Odd Jobs

29 min • 23 maj 2022

Work, girl! And we give love to our power bottom brethren.

Read Emily Dickinson's Poem 260.

You can listen to it read by Yina Liang, courtesy of the Favorite Poem Project here (~5 min).

Read (or listen) to Richard Blanco's poem "We're Not Going to Malta" here.

Watch Larry Levis read with Phil Levine (~76 minutes; Levis is first). Aaron is right, Levis has a lovely, crisp, deep man-voice.

Read Jane Kenyon's "Having it Out with Melancholy" here. Hear her read "Otherwise" here (video is of her and Donald Hall, walking with their dog). There's an incredible musical response to Jane Kenyon's "Having it Out with Melancholy" that I could not recommend more. Watch/listen here. Composed by Jonathan McNair and performed by The Unheard-of//Ensemble (~22 minutes).

Otherwise is Kenyon's New and Selected Poems. The Collected Poems assembles Kenyon's four previous volumes, plus her posthumous volumes, her translations of Anna Akhmatova, and then four poems never before published in book form. The book Aaron mentions is A Hundred White Daffodils: Essays, Interviews, The Akhmatova Translations, Newspaper Columns, and One Poem.

Read Nazim Hikmet's poem "On Living" here.

Auden did write a blowjob poem, apparently known by several different titles: "A Day for a Lay," aka “The Platonic Blow, by Miss Oral,” aka “The Gobble Poem,” and you can read about it here.

James's favorite Steve Orlen poem is "In the House of the Voice of Maria Callas," which you can read online here.