Recorded live on location at... my backyard. It was a lovely morning, and so I decided to read a poem. I didn't mention it in the recording because, well because I didn't think about it. I was thinking about Ryan's great poem. And so I recorded a nice short podcast about it.
I love this poem. It's one that I've copied out, longhand, in my own notebook that I'm carrying around right now. It's nice and short, for one, and it's fun to read out loud. "It's a pickle, this life" is a great opener, and everyone knows that "pickle" is one of the funniest words in English. Most critically, it's got some intellectual oomph to it as well, and is good for me to think about a while.
Since recording this, I've been thinking a lot more about the contrast between the jolly rhyme and the seriousness of what Ryan's talking about. The unextinguishable component of life, according to the poem, is strife. So when life is nearly gone ("shut down to a trickle") there's still the particles of suffering in it. And while the trials may shrink, they are still more than enough to eat you. _And yet_ there's something great in it, too. It's life, after all. We never reach the end, only cut the remainder in half (again!), even while we are encouraged by some coach to just end the race, we don't. And so while strife is always there, so it life itself. And that's pretty great, I think.
What do you think? Is this poem hopeless or ultimately hopeful? Also, what word is more fun than "pickle"?
#### TEXT OF POEM
"This Life" by Kay Ryan
It's a pickle, this life.
Even shut down to a trickle
it carries every kind of particle
that causes strife on a grander scale:
to be miniature is to be swallowed
by a miniature whale. Zeno knew
the law that we know: no matter
how carefully diminished, a race
can only be _half_ finished with success;
then comes the endless halving of the rest --
the ribbon's stalled approach, the helpless
red-faced urgings of the coach.
Episode 4.16 Three Poems by Stephen Crane
Episode 4.15 Wordsworth's "Lines Written in Early Spring"
Episode 4.14 Walter Scott’s “Innominatus”
Episode 4.13 Thomas Hardy’s “The Convergence of the Twain"
Episode 4.12 W. H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts”
Episode 4.11 Jim Harrison’s “I Believe”
Episode 4.10 E. E. Cummings “sweet spring is your,” “old mr ly,” and “pity this busy monster,manunkind”
Episode 4.09 An Easter reading of Rudyard Kipling’s “A Nativity”
Episode 4.08 Mark Gibbons’s “My Life as a Capitalist”
Episode 4.07 John Donne’s “Good Friday 1613, Riding Westward”
Episode 4.06 Dylan Thomas’s “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”
Episode 4.05 Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art”
Episode 4.04 The anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem “The Battle of Brunanburh”
Episode 4.03 John Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”
Episode 4.02 Czeslaw Milosz’s “And Yet The Books”
Episode 4.01 John Ashbery’s “Just Walking Around”
Episode 3.11: Gwendolyn Brooks' "The Preacher Ruminates Behind the Sermon"
Episode 310: Alexander Pope's "Ode on Solitude"
Episode 309: Karl Shapiro's "Interlude III"
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