Poetry: The Creative Process: Poets discuss Poems & Creativity

In this special edition, we hear from our guests from across the arts and sciences. From composers and poets to forest ecologists and climate envoys, they tell the story of our planet. Moving beyond the data of destruction, we explore the intelligence of nature, the ethics of what we eat, and the empathy required to save our future.

MAX RICHTER, Composer, Sleep, The Blue Notebooks

CARL SAFINA, Author, Becoming Wild

ADA LIMÓN, 24th US Poet Laureate

CYNTHIA DANIELS, Grammy Award-winning Sound Eng.

SUZANNE SIMARD, Finding the Mother Tree Duration: 00:17:56

How do writers develop their voice, showing us what is important in life?

ADA LIMÓN (24th U.S. Poet Laureate, Startlement, The Carrying) explains that her poetry begins with a bodily sensation or curiosity, not an idea. She values the space and breath poetry offers for unknowing and mystery, finding solace in the making and the mess, not in answers. She discusses being free on the page to be her whole, authentic, complicated self.

JAY PARINI (Author, Filmmaker, Borges and Me) calls poetry the prince of literary arts—language refined to its apex of mem...

“Poetry is like one of the great loves of my life, and I think it's probably the longest relationship I'll ever have. I read a lot of poetry. I also wrote these short stories even when I was pretty young, like in second grade, and the stories kept getting shorter and shorter. My family used to go to Damascus in Syria and Lebanon every summer for three months until 2011, when the Civil War broke out in Syria. In 2015, we made our first return after that gap, and my father and I went to Lebanon for two weeks. It's the fi...

“I'm Lebanese. I grew up in Lebanon during the Civil War, and I came to the United States as a graduate student with the intention of going back. I never wanted to stay here. I really thought that my life would happen in Beirut, in a city that I loved and hated in the healthiest of ways. My investments, both literary and intellectual, were rooted there. I came here as a graduate student and joined the PhD program, and then the events continued to unfold there, making life more and more of a risk, building a life in a pl...

“I had to become the father of my family very young because my parents divorced when I was 12. My situation was a little bit unusual in that my father kind of disappeared, and I had been making a fair amount of money as a kid, doing commercials and television and film. We needed money, and I kind of became the breadwinner. But I had this amazing world that I had access to, which was the world of the entertainment industry. My mom was supportive of my taking over and saying, "This is, I think, what we need to do." Sh...

“I won my first Emmy when I was 21, which was the result of absolutely devoting myself day and night for two years to doing all the scene work. I attended classes simultaneously and did plays until my mother died. I studied with Michael Howard for eight years. Even when I was so tired I couldn't get up to do a scene, he would say, "Get up and do a poem." It helped me enormously; it saved me.

The way I was trained and how I train others is that you know when you’re in the zone. Oh G...

“Poetry is the prince of the literary arts to me. It's at the very top because it's language refined to its apex of memorability. I am interested in poetry as memorability and poetry as something you live by. These are the words you live by. These words stay in your brain and guide your life. That's what I am interested in. My memoir slash autofiction is called Borges and Me, and as you know, it's a story of my time in 1970 when my best friend Billy was drafted for the Vietnam War, and so was I. He went to Vi...

“I'm hopeful for revolution. I'm optimistic. I want radical change. I think there's such a disinterest in education in America that it is sickening. I think we are repeating history. We are going through a cycle of fascism and greed, and I think we're going to see a lot of states collapse. As a result of that, I think people are going to be forced back to their primal needs and concerns, but I think they're going to be forced to think about what makes us human. How do we become more human? Because we've lost that. We've given it...

“One of the biggest symbols of America is Mount Rushmore. This monument, right? But I think most people fail to realize where it's located and why it's located there. Even more importantly, who did it? It's on a sacred Native American mountain, a place that was central to their creation stories. But then you think about who did it, and it was a Klansman. The guy who sculpted Mount Rushmore was a Klansman. People were like, "Wait, really?" Like, how is that a thing? But it seeps into our understanding and our embrace of white supremacy. This whole notion of...

“I think that it's almost like in some ways the specificity of Palestine also becomes kind of a universality, where you can stay in this specific example because there is something about this experience that makes it specific, right? It's happening because it's been sanctioned to happen in this way. Right? Because you can't slaughter tens of thousands of people without consequence unless you have made those people less than people. Unless there has been a very effective project of dehumanization that's been carried out against the people that are being killed.

I think, in some ways, th...

“I want to live a life of consequence, and I want to live a life that has stakes in it because that means that things matter to you. I think, in some ways, this memoir was a project of sifting through and excavating the darkest hours, both for me and for the lineage and ancestry that I came from. I think the darkest hours were experienced by so many people I come from who have had to leave places they didn't want to leave. I live in exile and have been forced to leave behind houses, land, cities, and pe...

