Versecraft
Exploring the art of poetry through the craft of some of the world's best but most underrated poems.
Episodes
Read this episode on Substack!
Mea culpa: Yes, in the heat of the moment, I mispronounced mise en scene. A la guillotine!
Topics discussed include:
-Some po-biz kvetching
-The telos of Versecraft
-The "ghost" of pentameter
-The Stevensian cosmovision and the metaphysics of metaphor
-The axis mundi
-Nicholas of Cusa and coincidentia oppositorum
-The Moirai
-Contronyms
Read this episode on Substack and subscribe!
Topics discussed include:
-Plato's "Ion"
-The Muses and Schizophrenia
-Poets must be weirdos
-The normies are the willing slaves of the mad
-Lewis's trilemma
-The American Confessionals and the French Decadents
-The Wild 18th century
-Go read William Cowper's "The Task!"
-Samuel Johnson, Richard Savage, William Collins, Christopher Smart, William B...
Read this episode (and the poem) on Substack!
Topics discussed include:
-Going to Oaxaca!
-"Poetry and Music" and "Rhyme's Reason" by John Hollander
-Jacques Lacan and the "mirror phase"
-The nightmare of the self vs. the nightmare of the unconscious
-The survival of Romanticism
VISIT MY WEBSITE HERE.
BUY VERSECRAFT MERCH HERE.
Read the poems: "The Early Purges" and "Limbo."
Topics mentioned:
-Poetry careerism in the 21st century
-The perennial appeal of the Gentleman Farmer Poet
-The value of exposure to death
-Rural vs. Urban morality
-"The Need of Being Versed in Country Things" by Robert Frost
-Piscine Christianity
Read this essay and support the show on Substack!
Topics discussed in this episode include:
R.S. Thomas's poems:
-Revision
-Alexander Fayne's essay on R.S. Thomas
-Pascal's "Night of Fire"
-Apophatic theology
-John Scotus Erigena, Philo, Pseudo-Dionysius, Weil, etc.
-Keats's "Ode On A Grecian Urn"
-Milton's "On His...
Read this episode in essay form here!
Topics discussed in this episode include:
-The Cambridge Three: Dick Davis, Robert Wells, Clive Wilmer
-The Stanford Poets: Thom Gunn, Edgar Bowers, Yvor Winters, etc.
-Virgil's Georgics
-The Idylls of Theocritus
-Wells poems discussed: "A Caution," "Deus Loci," "The Unnamed Pool," "The Bathing Place," "The Last...
Read the poem here.
Topics discussed in this episode include:
-Transcending the smallness of one's time
-The Voorslag Affair
-Campbell against the world, i.e. punching Steve Spender in the face
-Ambivalent stanzas
-The Waste Land" by T.S. Eliot
-"Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens
-"Kubla Khan" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
-"The Whiteness of the Whale" by Herman Melville
-A Nietzsch...
Read the episode on Substack here
Poems discussed in this episode:
"Shall Earth No More Inspire Thee" by Emily Bronte
"Cargoes" by John Masefield
"From Stone to Steel" by E.J. Pratt
"The Hill" by Rupert Brooke
"When the Ecstatic Body Grips" by E.R. Dodds
"For My Daughter" by Weldon Kees
"Poetry and Religion" by Les Murray
"Soul" by Alan Shapiro
-Read the poem... by pre-ordering Forester’s new collection here!
-My annus mirabilis
-Frederick Goddard Tuckerman
-Renovating the sonnet-house
-Mycorrhizal intelligence
-Is the pathos fallacious?
-A thinking cheese for the thinking man
-The ents at the entmoot
-My recent episode on Sleerickets with Alice
-Cosmic double-consciousness
-Dark circles of eternity and oblivion
Read the transcript of this episode here!
Topics discussed in this episode include:
-The meaning and history of New Formalism
-“Can Poetry Matter?” by Dana Gioia
-The Big Read and Poetry Out Loud
-“The Catholic Writer Today” by Dana Gioia
-“Poetry as Enchantment” by Dana Gioia
-The Noir hero
-Christopher Marlowe and Charles Marlow
-The Santa Ana winds
-“Red W...
