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 117: Billy Collins' "The Lanyard"
Episode 116: Donne's Holy Sonnet VII ("At the Round Earth's Imagin'd Corners, Blow")
Episode 115: Hughes' "I, Too, Sing America"
Episode 114: Donne's "Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward"
Episode 113: William Carlos Williams' "This is Just to Say"
Episode 112: Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at A Blackbird"
Episode 111: Anonymous' "Wulf" (translated from the Anglo-Saxon by Kevin Crossley-Holland)
Episode 110: Keats' "To One Who Has Been Long in City Pent"
Episode 109: Dickinson's "Some Keep the Sabbath by Going to Church"
Episode 108: Frost's "Two Tramps in Mud Time"
Episode 107: Yeats' "Lake Isle of Innisfree"
Episode 106: Silverstein's "Sick"
Episode 105: Shelley's "Ozymandias"
Episode 104: E. E. Cummings' "i thank You God for most this amazing"
Episode 103: Louis Simpson's "Chocolates"
Episode 102: Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays"
Episode 101: Milton's "When I Consider How My Light Is Spent"
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