Thank you for listening to Poems for the Speed of Life, with Shane Breslin. Please enjoy this special episode about the future direction of the podcast, what you can expect and how you can get involved. There are four announcements: This podcast will always be free and available wherever you listen to podcasts If you like you can support the show financially (more details to follow) The show from now on will take a series-based approach, with breaks between series I will be taking my message to event stages with a keynote talk that can be delivered at health, wealth, wellbeing, business or personal development conferences around the world. If you are an events organizer, or know someone who is, please go to this link and fill out your expression of interest to have me speak at your event.
Welcome to another episode in this special Christmas and end of year series of this podcast. The work of John O’Donohue, the great Irish spiritual leader, teacher, theologian and philosopher, continues to find new audiences all over the world more than 15 years after his passing at just 54 years of age. Two John O’Donohue poems have been among the most sought after episodes of this podcast. You can find “Beannacht” in Episode 17 and “On the Death of the Beloved” in Episode 95 by searching the archives of this show in your podcast player.
Jan Richardson is an artist, writer, and ordained minister in the United Methodist Church in the USA. She travels widely as a retreat leader and conference speaker. This poem is part of a special Christmas-themed short series for the end of the year. You can read the poem here *** For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify. If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here. Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts. To leave the show a review: On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. Music Credit: Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Dylan Thomas was a Welsh writer and poet. This is one of his best-remembered pieces of writing, a long prose poem recounting his memories of the Christmases of his childhood. This recording was originally made in 2019 as part of a different podcast project, but I thought it would be good to dust it off and re-edit it slightly to include here. It's one of my favourite pieces of Christmas writing. I hope you enjoy. You can read the piece here *** For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify. If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here. Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts. To leave the show a review: On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. Music Credit: Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Hi. Thank you for your patience and presence as I think through the next steps for this podcast. Poetry can be a transformational experience, and the last thing I ever want to do is reduce something that’s transformational into something that’s just transactional. Finally, if you would like to let me know what you think, I will gratefully receive your messages. You can email me at shane [at] shanebreslin [dot] com or leave me a voice message at this link: https://anchor.fm/poems-for-speed-of-life/message
This is the second episode of the Nature, Wilderness and Wildness series of the podcast.Seamus Heaney, who died in 2013, was one of Ireland's most celebrated and most loved poets, and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996.He grew up on a farm in County Derry, Northern Ireland, and the landscape of his childhood—its bogs, fields, and rural rhythms—saturated his work throughout his life. "Death of a Naturalist" is the title poem from his first collection, published in 1966 when Heaney was just 27 years old.Find out more about Seamus Heaney's life and work here.You can buy the collection "Death of a Naturalist" from Amazon.co.uk here.Announcing Strong WordsShane’s new professional service is Strong Words, which helps businesses, organizations and leaders all around the world find the right words to communicate their mission, their vision, and their impact.Find out more about Strong WordsRatings and reviewsI’d love to hear what you think of this episode. You can leave a comment below.If you like the show, we would be so grateful for your rating or review. For one thing, it’s a great way to tell the various platforms that it’s worth showing the podcast to new people.If you’re not yet a subscriber on Spotify, please seek out the “Follow” button on the “Poems for the Speed of Life” show page in your Spotify app. You can also leave the show a rating by tapping the stars.Music creditMANTRon by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/ Creative Commons CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
This is the first episode of the Nature, Wilderness and Wildness series of the podcast.Wendell Berry is an American poet, farmer, and environmental activist who has spent most of his life on a small farm in Kentucky. Born in 1934, Berry has been writing for over six decades, exploring themes of agrarian life, community, and our relationship with the land. He's both a working farmer and a thinker about what it means to live well on this earth. The New York Times has called him the "prophet of rural America.""The Peace of Wild Things" was first published in Berry’s 1968 collection “Openings”, and has become one of his most beloved poems. a quiet antidote to anxiety, and a reminder of where we might turn when the weight of the world becomes too much to bear.Find out more about Wendell Berry’s work via The Berry Center here.Announcing Strong WordsShane’s new professional service is Strong Words, which helps businesses, organizations and leaders all around the world find the right words to communicate their mission, their vision, and their impact.Find out more about Strong WordsRatings and reviewsI’d love to hear what you think of this episode. You can leave a comment below.If you like the show, we would be so grateful for your rating or review. For one thing, it’s a great way to tell the various platforms that it’s worth showing the podcast to new people.If you’re not yet a subscriber on Spotify, please seek out the “Follow” button on the “Poems for the Speed of Life” show page in your Spotify app. You can also leave the show a rating by tapping the stars.Music creditMANTRon by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/ Creative Commons CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Announcing a new series of Poems for the Speed of Life with Shane Breslin. This series of the podcast is overdue, and it's great to be back. This series is all about the world around us. Nature. Wilderness. Wildness. The other living things that share our space and our place on this earth. Included in this series of Poems for the Speed of Life will be poems from Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver, Seamus Heaney, Lucille Clifton, Wendell Berry and many more.A few things to note:Shane's new business is Strong Words, which helps businesses, organizations and leaders all around the world find the right words to communicate their mission, their vision, and their impact. Find out more about Strong Words here.If you're not yet a subscriber on Spotify, please seek out the "Follow" button on the show page in your Spotify app. You can also leave the show a rating by tapping the stars.Poems for the Speed of Life also appears on Substack here. Please go there and sign up if you would like to receive a notification by email when every new episode goes live.I'd love to hear what you think of this episode. You can leave a comment on Spotify or on Substack.In this trailer I mentioned Matthijs Schouten and his appearance on The Almanac of Ireland, a podcast from the much-missed Irish naturalist, author, linguist and documentary-maker Manchán Magan. You can listen to that episode, "Enchanted by Nature", which was first published in November 2020, here.