How do our personal relationships affect political movements and activism? What can we learn from Native American tradition to restore ecological balance? How can transforming capitalism help address global inequality and the environmental crisis?

DEAN SPADE (Author of Love in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together) shares his reflections on the importance of understanding common relational patterns within activist movements. He emphasizes the need for solidarity and collective action in response to global crises like the conflict in Gaza and ecological disasters. Spade argues for resilience and mutual support...

We are privileged to present the voices of individuals dedicated to effecting change and mitigating the harm inflicted upon our precious planet. These are individuals deeply committed to the core values that drive positive transformation. Thank you for tuning in to our episodes and for your ongoing dedication to stewarding our planet, not just on Earth Day but throughout the year. We can’t save the planet overnight, but by acting mindfully, we can create a better future. Let’s make Every Day, Earth Day!

Composer MAX  RICHTER on Nature's Sonic Landscape

Founder of PETA INGRID...

“When I was working at the Times and the Times Magazine, on one Tuesday morning, the towers fell. September 11, 2001. The magazine had a 10-day lead time, so it was a weekly that was essentially 10 days old by the time it came out. We came to work and realized the world had changed, and the entire process, the magazine had been made for over a hundred years, had to be thrown out the window. We had to create a new magazine in 36 hours that would in some way speak to this very different, scary, and interesting world we were now in...

In this episode on the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liutalks with Tao Leigh Goffe about her new, magisterial Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis. Spanning many fields and disciplines in the natural sciences, social sciences, the humanities, and the arts, Professor Goffe weaves together a historically rich and geographically complex picture of how capitalism and racism undergird the climate crisis in ways made invisible or benign via the work of the west’s “dark laboratory.” Writing back through accounts of indigenous bird watching and Black provisional grounds, we talk about thi...

“You have all the different languages interplaying with each other. Little scraps of Irish languages and idioms have stories that have been told, but how Ireland actually comes about as an idea, as to where the Irish come from. A lot of these kinds of debates are just placed, you know, in day-to-day conversation, and then they trail off. People start something; they trail off and might come back to it later. That phenomenon of speaking over each other, tales that are known and not known, I always found very interesting. It was literally like a radio that was ke...

Patrick Healy’s novel Beyond the Pale explores memory, time, childhood, and how language shapes our world. Set in rural Ireland, starting in the 1950s, the book follows a young boy’s early memories through a series of expressionistic soundscapes. The expression from which the book takes its name has come to mean beyond what is considered acceptable behavior, but the origins of the phrase referred to land within Ireland that was “beyond the control of the English government.” Healy’s book examines social class, stigma, village, family life, identity, and the nature of consciousness. Rooted in the oral tradition...

In this episode on Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu is delighted and privileged to be in conversation with Azucena Castro and Malcom Ferdinand. They start with a discussion of what Ferdinand calls the “double fracture”—the environmental division of humans from their connection to the biosphere, and the colonial division instantiated by white supremacism and patriarchy. He insists that we not see these two phenomena as separate, rather as intimately connected. This double fracture makes any attempts to solve either environmental violence or colonial violence ineffective. In her foreword to Ferdinand’s Decolonial Ecologies, Angela Y. Davis wr...

In this episode on Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Professor Christen A Smith on a new book she has co-edited entitled, The Dialectic is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatrix Nascimento. Smith explains that “Beatriz Nascimento was a critical figure in Brazil’s Black Movement until her untimely death in 1995. Although she published only a handful of articles before she died and left only a few other recorded thoughts, her ideas about the symbolic relationship between quilombos (Afro-Brazilian maroon societies) and black subjectivity encourage us to re-imagine the meaning of Black libe...

How do the arts help us find purpose and meaning? What role do stories play in helping us preserve memories, connect us to each other, and answer life’s big questions?

MAX RICHTER(Award-winning Composer & Pianist · His album Sleep is the most streamed classical album of all time) reflects on the importance of creativity and how literature, music, and visual art offer windows into other people’s perceptions and experiences, fostering understanding and connection.

ETGAR KERET (Cannes Film Festival Award-winning Director · Author of Fly Already · Suddenly a Knock on the Door · The Seven Good Years) shares i...

In this episode on Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Huda Fakhreddine and Anthony Alessandrini about the unique manners in which literature can disclose the human significance of the historical and ongoing genocide in Palestine. Such revelation has to fight at least two things—the sheer brutality and inhumanity of this violence, and the active silencing of Palestinian voices by institutions that, ironically, profess to champion the humanities. Here, once again, we find a pernicious instantiation of the Palestine Exception. Despite these efforts to censor and silence, Huda and Tony delve deeply into the power of...

How does art change the way we see and experience the world? Art has the power to offer transformative experiences, but what about the lives of artists who give so much of themselves? How can we balance creativity and personal well-being while still making work that is true and meaningful?

