Name: 'If I Could Tell You,' a poem by W.H. Auden, read by RM. by ViciousMinutesHour in auden
Duration: 1 min 38 s
Description: 'If I Could Tell You,' a poem by W.H. Auden, read by RM.

auden

The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

(From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._H._Auden)

Wystan Hugh Auden (/ˈwɪstən ˈhjuː ˈɔːdən/;[1] 21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973), who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet,[2][3] born in England, later an American citizen, regarded by many critics as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.[4] His work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievements, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety of tone, form and content.[5][6] The central themes of his poetry are love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of nature.

Auden grew up in and near Birmingham in a professional middle-class family and read English literature at Christ Church, Oxford. His early poems, written in the late 1920s and early 1930s, alternated between telegraphic modern styles and fluent traditional ones, were written in an intense and dramatic tone, and established his reputation as a left-wing political poet and prophet. He became uncomfortable in this role in the later 1930s, and abandoned it after he moved to the United States in 1939, where he became an American citizen in 1946. His poems in the 1940s explored religious and ethical themes in a less dramatic manner than his earlier works, but still combined traditional forms and styles with new forms devised by Auden himself. In the 1950s and 1960s many of his poems focused on the ways in which words revealed and concealed emotions, and he took a particular interest in writing opera librettos, a form ideally suited to direct expression of strong feelings.[7]

He was also a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological and religious subjects, and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays and other forms of performance. Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential. After his death, some of his poems, notably "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks"), "Musée des Beaux Arts", "Refugee Blues", "The Unknown Citizen", and "September 1, 1939", became known to a much wider public than during his lifetime through films, broadcasts, and popular media.[4]

W.H. Auden reads The More Loving One

The Hard Question

To ask the hard question is simple:
Asked at a meeting
With the simple glance of acquaintance
To what these go
And how these do;
To ask the hard question is simple,
The simple act of the confused will.

But the answer
Is hard and hard to remember:
On steps or on shore
The ears listening
To words at meeting,
The eyes looking
At the hands helping,
Are never sure
Of what they learn
From how these things are done,
And forgetting to listen or see
Makes forgetting easy,
Only remembering the method of remembering,
Remembering only in another way,
Only the strangely exciting lie,
Afraid
To remember what the fish ignored,
How the bird escaped, or if the sheep obeyed.

Till, losing memory,
Bird, fish, and sheep are ghostly,
And ghosts must do again
What gives them pain.
Cowardice cries
For windy skies,
Coldness for water,
Obedience for a master.

Shall memory restore
The steps and the shore,
The face and the meeting place;
Shall the bird live,
Shall the fish dive,
And sheep obey
In a sheep's way;
Can love remember
The question and the answer,
For love recover
What has been dark and rich and warm all over? 

(From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._H._Auden)

Wystan Hugh Auden (/ˈwɪstən ˈhjuː ˈɔːdən/;[1] 21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973), who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet,[2][3] born in England, later an American citizen, regarded by many critics as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.[4] His work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievements, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety of tone, form and content.[5][6] The central themes of his poetry are love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of nature.

Auden grew up in and near Birmingham in a professional middle-class family and read English literature at Christ Church, Oxford. His early poems, written in the late 1920s and early 1930s, alternated between telegraphic modern styles and fluent traditional ones, were written in an intense and dramatic tone, and established his reputation as a left-wing political poet and prophet. He became uncomfortable in this role in the later 1930s, and abandoned it after he moved to the United States in 1939, where he became an American citizen in 1946. His poems in the 1940s explored religious and ethical themes in a less dramatic manner than his earlier works, but still combined traditional forms and styles with new forms devised by Auden himself. In the 1950s and 1960s many of his poems focused on the ways in which words revealed and concealed emotions, and he took a particular interest in writing opera librettos, a form ideally suited to direct expression of strong feelings.[7]

He was also a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological and religious subjects, and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays and other forms of performance. Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential. After his death, some of his poems, notably "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks"), "Musée des Beaux Arts", "Refugee Blues", "The Unknown Citizen", and "September 1, 1939", became known to a much wider public than during his lifetime through films, broadcasts, and popular media.[4]

W.H. Auden reads The Hard Question

(From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._H._Auden)

Wystan Hugh Auden (/ˈwɪstən ˈhjuː ˈɔːdən/;[1] 21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973), who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet,[2][3] born in England, later an American citizen, regarded by many critics as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.[4] His work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievements, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety of tone, form and content.[5][6] The central themes of his poetry are love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of nature.