Topics discussed in this episode:
-My conversation with David and Matthew on Age of Muses
-My new post at Literary Matters
-My French translation episode on Heredia
-My Spanish translation episode on Lope
-Metaphrase and paraphrase
-Germany's view of Goethe
-Magister Christopher Childers
-From Sturm und Drang to Spit on that Thang (sorry)
-Weimar (semi)Classicism
-How to write a sex poe...
Topics discussed in this episode include:
Read the polished transcript of this episode on Substack!
My lecture on The Grand Style in English
My poem, "Spelunker," in New Verse Review
Poetry’s psychological effect and moral charge
The burden of genius
Poetry vs. Philosophy
Maimonides and Augustine
The decadence of the academy
"Poetry as Enchantment" by Dana ...
Topics discussed in this episode include:
Read the polished transcript of this episode here!
"The World as Will and Representation" by Arthur Schopenhauer
Why you Kant do metaphysics anymore
Matter, Phenomena, Representation, Maya vs.
Form, Noumena, Will, Nirvana
Terrains of flesh
French vs. English gardens
From Schopenhauer to Freud
Perception vs Reflection
Art vs. Philosophy
Idea vs. Concept...
Topics discussed in this episode include:
-My recent class at the Frost Farm Conference
-My trip to Europe
-Come to the ALSCW Conference!
-Part I and Part II of my essay on French poetry in Marginalia Review of Books
-New poems and translations of mine in the latest issue of Literary Matters
-My essays The Iron Lyre and The Monumentalist Manifesto
-The Romantic within the Classicist
-Philosophy within poetry
-The...
Topics mentioned in this episode:
-The use of the term “poetry” and the death of the genuine article
-Building metrical literacy
-My essay “The Iron Lyre”
-Modern small-souledness
-My essay “The Poisoned Well: Melville and Gnosticism”
-My essay “The Monumentalist Manifesto”
-“Science, Politics, and Gnosticism” by Eric Voegelin
-“The Whiteness of the Whale” in Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”
-“The Gnostic Gospels” ed. Elaine Pagels
Text of poem here
Topics discussed in this episode:
-The University of St. Thomas, Houston
-"The Flaming Heart" by Mario Praz
-Giambattista Marino
-Metaphysical vs. Baroque
-The poetry of rapture
-The Greek Anthology
-Laudianism
-Crashaw's Teresa poems
-Mixed meter and phantom beats
-"Venus and Adonis" by Billy Shakes
-The saintly grief in your wedding ring
-Aurora, not Selene!
-"The C...
Topics discussed in this episode include:
-The MFA Program at the University of St. Thomas
-My episode on Ryan’s poem “Disobedience”
-"How to Think Like a Poet" by Ryan Wilson
-New editions of Dryden and Pope soon come!
-“The Catholic Writer Today” by Dana Gioia
-David Rothman
-New Verse Review’s St. Thomas issue
-“A Season in Hell” by Arthur Rimbaud
-“Pure and Impure Poetry” by Robert Penn Warren
-The Fugitives, Ag...
Topics discussed in this episode include:
The University of St. Thomas MFA Program
My episode on James Matthew Wilson
"The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking" by James Matthew Wilson
"The Wayward Thomist" by James Matthew Wilson
The Complete Essays of J.V. Cunningham
Jacques Maritain
"Crime and Punishment" by Dostoevsky
"La Vita Nuova" by Dante
Matthew 16
"In Ghostlight" ...
Topics discussed in this episode include:
Matthew Buckley Smith over at SLEERICKETS
Alice Allan over at Poetry Says and In Future Posts
Ethan McGuire over at The Flummoxed
Zina Gomez Liss over at The Beauty of Things
Cameron Clark over at Minor Tiresias
Rationalist, Socialist, Humanist, Bicameral Demo-Oligarchic Utopia?
Ironkraft and Cheesecraft
An incomplete list of people I envy: Kendrick Lamar, Shane McCrae, James Matthew Wilson, Chris ...
Poems/Prose Lyrics featured:
"The Eagles" by Jones Very
"The Oracles" by A.E. Housman
"An Equation" by Hyam Plutzik
"Plato and the Serpent" by Catherine Davis
"Crow's Theology" by Ted Hughes
"Changeling" by Rhina Espaillat
"Hardy" by Robert Mezey
"The Master of Metaphor" by Carl Dennis
"Lust" by J.D. McClatchy
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