David Rubin (President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences 2019-2022 · Casting Director) discusses the importance of fostering an international presence for the Motion Picture Academy. He highlights how inviting filmmakers from around the world has enriched the community and emphasizes the power of collaboration in t...

This episode explores the enduring power of storytelling to shape our world and illuminate the human experience. Writers Neil Gaiman, Ada Limón, Jericho Brown, E.J. Koh, Marge Piercy, and Max Stossel discuss creativity, resilience, and the power of words to heal and bring people together.

Neil Gaiman (Writer, Producer, Showrunner · The Sandman, American Gods, Good Omens, Coraline) explores the secret lives of writers, reflecting on the masks they wear in the pursuit of truth and beauty.

Jericho Brown (Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet: The Tradition · Editor of How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Pra...

How do the works of Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin continue to influence our understanding of nature, ecological interdependence, and the human experience? How does understanding history help us address current social and environmental issues. How can dialogues between the arts and sciences foster holistic, sustainable solutions to global crises?

Renée Bergland is a literary critic, historian of science, and educator. As a storyteller, Bergland connects the lives of historical figures to the problems of the present day. As an educator, she emphasizes the interdisciplinary connections between the sciences and humanities. A longtime professor at Simmons U...

“I think as humans, we forget. We are often limited by our own stereotypes, and we don't see that in everyone there's the potential for beauty and love and all these things. And I think The Architecture of Oppression, both parts one and two, are really a reflection of all the community and civil rights work that I've been doing for the same amount of time, really - 25 years. And I wanted to try and mix my day job and my music side, so bringing those two sides of my life together. I wanted to create a platform for bl...

How can music challenge systemic oppression and bring about social change? How can we envision alternative paths while avoiding the pitfalls of past paradigms?

Jake Fergusonis an award-winning musician known for his work with The Heliocentrics and as a solo artist under the name The Brkn Record. Alongside legendary drummer Malcolm Catto, Ferguson has composed two film scores and over 10 albums, collaborating with icons like Archie Shepp, Mulatu Astatke, and Melvin Van Peebles. His latest album is The Architecture of Oppression Part 2. The album also features singer and political activist Jermain Jackman, a former winner of The...

“The thing that unites my poetry and the nonfiction writing is my main obsession as a writer. It's the question of, how do you live meaningfully in late capitalism? As corporations and global capitalist forces take over the world, what does it mean to try to have a meaningful human life? I think the proliferation of objects might reflect that. A lot of what we do in this world is collect objects, and regardless of whether it's good or bad, you build a nest. I think that in Picture Window in particular, I wanted to write about the domestic in...

What is the future of literature in the age of generative AI? How can bookstores build community and be engines for positive social change? What does it mean to try to have a meaningful human life?

Danny Caine is the author of the poetry collections Continental Breakfast, El Dorado Freddy's, Flavortown, and Picture Window, as well as the books How to Protect Bookstores and Why and How to Resist Amazon and Why. His poetry has appeared in The Slowdown, Lit Hub, Diagram, HAD, and Barrelhouse.  He's a co-owner of The Raven Bookstore, Publisher's Weekly's 2022 Bookstore of the Y...

It is said that people never die until the last person says their name. In memory of the writer and director Paul Auster, who passed away this week, we're sharing this conversation we had back in 2017 after the publication of his novel 4 3 2 1. Auster reflects on his body of work, life, and creative process.

Environmentalists, writers, artists, activists, and public policy makers explore the interconnectedness of living beings and ecosystems. They highlight the importance of conservation, promote climate education, advocate for sustainable development, and underscore the vital role of creative and educational communities in driving positive change.

00:00 "The Conditional" by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón

01:27 The Secret Language of Animals: Ingrid Newkirk, President of PETA

03:03 A Love Letter to the Living World: Carl Safina, Ecologist & Author

04:11 Exploring the Mysteries of Soil and Coral Reefs: Merlin Sheldrake, Biologist, Author of Entangled Life

04:47 E...

"Being moved to write the sonnets was an unexpected gift that I was given. I certainly didn't expect that unusual practice, but I found myself moved to sum up the wisdom in concise and distilled form just by taking notes on the daily reading that I'd done each morning after watching the sunrise. And I was surprised to learn after starting the project that many people who read this wisdom during the Founding Era were also moved to write sonnets, including Phillis Wheatley, the great poet, Mercy Otis Warren, Alexander Hamilton, and John Quincy Adams, who would read the T...

What is the true meaning of the pursuit of happiness? What can we learn from the Founding Fathers about achieving harmony, balance, tranquility, self-mastery, and pursuing the public good?

Jeffrey Rosen is President and CEO of the National Constitution Center, where he hosts We the People, a weekly podcast of constitutional debate. He is also a professor of law at the George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor at The Atlantic. Rosen is a graduate of Harvard College, Oxford University, and Yale Law School. He is the author of seven previous books, including the New Yo...