Auden grew up in and near Birmingham in a professional middle-class family and read English literature at Christ Church, Oxford. His early poems, written in the late 1920s and early 1930s, alternated between telegraphic modern styles and fluent traditional ones, were written in an intense and dramatic tone, and established his reputation as a left-wing political poet and prophet. He became uncomfortable in this role in the later 1930s, and abandoned it after he moved to the United States in 1939, where he became an American citizen in 1946. His poems in the 1940s explored religious and ethical themes in a less dramatic manner than his earlier works, but still combined traditional forms and styles with new forms devised by Auden himself. In the 1950s and 1960s many of his poems focused on the ways in which words revealed and concealed emotions, and he took a particular interest in writing opera librettos, a form ideally suited to direct expression of strong feelings.[7]

He was also a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological and religious subjects, and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays and other forms of performance. Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential. After his death, some of his poems, notably "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks"), "Musée des Beaux Arts", "Refugee Blues", "The Unknown Citizen", and "September 1, 1939", became known to a much wider public than during his lifetime through films, broadcasts, and popular media.[4]

W.H. Auden reads Song

(From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._H._Auden)

Wystan Hugh Auden (/ˈwɪstən ˈhjuː ˈɔːdən/;[1] 21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973), who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet,[2][3] born in England, later an American citizen, regarded by many critics as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.[4] His work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievements, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety of tone, form and content.[5][6] The central themes of his poetry are love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of nature.

Auden grew up in and near Birmingham in a professional middle-class family and read English literature at Christ Church, Oxford. His early poems, written in the late 1920s and early 1930s, alternated between telegraphic modern styles and fluent traditional ones, were written in an intense and dramatic tone, and established his reputation as a left-wing political poet and prophet. He became uncomfortable in this role in the later 1930s, and abandoned it after he moved to the United States in 1939, where he became an American citizen in 1946. His poems in the 1940s explored religious and ethical themes in a less dramatic manner than his earlier works, but still combined traditional forms and styles with new forms devised by Auden himself. In the 1950s and 1960s many of his poems focused on the ways in which words revealed and concealed emotions, and he took a particular interest in writing opera librettos, a form ideally suited to direct expression of strong feelings.[7]

He was also a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological and religious subjects, and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays and other forms of performance. Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential. After his death, some of his poems, notably "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks"), "Musée des Beaux Arts", "Refugee Blues", "The Unknown Citizen", and "September 1, 1939", became known to a much wider public than during his lifetime through films, broadcasts, and popular media.[4]

W.H. Auden reads Chorus

In one of his many visits to the 92nd Street Y, poet W.H. Auden reads from a selection of his work, including “Bucolics” (a sequence of seven poems about man's relation to nature) and selections from “Horae Cononicae” (a series of poems which dramatize Auden’s religious position).

Recorded January 22, 1955, at 92nd Street Y. Read Cynthia Ozick’s reflection on listening to Auden at http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/01/22/w-h-auden-at-the-92nd-street-y/. More information can be found at http://www.92Y.org/VPC.

W.H. Auden Reads “Bucolics”  and “Horae Cononicae” at 92Y

Then came a time of caesuras. The lakes
the land, the soul-blue earth, listened.
Some dream, long sealed in the ice of stars,
awakened, tinkling like a crystal glass
under a knife — the dream that all men
dreamed, lying in wet grass under comets,
or thighs vacant in the back of brothels —
a lust for another planet of another hue,
redder than the Red square in Moscow.

Of course, it felt just like a joke, this false
reverie of a false country, but it covered it all,
the heat thicker than honey into which
bears dived and died, bees lost in poppies,
nightingales missing at dawn, their songs,
their small decisions, their inscrutable innocence
filling pages of books never to be read
again. And no one could say if it mattered much
or not, to live under of a birdless sky,
when there wasn’t a creature on this earth,
flapping its wings out of illustrations,
for whom one would gladly give his life.

