"Unrequited Love," Part One: Poets respond in a variety of ways when their strong desires for another are not returned: from anger to bewilderment to resignation. Over time, a number of episodes of Poems for Company will focus on this theme. Today's show features these poems: Sappho, Poem # 94, translator Michael R. Burch (thehypertexts.com/Sappho Longer Poems in Translations by Michael R. Burch.htm), read with kind permission of the translator. Catullus, Poem # 8. Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sonnet 47 ("Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly"). W. B. Yeats, "When You Are Old." Sharon Olds, "Unspeakable," from Stag's Leap (Knopf, 2012), read with kind permission of the author. The show's theme music is Philip Aaberg's "Going-to-the-Sun" from his CD Live from Montana (Sweetgrassmusic.com).
“Gone Parents“: Poets featured today consider deceased parents, somewhat sentimentally or as mysterious dream figures. Ted Kooser, “Mother” and “Father,” from Delights & Shadows ...
Do we imagine the dead as content in their zone, or do they express anxieties about how the world of the living functions in...
“Running on Empathy”: Three authors display various degrees of empathy in their depictions of Abraham Lincoln. Walt Whitman, prose passages from Specimen Days, and...