a network of lifts. Val Claret and Tignes Le Lac villages are lively hubs, with restaurants and shops. In summer, the area offers trails, golf and a bike park, plus ski runs on the Grande Motte glacier.
Read by Dave Luukkonen and Music by Tony Anderson
Walt Whitman is America’s world poet – a latter-day successor to Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare, whose verse collection ‘Leaves of Grass’ marked a new era in the history of American literature.
Within Leaves of Grass, Whitman’s ‘Song of the Open Road’ engages with important themes of freedom, the self and nature. The poem begins with the speaker setting out on a long brown path “Afoot and light-hearted,” for he is done with the routines, customs, and safe behaviours of his previous life, “done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms.”
Here, Whitman renounces a life devoted to the conventional pursuit of material success and embarks on the open road, the world before him. –
If you’d like to read the full poem, go here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem…
Read by: A Poetry Channel
Sonnet 44 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man. Sonnet 44 is continued in Sonnet 45.
If the dull substance of my flesh were thought,
Injurious distance should not stop my way;
For then despite of space I would be brought,
From limits far remote, where thou dost stay.
No matter then although my foot did stand
Upon the farthest earth removed from thee;
For nimble thought can jump both sea and land
As soon as think the place where he would be.
But ah! thought kills me that I am not thought,
To leap large lengths of miles when thou art gone,
But that, so much of earth and water wrought,
I must attend time’s leisure with my moan,
Receiving nought by elements so slow
But heavy tears, badges of either’s woe.
In the latest episode in their series of Close Readings, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford look at the life and work of Robert Frost, the great American poet of fences and dark woods. They discuss Frost’s difficult early life as an occasional poultry farmer and teacher, his arrival in England in 1912 amid the flowering of Georgian poetry, and his emergence as the first 20th-century professional poet, whose version of the American wilderness myth, full of mischief and foreboding, took him to packed concert halls and a presidential inauguration.
A conversation with the acclaimed poet and New Yorker writer Cynthia Zarin that transports us to two of her favorite cities, Venice and Rome, in a celebration of Italy as the country begins to loosen the longest coronavirus-related lockdown in Europe. The episode features evocative readings from her forthcoming book,Two Cities, which captures the meditative yet constantly surprising nature of travel from a deeply personal point of view.
From acclaimed poet and New Yorker writer Cynthia Zarin comes a deeply personal meditation on two cities, Venice and Rome—each a work of art, both a monument to the past—and on how love and loss shape places and spaces.
Here we encounter a writer deeply engaged with narrative in situ—a traveler moving through beloved streets, sometimes accompanied, sometimes solo. With her, we see, anew, the Venice Biennale, the Lagoon, and San Michele, the island of the dead; the Piazza di Spagna, the Tiber, the view from the Gianicolo; the pigeons at San Marco and the parrots in the Doria Pamphili. As a poet first and foremost, Zarin’s attention to the smallest details, the loveliest gesture, brings Venice and Rome vividly to life for the reader.
The sixteenth book in the expanding, renowned ekphrasis series, Two Cities creates space for these two historic cities to become characters themselves, their relationship to the writer as real as any love affair.
ekphrasis
Dedicated to publishing rare, out-of-print, and newly commissioned texts as accessible paperback volumes the ekphrasis series is part of David Zwirner Books’s ongoing effort to publish new and surprising pieces of writing on visual culture.
Cynthia Zarin
Cynthia Zarin is the author of five books of poetry, most recently, Orbit (2017), as well as five books for children and a collection of essays, An Enlarged Heart: A Personal History (2013). Her honors and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship for Literature, the Ingram Merrill Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker, Zarin teaches at Yale University.
Directed by: Elizabeth and Matthew Boulton
Poem by Marie Howe.
Text and context: brainpickings.org/2020/04/23/singularity-marie-howe-animated
Created for The Universe in Verse: brainpickings.org/the-universe-in-verse
Produced by SALT Project (saltproject.org) with Maria Popova (brainpickings.org). Original music by Zoë Keating (zoekeating.com).
This has been a multi-woman labor of love, with everyone involved donating their time and talent.
Before she published “Silent Spring,” one of the most influential books of the last century, Rachel Carson was a young aspiring poet and then a graduate student in marine biology. Although she couldn’t swim and disliked boats, Carson fell in love with the ocean. Her early books—including “The Sea Around Us,” “The Edge of the Sea” and “Under the Sea Wind”—were like no other nature writing of their time,
Jill Lepore says: Carson made you feel you were right there with her, gazing into the depths of a tide pool or lying in a cave lined with sea sponges. Lepore notes that Carson was wondering about a warming trend in the ocean as early as the 1940s, and was planning to explore it after the publication of “Silent Spring.” If she had not died early, of cancer, could Carson have brought climate change to national attention well before it was too late?
Excerpts from Carson’s work were read by Charlayne Woodard, and used with permission of Carson’s estate.
Rachel Louise Carson (May 27, 1907 – April 14, 1964) was an American marine biologist, author, and conservationist whose book Silent Spring and other writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement.
Carson began her career as an aquatic biologist in the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, and became a full-time nature writer in the 1950s. Her widely praised 1951 bestseller The Sea Around Us won her a U.S. National Book Award, recognition as a gifted writer, and financial security. Her next book, The Edge of the Sea, and the reissued version of her first book, Under the Sea Wind, were also bestsellers. This sea trilogy explores the whole of ocean life from the shores to the depths.
Late in the 1950s, Carson turned her attention to conservation, especially some problems that she believed were caused by synthetic pesticides. The result was the book Silent Spring (1962), which brought environmental concerns to an unprecedented share of the American people. Although Silent Spring was met with fierce opposition by chemical companies, it spurred a reversal in national pesticide policy, which led to a nationwide ban on DDT and other pesticides. It also inspired a grassroots environmental movement that led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Carson was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter.
From an Apollo Magazine article (April 7. 2020):
‘We are fond of tracing the resemblance between Poetry and Painting,’ wrote William Wordsworth (1770–1850) in the famous ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads (1800), ‘and, accordingly, we call them Sisters.’ To speak of the ‘sister arts’ was indeed a critical platitude of the age, though as it happens Wordsworth’s attitude towards painting wasn’t normally very sisterly.
When, in 1840 or so, a well-meaning houseguest called Margaret Gillies made a drawing of the 70-year old Mrs Wordsworth, everyone agreed that it was an excellent likeness; but her kind act was rewarded with a testy and somewhat ungracious sonnet from the sitter’s husband. He preferred to visualise Mary in her salad days: ‘’tis a fruitless task to paint for me, / Who, yielding not to changes Time has made, / By the habitual light of memory see / Eyes unbedimmed, see bloom that cannot fade, / And smiles that from their birth-place ne’er shall flee / Into the land where ghosts and phantoms be’.
Boomers Daily 