Adelaide Crapsey was an American poet who died in 1914 at the age of just 36. She often wrote in the format called the "cinquain", a tightly structured form of poetry that owes something to the old Japanese haiku. The cinquain includes one stanza of five lines, with a per-line syllable structure of 2-4-6-8-2. This poem, about the quiet of a November night, is included here because this month of the year (at least in the western Northern hemisphere) has recently found itself squeezed and lost between two festivals, Halloween and Christmas, which have become so heavily consumerist over recent decades. You can read the poem here *** For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify. If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here. Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts. To leave the show a review: On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. Music Credit: Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Wendell Berry has been writing and publishing poetry and prose for more than 60 years. He has featured in this podcast before in Episode 70 ("The Peace of Wild Things"). It's interesting that the core idea of that earlier poem, peace, returns here. What is it to be "at peace and in place"? What is it for a man to be "at peace and in place"? What is it for a man to give his hands and voice and mind to other men, especially those who are "thing-ridden" and bent on extraction and destruction? If you're interested in more on the theme of men and the male experience, do check out Episode 145, three poems on masculinity and the male experience from Pat Boran, Seamus Heaney and Norman MacCaig. You can read "To Think of the Life of a Man" here *** For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify. If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here. Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts. To leave the show a review: On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. Music Credit: Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Chantal House is a poet whose recent chapbook is titled "Reaching for the Sun". The mission behind her work is that everyone should be a poet, and everyone could have poetry as part of their daily cycle. That mission aligns a lot with the mission of this podcast, to bring one poem, and some of its power, to every day. You can read the definition of "Does every generation" here You can follow Chantal via @bear_hunt_poems on Instagram *** For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify. If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here. Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts. To leave the show a review: On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. Music Credit: Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Annie Finch has been publishing and editing books of poetry and poetics for three decades. Her most recent book is Earth Days: Poems, Chants, and Spellsin Five Directions (Nirala Publications, 2023). Samhain is the ancient Irish and pagan festival of the autumn, the Celtic new year and the time when the spirits moved between worlds. It is the ancestor of the modern day Halloween. There is great mystery in this poem. Enjoy. You can read "Samhain" here *** For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify. If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here. Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts. To leave the show a review: On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. Music Credit: Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
John Koenig's decade-plus-long project, "The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows", earned a fitting celebration in 2021 when the book based upon it became a New York Times Bestseller. Koenig set out to fill the gaps in our language of emotion, creating words such as kenopsia, dès vu and énouement. One of the definitions that went viral in the early days of the project, and which continued to surface and resurface for years afterwards, was "sonder". In just a single sentence, Koenig poetically and lyrically explores the lives of all the countless others and how they interact with us our own, if only fleetingly, or only in our minds. You can read the definition of "Sonder" here *** For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify. If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here. Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts. To leave the show a review: On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. Music Credit: Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
David Gate is an English poet based in the United States. Per his own website, his work centers around care for the individual (heart, mind, body & soul) and the nurture of community (culture, the earth & environment, the dignity of others and spiritual communities). Those values vibe strongly with the ethos of this podcast. You can read "Friendship is what will save us" here You can follow David Gates on Instagram here *** For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify. If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here. Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts. To leave the show a review: On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. Music Credit: Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Vaclav Havel was a Czech writer, dissident and statesman, who was President of Czechoslovakia and later of the new Czech Republic. This short piece is an essay on the meaning and importance of hope, especially in difficult times. Please share your thoughts by joining the Poems for the Speed of Life Substack community here. You can read "Hope" here *** For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify. If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here. Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts. To leave the show a review: On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. Music Credit: Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Gwen Harwood was an Australian poet. In the male-dominated publishing world of the mid-20th century, she had a difficult time getting published, and resorted to submitting work under a range of male pseudonyms. This poem is an insight into her complex and fraught relationship with womanhood, with motherhood. Please share your thoughts by joining the Poems for the Speed of Life Substack community here. You can read "In The Park" here *** For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify. If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here. Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts. To leave the show a review: On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. Music Credit: Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Some poems are straightforward to break down into paragraphs, sentences and clauses, to better extract their meaning. This one is a little more difficult. There are three sentences here, but the last of them, when you see the poem laid out on page or screen, spans six stanzas, and takes us to several places in both the physical world and the interior world. Who is the true love? Is it the love and acceptance of another? Is it the love and acceptance of oneself? Please share your thoughts by joining the Poems for the Speed of Life Substack community here. You can read "The Truelove" here You can also find the poem as part of David Whyte's series of 52 sessions on the Waking Up app here. *** For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify. If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here. Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts. To leave the show a review: On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. Music Credit: Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
A gorgeous little poem that takes Charles Darwin and his reputed love of stories as its starting point. This symbol - one of the fathers of modern science, upholding the value of story as something vital, alongside the scientific fact of his work - presents questions about what truth is. And asks us to consider whether truth is something more than just a collection of facts. You can read "Consolation" here *** For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify. If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here. Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts. To leave the show a review: On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. Music Credit: Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
What is the role of England in this poem? Is "The Soldier" a nationalist polemic, glorifying war? Or can we read the ideal, idyllic England of Rupert Brooke as a symbol of something else? You can read "The Soldier" here *** For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify. If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here. Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts. To leave the show a review: On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. Music Credit: Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Breda Wall Ryan is Irish writer and poet. She has published two collections of poetry, In a Hare’s Eye and Raven Mothers. Her poems are full of powerful imagery, and she often brings the lives of women into sharp focus. You can read "Tremolo" on her website here *** For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify. If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here. Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts. To leave the show a review: On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. Music Credit: Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com