“I want to quote a poem because it's not only a poem. It's a poem rethought by and revisited by a conceptual artist. It's called "All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace". So this originally is a 1967 poem by an American author Richard Brautigan, but then in 2021, it became a video by Turkish artist Memo Akten. This video brings together an amazing array of images in which you see different natural environments and artificial intelligence. Gradually, they come to blend, and then they melt, and then they become one.”

I like to think
(it has to be...

How can we create positive change? What does it mean to have an ecological mind? How can interdisciplinary collaborations help us move beyond educational silos and create sustainable futures?

Paola Spinozzi is Professor of English Literature at the University of Ferrara and currently serves as Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Internationalisation. She is the coordinator of the PhD Programme in Environmental Sustainability and Wellbeing and the co-coordinator of Routes towards Sustainability. Her research encompasses the ecological humanities and ecocriticism, utopia and sustainability; literature and the visual arts; literature and science; cultural memory. She has co-edited Cultures of Sustainability and Wellbeing...

“I had so many people around me when I was young– famous poets like Ary dos Santos, one of Portugal’s greatest poets of the 20th century. Sometimes he would be there talking with my mother, and I had this information that was getting in, but I wasn’t aware of it. And then in the early days, when I had just started playing, I was really into modern jazz, which was very instrumental, so I didn’t really pay attention to lyrics. It took me a while to get interested in Portuguese music, and in that mixture between jazz, Fado...

Bernardo Moreira is one of the most active Portuguese double bassists. He has performed as a guest soloist with Gulbenkian, Metropolitan de Lisboa, and Nacional do Porto orchestras, and gained prominence for his collaborations with international artists, including the legendary Benny Colson, Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, Art Farmer, and Kenny Wheeler. He is a regular collaborator with many jazz musicians in Portugal, participating in formations such as the Maria João/Mário Laginha quartet, the Mário Laginha trio, and singer Cristina Branco. In 2021, he released Enter Paredes, and in 2022, he led Cantina’s de Main and SUL.

“We become the stories we tell ourselves…I started writing around the time I learned English because we moved to the States soon after my fourth birthday, and so I was here for kindergarten into elementary school. I grasped this new language just as I was learning how to also put things onto the page. Those two things really happened at the same time for me. I entered this world where I felt very different and very other, for all intents and purposes I was set to be raised in Kuwait. And then that of course got turned upside down...

Hala Alyan is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, as well as the forthcoming novel The Arsonists’ City, and four award-winning collections of poetry, most recently The Twenty-Ninth Year. Her work has been published by the New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets, Lit Hub, The New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, where she works as a clinical psychologist.

· halaalyan.com
· www.creativeprocess.info

Poets, novelists, activists & translators discuss the Art of Writing and The Creative Process. This episode features:

NEIL GAIMAN - Writer, Producer, Showrunner - The Sandman, American Gods, Good Omens, Coraline

JERICHO BROWN - Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet: The Tradition
Editor of How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill

ADA LIMÓN, U.S. Poet Laureate - The Hurting Kind, The Carrying

MARGE PIERCY - Award-winning Novelist, Poet & Activist

E.J. KOH - Award-Winning Memoirist & Poet - The Magical Language of Others, A Lesser Love

"I tried to make something that I would have needed. And because that's what I tried to make, I'm hoping readers read something that they need. You know, that's the joy of books, that you come across something that you needed that you didn't even know you needed.

In order to make what you make, you have to use what you have. You have to submerge yourself, immerse yourself in what you know, in your own vernacular, in your own tone, in your own belief, in your own way of doing things and telling stories. And that's...

How do you find your voice? As a writer, how do you take what you know and what you believe to share your stories with the world? How do we let young writers know just how powerful they are and that what they do matters?

In How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill Pulitzer Prize winning, and National Book Award finalist author Jericho Brown brings together more than 30 acclaimed writers, including the likes of Tayari Jones, Jacqueline Woodson, Natasha Trethewey, among many others, to discuss, dissect, and offer advice and encouragement on the...

Marge Piercy’s 17 novels include NYTimes Bestseller Gone To Soldiers; National Bestsellers Braided Lives and The Longings of Women; the classics Woman on the Edge of Time and He, She and It, and her critically acclaimed memoir Sleeping with Cats. She’s written 20 volumes of poetry. The most recent is On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light. Born in Detroit, educated at the University of Michigan and Northwestern, she is active in antiwar, feminist and environmental causes.

www.margepiercy.com

www.miafunk.com
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.inst...

