Ep 138-Poetry: The Language of the Soul, Part 2

Potter's Inn Soul Care Conversations

We are continuing the conversation today with Steve and Roger Housden. It was Roger who opened the portal for Steve to get and understand poetry. Roger is a prolific writer, poet, speaker and teacher and speaks with a grace and appreciation of self-discovery and exploration . Thank you for joining us today!

Our Special Guest - Roger Housden

Roger Housden is an author and has been featured many times in The Oprah Magazine, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. His first book was published in the U.K. in 1990, and as of 2018, he has published twenty six books, including four travel books, a novella, Chasing Love and Revelation, and the best-selling Ten Poems series, which began in 2001 with Ten Poems to Change Your Life and ended with the publication in 2018 of Ten Poems for Difficult Times. A native of England, he lives in Marin County, California, and teaches around the world.

• Roger’s Website

• Roger’s Books

Mentioned in Podcast

Come Before Winter Retreat

A Brief for the Defense by Jack Gilbert

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils. But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants. Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women at the fountain are laughing together between the suffering they have known and the awfulness in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody in the village is very sick. There is laughter every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta, and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay. If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, we lessen the importance of their deprivation. We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil. If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down, we should give thanks that the end had magnitude. We must admit there will be music despite everything. We stand at the prow again of a small ship anchored late at night in the tiny port looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning. To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth all the years of sorrow that are to come.

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From Collected Poems by Jack Gilbert. Copyright © 2012.

Unholy Sonnet 11 by Mark Jarman

Half asleep in prayer I said the right thing

And felt a sudden pleasure come into

The room or my own body. In the dark,

Charged with a change of atmosphere, at first

I couldn’t tell my body from the room.

And I was wide awake, full of this feeling,

Alert as though I’d heard a doorknob twist,

A drawer pulled, and instead of terror knew

The intrusion of an overwhelming joy.

I had said thanks and this was the response.

But how I said it or what I said it for

I still cannot recall and I have tried

All sorts of ways all hours of the night.

Once was enough to be dissatisfied.

——————

From Questions for Ecclesiastes by Mark Jarman. Copyright © 1997.

MUSIC USED IN PODCAST

• Music Break at 47:35 - Armenian Tradition: Surb (Holy, Holy, Holy) - Performed by Harpa Dei.

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