If you enjoy my readings and would like to support the channel, you can buy me a cup of coffee : https://buymeacoffee.com/lorigomez_apoetrychannel This Morning by Charles Simic (1938-2023) Enter without knocking, hard-working ant. I’m just sitting here mulling over What to do this dark, overcast day? It was a night of the radio turned down low, Fitful sleep, vague, troubling dreams. I woke up lovesick and confused. I thought I heard Estella in the garden singing And some bird answering her, But it was the rain. Dark tree tops swaying And whispering. “Come to me my desire,” I said. And she came ..read more

Happy Birthday to Rilke! My audiobook of these sonnets continues using the Stephen Mitchell translation.. Dedicated to the memory of a young woman whose premature death deeply affected him, "these strange Sonnets," Rilke wrote, "appeared, often many in one day, completely unexpectedly…I could do nothing but surrender, purely and obediently, to the dictation of this inner impulse." If you enjoy my readings and would like to support the channel, you can buy me a cup of coffee : https://buymeacoffee.com/lorigomez_apoetrychannel ..read more

"Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth." ~Raskolnikov, Part 3, Chapter 5 Published in 1866, Dostoevsky’s iconic novel, Crime and Punishment, dives into the feverish mind of Rodion Raskolnikov, a former student who believes his superior intelligence entitles him to commit murder for what he perceives to be a moral calling. Regardless, after killing a pawnbroker, Raskolnikov is consumed by psychological and moral unraveling that drives him to madness. The novel doesn’t merely ask whether ..read more

My audiobook for this 1962 Neo-Gothic classic continues...The last of the Blackwoods (Mary Katherine, Constance and their Uncle Julian) live in isolation where they traverse a labyrinth of unraveling secrets high atop a hill overlooking a village of hostile residents after experiencing a notorious family tragedy where several family members were murdered six years earlier. We are told their story by the teenage Mary Katherine nicknamed Merricat - a most unreliable narrator. The playlist https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7Wr1VPtVzqWhlqSsFEPEf3df35pVhHr5&si=s7kmc0bX9NuXbiYS If you enjoy my ..read more

The next installment of my audiobook for David Eagleman's Sum: forty tales from the afterlives... At once funny, wistful and unsettling, Sum is a dazzling exploration of unexpected afterlives—each presented as a vignette that offers a stunning lens through which to see ourselves. In one afterlife, you may find that God is the size of a microbe and unaware of your existence. In another version, you work as a background character in other people’s dreams. Or you may find that God is a married couple, or that the universe is running backward, or that you are forced to live out your afterlife with ..read more

My audiobook of these sonnets continues using the Stephen Mitchell translation.. Dedicated to the memory of a young woman whose premature death deeply affected him, "these strange Sonnets," Rilke wrote, "appeared, often many in one day, completely unexpectedly…I could do nothing but surrender, purely and obediently, to the dictation of this inner impulse." I have the great Bill Evans Trio and imagery from the exquisite Fantasia accompanying my reading. If you enjoy my readings and would like to support the channel, you can buy me a cup of coffee : https://buymeacoffee.com/lorigomez_apoetrychan ..read more

Candide is a French satire written by Voltaire, a philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment, first published in 1759. The picaresque novella begins with a young man, Candide, whose very name bespeaks guilelessness and innocence. Candide is living a sheltered life in an Edenic paradise with a noble family while being indoctrinated with Leibnizian optimism by his mentor, Professor Pangloss. What proceeds is a savage denunciation of metaphysical optimism—as espoused by the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz—that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Published when the author was 65 and co ..read more

Happy Thanksgiving! Among her many honors, 73 year old Joy Harjo has received the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America (1991), the Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Award (2015), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (2017), and the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award (2022). She served three consecutive terms as The United States Poet Laureate between 2019-2022 and is the first Native-American to have that honor. If you enjoy my readings and would like to support the channel, you can buy me a cup of coffee : https://buymeacoffee.com ..read more

The next installment of my audiobook for James Joyce's idioglossial masterpiece. Started in 1928 and eventually published in its entirety in 1939, Finnegans Wake is a complex novel that blends the reality of life with a dream world. The motive idea of the novel, inspired by the 18th-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, is that history is cyclical. To demonstrate this, the book ends with the first half of the first sentence of the novel. Thus, the last line is actually part of the first line, and the first line a part of the last line. The plot itself is difficult to follow, as the no ..read more

The next segment of this wicked poem;) Book 2, section 9. Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers reads like Mother Goose in comparison to this subversive Grimm fairytale. Les Chants de Maldoror is a French poetic novel, or a long prose poem. It was written and published between 1868 and 1869 by the Comte de Lautréamont, the nom de plume of the Uruguayan-born French writer Isidore Lucien Ducasse.Although obscure at the time of its initial publication, Maldoror was rediscovered and championed by the Surrealist artists during the early twentieth century. The work's transgressive and absurdist theme ..read more