The Poetry Radio Project
Poetry in our Radio Programs
Revealing Ramadan
June 25, 2009
Poetry was Adnan Onart's response to our invitation for expressions of Muslim identity. He first submitted "Morning Prayer" — which he wrote as he was coming out of a deep depression. Read that poem, along with three others, and listen to Onart reciting his words.
» "Ramadan in Dunkin Donuts"
» "Morning Prayer"
» "Ribbon Time: The Moment"
» "Al-Mir'aj"
Fragility and the Evolution of Our Humanity — A Geophysicist's View
May 7, 2009
Xavier Le Pichon describes how his mother taught him a version of this lovely Sully Prudhomme poem. Read our commissioned English translation, and listen to a Québécois poet to recite the poem in French and English.
» "Le Vase Brisé / The Broken Vase""
Repossessing Virtue: Living Differently, Beyond Economic Crisis
June 25, 2009
One of the voices in this program mentioned this Wendell Berry poem as one of her favorites. Listen to Krista recitation and read the text.
Opening to Our Lives — Jon Kabat-Zinn's Science of Mindfulness
April 16, 2009
Hear Derek Walcott's poem recited by Kabat-Zinn, who said that a prose statement was "bound to be inadequate" in communicating his point. Download the poem and read along.
Alzheimer's, Memory, and Being
March 26, 2009
This program includes two poems by Sean Nevin, who has led writing groups with Alzheimer's patients and lived through his own grandfather's struggle with this disease.
» "Oblivio Gate"
» "Self-Portraits from the Widow House"
Laying the Dead to Rest
March 19, 2009
Features Argentine poet Alicia Partnoy reciting her verse and a poem by Chilean poet Marjorie Agosin — in English and Spanish.
» "Survivor"
» "Testimony"
» "Epitaph"
» "A Homespun Love"
» "How many times …"
The Inner Landscape of Beauty
February 28, 2008
Dedicates a special hour to the late Irish poet, John O'Donohue.
The Ecstatic Faith of Rumi
December 13, 2007
Presents the texts and readings of the Sufi mystic's poems in Persian and in English, with male and female voices.
The Soul in Depression
February 26, 2009
Features poetry for reflection, help, and healing from Rainer Marie Rilke, Anita Barrows, Jane Kenyon, and the Book of Psalms.
Poetry in SoundSeen (our multimedia stories)
Children of the Disappeared
[video, 4:59]
March 19, 2009
The legacy of Argentina's Dirty War lives on in the children of those who disappeared. We pair their portraits with the poetry of Alicia Partnoy, a survivor from that time and place.
"Beannacht" [slideshow, 1:18]
February 28, 2008
We've woven together the late Irish poet John O'Donohue's reading of his poem with his friends' photographs of the Celtic landscapes he loved.
About the Project
The poet Percy Shelly once wrote "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Often poetry is able to say what prose cannot. We've been seeking poets and poetry to provide fresh insights for our programs. We're collecting the results of those efforts here, whether they're from our programs, blogs, or special features.
Project-related Shows
14 Muslims, in their own words, speak about the delights and gravity of Islam's holiest month. Through vivid memories and light-hearted musings, they reveal the richness of Ramadan — as a period of intimacy, and of parties; of getting up when the world is quiet for breakfast and prayers with one's family; of breaking the fast every day after nightfall in celebration and prayers with friends and strangers.
Xavier Le Pichon, one of the world's leading geophysicists, helped create the field of plate tectonics. A devout Catholic and spiritual thinker, he raised his family in intentional communities centered around people with mental disabilities. He shares his rare perspective on the meaning of humanity — a perspective equally informed by his scientific and personal encounters with fragility as a fundament of vital, evolving systems. Le Pichon has come to think of caring attention to weakness as an essential quality that allowed humanity to evolve.
We're bringing the voices of our listeners into the conversation we've been building online and on-air since the economic downturn began last year. Many are grappling with the shame that comes in American culture with the loss of a job, and many are seeking community in old places and new. For some, economic instability — a kind of life on the edge — is not new. They've been cultivating virtues of patience, self-examination, service and good humor that might help us all.
Jon Kabat-Zinn has learned, through science and experience, about mindfulness as a way of life. This is wisdom with immediate relevance to the ordinary and extreme stresses of our time — from economic peril, to parenting, to life in a digital age.
Alzheimer's disease has been described as "the great unlearning," a "disease of memory," a "demise of consciousness." But what does it reveal about the nature of human identity? What remains when memory unravels? And how might such insights help Alzheimer's sufferers themselves?
With an Argentinean scientist, we explore the human landscape of forensic sciences and its emergence as a tool for human rights. Doretti has unearthed bones and stories of the dead and "the disappeared" in more than 30 countries, including victims of Argentina's Dirty War, over two decades. She shares her perspective on reparation, the need to bury our dead, and the many facets of justice.
The late Irish poet and philosopher, John O'Donohue, is beloved for his book Anam Ċara, Gaelic for "soul friend," and for his insistence on beauty as a human calling and a defining aspect of God. In one of his last interviews before his death in 2008, he articulated a Celtic imagination about how the material and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible worlds intertwine in human experience.
The 13th-century Muslim mystic and poet Rumi has long shaped Muslims around the world and has now become popular in the West. Rumi created a new language of love within the Islamic mystical tradition of Sufism. We hear his poetry as we delve into his world and listen for its echoes in our own.
One in ten Americans, and even more dramatically, about one in four women, will experience clinical depression at some point in their lives. We take an intimate look at the spiritual dimensions of this illness and its aftermath.
Poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht says that as a scholar she always noticed the "shadow history" of doubt out of the corner of her eye. She shows how non-belief, skepticism, and doubt have paralleled and at times shaped the world's great religious and secular belief systems. She suggests that only in modern time has doubt been narrowly equated with a complete rejection of faith, or a broader sense of mystery.
Special Funding
We're a proud partner in a collaboration between the Poetry Foundation and American Public Media.
The Poetry Radio Project