Alice Notley has published over forty books of poetry, most recently For the Ride (Penguin Books) and Eurynome’s Sandals (PURH). Notley has received many awards including the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Award, the Griffin International Prize, two NEA Grants, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a lifetime achievement award. She is also a visual artist and collagist, and a book of her poem-drawings is forthcoming from Archway Editions. Since 1992, Notley has lived and worked in Paris, France.

www.miafun...

Alice Fulton’s books include Barely Composed, a poetry collection; The Nightingales Of Troy, linked stories; and Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems. Her book Felt received the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress, awarded to the best book of poems published within a two-year period. She has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, and Ingram Merrill Foundation.  Her other books include Sensual Math, Powers Of Congress, Palladium, Dance Script With Electric Ballerina, and an essay collection, Feeling As A Foreign Language. She...

E. J. Koh is the author of the memoir The Magical Language of Others, winner of the Washington State Book Award and the 2021 Pacific Northwest Book Award. For her poetry collection A Lesser Love she received the Pleiades Press Editors Prize. She is the co-translator of Yi Won’s The World’s Lightest Motorcycle, forthcoming from Zephyr Press. Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and World Literature Today, among others. She earned her MFA in Literary Translation and Creative Writing from Columbia University, and is completing the PhD program at the...

Anthony Joseph is a poet, novelist, academic and musician who moved from Trinidad to the UK in 1989. A lecturer in creative writing at Birkbeck College, he is particularly interested in the point at which poetry becomes music.

As well as four poetry collections, a slew of albums, and three novels – most recently Kitch – Joseph has published critical work exploring the aesthetics of Caribbean Poetry among other subjects. He performs internationally as the lead vocalist for his band The Spasm Band. Sonnets for Albert is his first poetry collection since Rubber Orchestras.

“Calling England Home” and “Language...

Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her work has been supported most recently by a Guggenheim Fellowship. She grew up in Sonoma, California and now lives in Lexington, Kentucky where she writes, teaches remotely, and hosts the critically-acclaimed poetry podcast, The Slowdown. Her new book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in May 2022. Duration: 00:06:50

Neil Gaiman is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty books, including The Sandman, American Gods, Good Omens, Stardust, Coraline, Norse Mythology, Neverwhere, and The Graveyard Book. He’s adapted many of his books for television and film. Among his numerous literary awards are the Newbery and Carnegie medals, and the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Will Eisner awards. He is a Global Goodwill Ambassador for United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). In this episode, Gaiman reads his poems “A Writer’s Prayer” and “These Are Not Our Faces”.  To hear our full interview with Neil Gaiman...

"When I was writing On Time and Water somebody said this is not just one book. This is about your grandmother, about glaciers. You have to focus. You can't have this mythology and glacial and ocean sites, speculations about words like ocean acidification, and your grandfather's sister who is visiting Tolstoy. You have to focus. You can't put all this into a book. And then I thought, oh yes, I forgot my favorite uncle, who was the researcher of crocodiles. I also have to put him into the book. And when I put the crocodile's story into the book, it...

Andri Snær Magnason is an award winning author of On Time and Water, The Casket of Time, LoveStar, Dreamland and The Story of the Blue Planet. His work has been published in more than 35 languages. He has a written in most genres, novels, poetry, plays, short stories, non fiction as well as being a documentary film maker. His novel, LoveStar got a Philip K. Dick Special Citation, and the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire in France and “Novel of the year” in Iceland. The Story of the Blue Planet, was the first children’s book to receive the Icelandic...

Listen to Part 4 of this Special Series with music courtesy of composer Max Richter. All voices on this episode are from our interviews for The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast:

INGRID NEWKIRK, Founder & President of PETA - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

JEFFREY D. SACHS, President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, Director of Center for Sustainable Development, Columbia University, Economist, Author

JENNIFER MORGAN, Fmr. Executive Director of Greenpeace International, Special Envoy for International Climate Action, German Foreign Ministry

MERLIN SHELDRAKE, Biologist & Bestselling Author of “Entangled Life: How Fu...

Listen to Part 3 of this Special Series with music courtesy of composer Max Richter.

All voices on this episode are from our interviews for The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast:

PAULA PINHO, Director of Just Transition at the European Commission Directorate-General for Energy

PIA MANCINI, Co-founder/CEO of Open Collective - Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation, YGL World Economic Forum

JENNIFER MORGAN, Fmr. Executive Director of Greenpeace International, Special Envoy for International Climate Action, German Foreign Ministry

WALTER STAHEL, Architect, Economist, Founding Father of Circular Economy, Founder-Director, Product-Life Institute

Listen to Part 2 of this Special Series with music courtesy of composer Max Richter.

All voices on this episode are from our interviews for The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast:

MANUELA LUCÁ-DAZIO - Executive Director, Pritzker Architecture Prize - Fmr. Exec. Director of Venice Biennale, Visual Arts & Architecture Dept.

