Do we imagine the dead as content in their zone, or do they express anxieties about how the world of the living functions in their absence? Poems in this episode offer contrasting answers: Frederic Weatherly's "Danny Boy"; A.E. Housman's "Is My Team Ploughing?"; Thomas Hardy's "Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?"; John McCrae's "In Flanders Fields"; Homer's depiction of Odysseus' dialogue with his dead mother in the Underworld (from The Odyssey, Book 11); Ted Kooser's "Old Cemetery" (from Delights and Shadows, Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2004), used with permission of Copper Canyon Press, coppercanyonpress.org.
“Running on Empathy”: Three authors display various degrees of empathy in their depictions of Abraham Lincoln. Walt Whitman, prose passages from Specimen Days, and...
“Desk Jobs”: Did you ever have a job you abruptly quit soon after it began? Why did you do that? The first three lines...
“Children Thinking”: This episode features the voices of children–filtered through adult poets–in three poems that express a variety of insights. These poems may prompt...