Human Voices Wake Us

An episode from 4/20/26: Tonight, we delve into the world of cities. First, in a passage from Sam Quinones’s Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic, the town of Portsmouth, Ohio, is lovingly described in the decades before the epidemic.
Next, a passage from Ben Wilson’s Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind’s Great Invention describes the author’s travels to research the book, and his conclusion that the messiness of urban life is key to its vitality and innovation.
Finally, I read letters from twentieth-century Jewish immigrants to New York City. Originally published in the Jewish Daily Forward and later collected in The Bintel Brief, the letters describe the difficulties faced by newly arrived immigrants who had rarely (if ever) experienced life outside of the insular world of shtetl.    
The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. I also have a YouTube channel where I share poems and excerpts from these books, mostly as YouTube shorts.
Email me at [email protected].

An episode from 4/13/26: Tonight, I read about the invention of the wheel and what it meant for the earliest communities of Europe and the Eurasian steppes, from David Anthony’s The Horse, the Wheel, and Language.
After this, a few passages from Norman Longmate’s How We Lived Then: A History of Everyday Life During the Second World War tells the story of gasoline rationing in England during the war, and the sometimes-comical lengths people went to hoard the fuel they could get a hold of.
Finally, passages from S. Y. Agnon’s Days of Awe: A Treasury of Jewish Wisdom for Reflection, Repentance, and Renewal on the High Holy Days and Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism illustrate the power of language and storytelling in the Jewish tradition.
The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. I also have a YouTube channel where I share poems and excerpts from these books, mostly as YouTube shorts.
Email me at [email protected].

An episode from 12/9/24: Tonight's episode gathers together all of the readings I've done on this podcast from the poet ⁠William Blake⁠ (1757-1827). All of these poems can be found online at ⁠The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake⁠:
Blake & His Animals: One passage from Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and two from Milton. I hope that plucking these three excerpts from his longer work can suggest how varied—not just how prophetic and opaque, but simply beautiful—so much of his poetry can be. (From the episode ⁠Poetry Friday⁠)
An excerpt from his long poem Milton. (From the episode ⁠Visionary Poems⁠) Listeners will forgive that this section fades in from a talk about Wordsworth and Whitman, and fades out as the episode it was taken from moves on to other poets.
Another excerpt from Milton, where Blake's personal mythology is given free reign over the city of London. (From the episode ⁠Cities Under Siege⁠)
The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. I also have a YouTube channel where I share poems and excerpts from these books, mostly as YouTube shorts.
Email me at [email protected].

An episode from 1/10/23: Tonight we take a peek into the creative life of Charles Dickens (1812-1870). Through a handful of readings from Claire Tomalin’s biography of Dickens, we see how he was able to juggle, for almost a year, the writing of two novels for simultaneous serial publication. Then, thanks to a letter written by Fyodor Dostoevsky, who visited Dickens in London in 1862, we also hear Dickens admitting that his villains were better reflections of himself than his more lovable and generous characters. We also answer the question: what do David Copperfield and Jane Eyre have in common? Finally, we hear about the chance encounter Dickens had with a young fan in America, who grew up to become a novelist herself.
Note: these readings from the life of Dickens were originally the first part of a longer episode, hence the brief mention of the second part, no longer included, and the abrupt ending here. Listeners will forgive these frayed edges.
The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. I also have a YouTube channel where I share poems and excerpts from these books, mostly as YouTube shorts. Email me at [email protected].

An episode from 8/25/23: Tonight, I read ten essential poems from one of the great and most public poets of the last seventy years, Seamus Heaney (1939-2013). It isn’t hard to come by details of Heaney’s life, but ⁠Stepping Stones⁠ (where Heaney is interviewed at length in what amounts to an autobiography), is a good place to start. His poems are collected in ⁠100 Poems⁠, and in the ⁠individual collections⁠.
There are many ways to look at Heaney’s work, and the ten poems I choose only present one picture: a poet as at home on the farm as he was at Harvard; as interested in literary history as in archaeology and the deep interior of the Irish imagination; as concerned with childhood, memory, and family as with the darkest aspects of human life. In introducing these poems, I reflect on Heaney’s importance in my own life, and the huge impact his death had on me, ten years ago this month.
The poems I read are:  
Personal Helicon (Death of a Naturalist, 1966)
The Forge and Bogland (Door into the Dark, 1969)
The Tollund Man (Wintering Out, 1972)
The Strand at Lough Beg (Field Work, 1979)
Squarings #2, #8, #40 (Seeing Things, 1991)
from his translations of Beowulf (1999)
Uncoupled (Human Chain, 2010)  
The episode ends with Heaney's reading of "The Tollund Man."
The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. I also have a YouTube channel where I share poems and excerpts from these books, mostly as YouTube shorts.
Email me at [email protected].