BRITT WRAY - Author of “Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis”, Researcher Working on Climate Change & Mental Health, Stanford University

WALTER STAHEL - Architect, Economist, Founding Father of Circular Economy - Founder-Director, Product-Life Institute

MATHIS WACKE...

Today we’re streaming voices of environmentalists, artists, students, and teachers. Enjoy Part 1 of this Special Series with music courtesy of composer Max Richter.

All voices on this episode are from our interviews for The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast:

MAX RICHTER

INGRID NEWKIRK, Founder of PETA

BERTRAND PICCARD, Aviator of 1st Round-the-World Solar-Powered Flight, Explorer, Founder, Solar Impulse Foundation

CARL SAFINA, Ecologist, Founding President of Safina Center

CLAIRE POTTER, Designer, Lecturer, Author of “Welcome to the Circular Economy”

ADA LIMÓN, U.S. Poet Laureat...

00:25 JERICHO BROWN - Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet, Author of “The Tradition” & “The New Testament”

00:39 JILL HEINERTH - Explorer, Presenter, Author of “Into The Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver”

01:02 ALICE FULTON - Poet - Recipient of MacArthur “Genius”, NEA & Guggenheim Fellowships

01:31 BERTRAND PICCARD - Aviator of 1st Round-the-World Solar-Powered Flight, Explorer, Founder, Solar Impulse Foundation: 1000+ Profitable Climate Solutions

02:31 CHRIS BLACKWELL - Founder of Island Records - Bob Marley, U2, Cat Stevens, Grace Jones, Roxy Music, Amy Winehouse…Author of “The Islander: My Life in Music and Beyond"

03:31 ALICE NOTLEY - Poet & Artist - Acade...

"I think we have such an intensity in society for trying to push us to all see things the same way. And to try to conform all our vision to one sense of right or wrong. Or this is the way we're supposed to do things, as opposed to letting our unfiltered just like - what's real for me? What wants to happen? And how am I seeing the world?

And maybe I'm totally different and weird and out there and outrageous in this way? And what if that's not something to hide, but something to embrace? And I...

Max Stossel is an Award-winning poet, filmmaker, and speaker, named by Forbes as one of the best storytellers of the year. His Stand-Up Poetry Special Words That Move takes the audience through a variety of different perspectives, inviting us to see the world through different eyes together. Taking on topics like heartbreak, consciousness, social media, politics, the emotional state of our world, and even how dogs probably (most certainly) talk, Max uses rhyme and rhythm to make these topics digestible and playful. Words That Move articulates the deep-seated kernels of truth that we so often struggle to find words for o...

"Sonnet’s Shakespeare itself came out of thinking about the form of erasure, what working in that form could do and mean. And at the time there were conversations about appropriative poets where there were specific instances of pretty shady power dynamics around certain poets taking certain texts and presenting them as their own and saying, 'This is just an appropriative poetics move.’ And I was looking at critical writing about it, and I couldn't find anything that talked about the role of the poet who is doing that as censorial or as somehow violencing the original text. I was t...

Sonnet L'Abbé is a Canadian poet, songwriter, editor and professor. They are the author of A Strange Relief, Killarnoe, and Sonnet's Shakespeare. Sonnet's Shakespeare was a Quill and Quire Book of the Year. In 2014 they edited the Best Canadian Poetry in English anthology. Their chapbook, Anima Canadensis, won the 2017 bpNichol Chapbook Award. They teach Creative Writing and English at Vancouver Island University, and are a poetry editor at Brick Books.

"Sonnet’s Shakespeare itself came out of thinking about the form of erasure, what working in that form could do and mean. And at the time there wer...

"The life of Caribbean people is not really documented. So this idea of Caribbean life being fragmented is something that I've had in my mind for a long time. So when I came to write this collection for my father, I realized that it was the same process and what I had were fragments, especially with him, because he wasn't around in a physical sense all the time. So all I had were little photographs, scattered memories, and remembrances. They're little parts of his life and parts of my experience with him...  I never disliked my father. I always l...

Anthony Joseph is a poet, novelist, academic and musician who moved from Trinidad to the UK in 1989. A lecturer in creative writing at Birkbeck College, he is particularly interested in the point at which poetry becomes music.

As well as four poetry collections, a slew of albums, and three novels – most recently Kitch – Joseph has published critical work exploring the aesthetics of Caribbean Poetry among other subjects. He performs internationally as the lead vocalist for his band The Spasm Band. Sonnets for Albert is his first poetry collection since Rubber Orchestras. His most recent album is The Rich...

"I think a poem is a wonderful device for challenging our sense of the world around us and how things are connected in particular. Whether it's through the patterning of sounds or the arrangement of line breaks, poems are always suggesting to us new and perhaps unconsidered ways in which seemingly unlike things can be drawn into a relationship with one another, perhaps have always been in a relationship that we haven't understood. In Anthropocene Poetics, I talk about the thick time of lyric poetry, how a poem can bring many different times and time scales together. A poem...