When the word extinction flooded the news,
everyone felt the roots of his own world
move but sat on, with pictures, pictures
and nothing else, pinned on retinas like moths.
— men falling from boats or towers of steel,
selfies longing to drown in popularity.
A horror so deep only a new ritual could absorb it
— with no icons nor incense, but laughs
and porn halting the mind via telephones.

Oracles hardly depicted such terminal,
that pit of iron oxide, hung like a ruby
in the sky. Never mind — the City of Light
now drifted as a glacier in the distance,
the last trumpet — or was it the whole
Revelation ? — just a broken gutter pipe.
There are so many ways to decline
a miracle, not the jasper flying through the air,
but the air itself. Not the gold but the water.
Heaven was blue. The dream, of blood.

Honey I’m losing you, played the song on repeat.
I can feel it in the air, it’s there everywhere.

During the interval, between the sapphire
and the record, the picture and the eye,
a disk tried not to break in the sunless oceans,
— whales, linked as children in a circle,
danced the perfect dance of Ezekiel’s wheels.
Watching it roll at the surface of water,
for a moment, was enough to unfold
the lungs like newspapers in the wind.

Something in their cry pierced the bones.
It carried the cold ordinary world.
The wild memories that swallowed us all.
The silence of islands and the height of cities.
The mother’s womb and the cruel clock ticking,
the trucks unloading skinned animals
from beds of ice, and the high heels
walking down the same street at dawn.

They were, these colossuses, the sense
of pride and the sense of guilt. Sex,
passion, breath, boredom — gift.
They turned and turned indifferent to greed.

From that rusty ball, you will remember
their grey loneliness, the chant that can’t
reach you, so high up in this vertiginous
Hell. You will crave the modern landscapes,
those you prefered to ignore, the deserts
which contained all human scorn.
The shopping mall, the suburbs, the freeways,
the asylum — all with a kind of softness
in the bone. You will picture the dirty lane,
and the lover you kissed in the dark.

Everything is gone, will play the song
but not the way love is done.

And in the world below, the whales
will achieve their dance in silence
for we only forgive those we understand.

Album de karen mary

Mars, written and read by Karen Mary Berr

https://soundcloud.com/kscopemusic/porcupine-tree-trains-from-in-absentia
https://soundcloud.com/viciousminuteshour/a-quote-on-suicide-written-by?in=viciousminuteshour/sets/personal-favourites
My dear, I don’t know what to do today, help me decide. 
Should I cut myself open and pour my heart on these pages? 
Or should I sit here and do nothing, nobody’s asking anything of me after all. Should I jump off the cliff that has my heart beating so and develop my wings on the way down? Or should I step back from the edge, and let the others deal with this thing called courage. Should I stare back at the existential abyss that haunts me so and try desperately to grab from it a sense of self? Or should I keep walking half-asleep, only half-looking at it every now and then in times in which I can’t help doing anything but? 
Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee? Falsely yours, Albert Camus

Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?

Rahim Ladha - Diamonds In The Field - 1995

Arcee & Fatski - Live On Places & Spaces - CIUT 89.5 FM

In Another Life

In Another Life (Edit)

As part of his mission to make sure artists are financially supported, Toronto-based fundraising consultant Rahim Ladha has taken it upon himself to fund and award three new cash prizes for underrepresented writers in Canada, ranging from BIPOC writing poetry to non-binary illustrators working in SFF. In this month's episode, we talk to Rahim about his intentions for the monthly/quarterly awards, how it's going so far, and his plans for growing the program.

(Find the transcript here: https://www.booknetcanada.ca/blog/2018/7/30/podcast-shoot-for-the-moon-awards-for-underrepresented-writers).

Full details on the Spark, Nova, and Echo awards, including eligibility and how to get in touch with Rahim, can be found at https://shootforthemoon.art. The 'racism in CanLit' article that Rahim mentions in the episode can be found at http://yilinwang.com/racism-in-canlit.

Shoot for the Moon: Awards for underrepresented writers

Ocean Dreams- Sheniz J

Forget This \\ Rachel Romu (demo)

Heal

'If I Could Tell You,' a poem by W.H. Auden, read by RM.

The audio archives for VMH (http://viciousminuteshour.com) Contact - rahim@viciousminuteshour.com

'If I Could Tell You,' a poem by W.H. Auden, read by RM.

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