Quiet Transmission

Nocturne

Vanessa Lowe

Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 8 January 2019

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Poetry and the night are some of the last remaining domains of “unknowing”; places where it’s acceptable to digest the world slowly and without conclusion, and where one can linger in, and traverse, experiences like solitude, impermanence, and wonder. Poets Cecily Parks and Tom Harding are both drawn to explore the intersection between the quiet tender moments of night and the act of writing and reading poetry. It’s a space where one can capture fleeting wisps from the darkness, and then send them off for others to hold like fireflies in a jar. Poems from the night are like fragments of dreams forgotten upon waking, reminders of things lost to us in the day. Quiet Transmission Credits Nocturne is produced by Vanessa Lowe. Nick White is our senior editor. Nocturne is distributed by KCRW, and receives support from KCRW's Independent Producer Project, which provides resources to creative storytellers around the world. Special thanks to Alex Espinoza, Jeremy Cherfas, Herrin Hopper, David Green, Mary Jo Eyler, Marta Pelrine-Bacon, Tara, Chris Glover, Ashley Cummings, Benjamin Yeamans, Maria Samuelsen, Misty Lytle, Sleep with Me Podcast, Tara, Tim Harincar More information about the work of Cecily Parks, and her relationship with the moon, can be found here. Find information about the work of Tom Harding here. For more about Robert Macfarlane’s collection of words that should be saved read this . Music Nocturne theme music by Kent Sparling Additional music: Kent Sparling \\ Fieldlines \\ Jeffrey Foster \\ Kid Otter Episode Artwork: Robin Galante

Transcript

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0:00.0	From KCRW, this is Nachterra.
0:07.0	There's an intersection between the quiet, tender moments of night and the act of writing and reading poetry.
0:20.0	It's a space where one can capture fleeting whips from the darkness and then send them off for others to hold like fireflies in a jar.
0:29.0	Poems from the night are like fragments of dreams forgotten upon waking, reminders of things lost to us in the day.
0:37.0	I had started writing poems that occupied the night in a kind of personal and intimate way.
0:44.0	And as always when I'm writing my own poems,
0:48.0	I kind of think about the literary history
0:50.0	that I might be joining or trying to join in some way in my own work so to think
0:56.3	about how other poets had written about the night I turned to people I knew
1:00.9	well like Emily Dickinson.
1:04.5	She describes following what is called
1:07.4	a will of the wisp and the idea of following
1:11.4	this light that appears in the swamp.
1:16.0	And then I turn to someone like Tharo,
1:18.7	who's not first and foremost known for his poetry,
1:21.3	but has what I think of as very poetic journals and discovered
1:25.6	that there was this whole chunk of writing in the American 19th century about the night.
1:31.1	There's one that I'm always reluctant to mention because he kind of gets hijacked, but Charles
1:37.2	Berkowski is a, I'm a huge fan of his, and of course he worked the majority of his life,
1:42.1	you know, and he wrote famously about the jobs he did and he wrote many many times about
1:48.2	staying up at night and typing on a typewriter and listening to the radio and drinking and writing away.
1:56.2	And it just something, I might not have quite the hard living that he had, but the spirit
	...

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