David Farrier's books include Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils (2020) and Anthropocene Poetics (2019). Footprints won the Royal Society of Literature’s Giles St. Aubyn award and has been translated into nine languages. He is Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of Edinburgh. 

"I think a poem is a wonderful device for challenging our sense of the world around us and how things are connected in particular. Whether it's through the patterning of sounds or the arrangement of line breaks, poems are always suggesting to us new and perhaps unconsidered ways in which seemingly unlike things c...

“I really hope that kindness is preserved. I really think manners and being polite can go a long way. People are in such a rush these days. Everybody wants to acquire so much, and they forget to just be thankful for the little things in life. To slow down, how you move through the world and how selfless you are, holding open a door for someone, or just telling someone to have a good day. Those are all things that can have a lasting effect on another person and make them want to be better as well.”

Best...

Best-selling author Courtney Peppernell is from Sydney, Australia. Her poetry collection Pillow Thoughts was a worldwide success. Her Young Adult novels and poetry books have struck a chord with young readers and the LGBTQ+ community. Her other works include I Hope You Stay, Watering the Soul, as well as Hope in the Morning, profits of which were donated to assist relief efforts for injured wildlife affected by Australian bushfires.

“I really hope that kindness is preserved. I really think manners and being polite can go a long way. People are in such a rush these days. Everybody wa...

“These were my bedtime stories stories. I remember listening to them before I could speak. I had delayed speech, and I had quite a bit of trouble with speaking at all and with learning and also just simply getting into school. I think I must have been five before I was uttering some of my first words and trying to articulate.

Simple communication was very difficult for me and my family, especially in a family where we were speaking several languages. They hoped to instill English. It’s the language of survival. Once they immigrated to the Stat...

E. J. Koh is the author of the memoir The Magical Language of Others, winner of the Washington State Book Award and the 2021 Pacific Northwest Book Award. For her poetry collection A Lesser Love she received the Pleiades Press Editors Prize. She is the co-translator of Yi Won’s The World’s Lightest Motorcycle, forthcoming from Zephyr Press. Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and World Literature Today, among others. She earned her MFA in Literary Translation and Creative Writing from Columbia University, and is completing the PhD program at the...

"This poem was written when I was having a real moment of reckoning, not that I hadn't had it earlier, but where I was doing some deep reading about the climate crisis and really reckoning with myself, with where we were and what was happening, what the truth was. And I felt like it was so easy to slip down into a darkness, into a sort of numbness, and I didn't think that that numbness and darkness could be useful."

Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the N...

Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her work has been supported most recently by a Guggenheim Fellowship. She grew up in Sonoma, California and now lives in Lexington, Kentucky where she writes, teaches remotely, and hosts the critically-acclaimed poetry podcast, The Slowdown. Her new book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in May 2022. Duration: 00:00:00

“I just want to make the poems like a living being…There are moments that I’m not at the desk, but I’m living life. And living life is actually what leads to writing. You have to have experiences to write about. Whether or not you are aware of those experiences as you are writing them down because if you’re doing music first, maybe you’re not aware of what you’re writing. And yet, those experiences are what come to fruition in your writing. You become aware. Oh, I did come on that roller coaster that time that I ha...

Jericho Brown is author of the The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle...

Latest Spirituality & Mindfulness interview from The Creative Process’ MAIN CHANNEL. To listen to more of our interviews across the arts and other disciplines, visit tinyurl.com/thecreativepod, tinyurl.com/thecreativespotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. 

This POETRY podcast focuses on interviews with poets, but you can find hundreds more conversations across the arts, culture, society & the environment on our main channel. We hope you’ll check it out!

For more than 30 years, Master Shi Heng Yi has been studying and practicing the interaction between mind and body. His strength is the ability to smoothly combi...

Latest ARTS interview from The Creative Process’ MAIN CHANNEL. To listen to more of our interviews across the arts, visit tinyurl.com/thecreativepod, tinyurl.com/thecreativespotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. This POETRY podcast focuses on interviews with poets, but you can find hundreds more conversations across the arts, culture, society & the environment on our main channel. We hope you’ll check it out!

"The idea of writing memoir is about listening carefully. The way to find a story or, at least the story that needs to be told is that moment that you’re writing is the...

“One of the things that is dying is our planet. We hear these sirens every single day. We’re being warned daily by experts and concerned people how vast that squandering is going. It’s a case of urgency and it’s astounding and a very sad, a very pathetic comment on modern life that most people are ignoring those signs. As a poet, it seems to me that one of the tasks that the poet takes on, it’s a vocation that’s born with it, it’s this consciousness, this serving as witness.”

Xicana activist, editor, poet, no...

Xicana activist, editor, poet, novelist, and artist Ana Castillo, was born and raised in Chicago. She is known for coining the term “xicanisma” which is defined in her book the Massacre of the Dreamers as, “a sociopolitical movement in the United States that analyzes the historical, cultural, spiritual, educational, and economic intersection of Mexican American women that identify as Chicana.” The term cross bred Chicana feminism, which came to include the indigenous ancestry of Mexican Americans, unifying us with our sisters on the other side of the border.

· www.anacastillo.net
· www.creativeprocess.info
· www.oneplanetpo...

“People who take care of sick people and AIDS and teachers and garbage collectors and people who work in daycare…all the things that have to happen in society we pay shit for. We pay an enormous amount of money to people who can throw a ball through a hoop. We pay an enormous amount of hedge fund people. All the people who take over corporations go in and destroy get immensely rich while the people who do what we actually need doing, what we must have to survive, the people who grow food, the independent farmers that used to e...

Marge Piercy’s 17 novels include NYTimes Bestseller Gone To Soldiers; National Bestsellers Braided Lives and The Longings of Women; the classics Woman on the Edge of Time and He, She and It, and her critically acclaimed memoir Sleeping with Cats. She’s written 20 volumes of poetry. The most recent is On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light. Born in Detroit, educated at the University of Michigan and Northwestern, she is active in antiwar, feminist and environmental causes.

· margepiercy.com
· www.creativeprocess.info

"When I was younger, I never really thought of living past twenty-five…I felt like I was in a movie. I thought that I was living this movie idea of things and there’d be gunshots around you. You hear it hitting the concrete, and you’re like ‘Oh, shit’. Seriously, I didn’t think of it as real life. When you’re young, the idea that I’d known people that were killed early, you go to prison. These just felt like matter of fact. They seemed to be this part of life and you just accepted them.”

David Tomas...

David Tomas Martinez is the author of two collections of poetry, Hustle and Post Traumatic Hood Disorder, both from Sarabande Books. Martinez is a Pushcart winner, CantoMundo fellow, a Breadloaf Stanley P. Young Fellow, NEA poetry fellow, and NEA Big Read author. Martinez lives in Brooklyn.

· davidtomasmartinez.com
· www.creativeprocess.info

“I think something happened in 2016, where I just snapped. There was a lot of a hateful news going around with American politics, and I didn’t know how to answer a lot of my kids questions then. Something I know I can do is to tell them things that I loved about this planet or things that I loved in other people because all they saw or heard about was just this weird ugliness, school shootings, leaders who were saying ‘build that wall’ to anybody who looked different than them, and so I remember the night I shut myself up in my...

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the NYTimes best-selling illustrated collection of nature essays and Kirkus Prize finalist, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks & Other Astonishments, which was chosen as Barnes and Noble’s and has sold 5 million copies. She has four previous poetry collections: Oceanic, Lucky Fish, At the Drive-in Volcano, and Miracle Fruit. Her most recent chapbook is Lace & Pyrite, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems with the poet Ross Gay. Her writing appears twice in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and Tin House.

Welcome to The Creative Process’s Poetry and Prose series. In this episode, we’ll be hearing powerful readings of poems and prose from Neil Gaiman, Marge Piercy, Alice Fulton, EJ Koh, Alice Notley, Gerald Fleming, Margo Berdeshevsky, Jess Wilber & Yu Young Lee.

· www.neilgaiman.com

· www.margepiercy.com

· www.alicefulton.com

· www.thisisejkoh.com

· margoberdeshevsky.com

· www.swimtheuniverse.com

· www.creativeprocess.info

Yu Young Lee introduces a new series of The Creative Process Podcast.

Alice Fulton’s books include Barely Composed, a poetry collection; The Nightingales Of Troy, linked stories; and Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems. Her book Felt received the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress, awarded to the best book of poems published within a two-year period. She has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, and Ingram Merrill Foundation. Her other books include Sensual Math, Powers Of Congress, Palladium, Dance Script With Electric Ballerina, and an essay collection, Feeling As A Foreign Language. She li...

Alice Fulton’s books include Barely Composed, a poetry collection; The Nightingales Of Troy, linked stories; and Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems. Her book Felt received the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress, awarded to the best book of poems published within a two-year period. She has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, and Ingram Merrill Foundation.  Her other books include Sensual Math, Powers Of Congress, Palladium, Dance Script With Electric Ballerina, and an essay collection, Feeling As A Foreign Language. She liv...

Alice Notley has published over forty books of poetry, most recently For the Ride (Penguin Books) and Eurynome’s Sandals (PURH). Notley has received many awards including the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Award, the Griffin International Prize, two NEA Grants, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a lifetime achievement award. She is also a visual artist and collagist, and a book of her poem-drawings is forthcoming from Archway Editions. Since 1992, Notley has lived and worked in Paris, France.