WBUR Podcasts.
Boston.
We met on PoetryDates.com.
Right.
So we both kind of knew.
It's a hot space.
I was working at Sports Television Network.
And I was a professional athlete.
So it was a logical thing that we'd meet eventually.
This is the comedian Mike Rabiglia and his wife Jenny.
She's a poet who publishes under the name J.
Hope Stein.
We both do our thing.
Her poetry, me comedy.
And sometimes we do it together.
Mike and Jenny published a book in 2020 called The New One.
It's a mix of comedy and stories and poems.
They also bring jokes and poems together on stage, which Faith and I got to experience in person last year.
Yep, and soon after, they agreed to talk to us for this show, in part because they're fans of Maggie.
We have good bones in our living room.
It's so beautiful.
Yeah.
So, I mean, I think I probably have known about Maggie for a pretty long time and she's been an inspiration to my work.
And so when that happens, I always share that with Mike.
And so we both became fans.
Yeah, I basically like my poetry taste as an adult is what Jen shares with me.
I love that.
So that became something that was in my life.
Was poetry a part of your life, Mike, before you fell in love with a poet?
Well, weirdly, when I was a kid, I wanted to be a poet, a comedian, or the owner of a pizza restaurant where seventh graders could hang out.
This was, of course, when I was in seventh grade.
Yeah, yeah.
It was a very limited niche market, but I thought that made a ton of sense.
And so I wrote tons of poems when I was a kid.
And then I thought that was going to do and then I didn't, but I married a poet and I feel like her influence in my work.
I mean, she's a producer on almost every single thing I've done since we met.
And
And I feel like her influence on my work has moved it towards poetry.
And I'd like to think that whatever the hell I do has influenced her too.
Whatever the hell you do has influenced me.
That's the blurb.
I can't think of a higher compliment than to say someone's influence has moved you towards poetry.
Like if you applied that anywhere, that someone's influence in your life makes you some kind of a poet.
Yeah, it also makes your bank account go lower simultaneously.
I can attest to that.
There's a cross correlation with finances and poetry that it just, it sinks all boats.
Fortunately, this is not a show about finances.
It's about making this place, this day, this world, this life more beautiful.
And poetry lifts all of those votes.
I'm Maggie Smith.
I'm Faith Saley, and you could make this beautiful.
You may know Mike Birbiglia for his comedy specials or his solo shows like The Good Life and My Girlfriend's Boyfriend.
Or maybe for his films Don't Think Twice and Sleepwalk With Me, the latter of which started as a stage show in the mid-2000s.
And this, you could say, was the beginning of Jenny's poetic influence on him.
I mean, this is how delusional I was.
I invited my girlfriend, you know, the person I was dating to see a show about me having a severe sleepwalking disorder and cheating on my ex-girlfriend.
And I was like, you should come see this.
Mike's being generous here when he says the person I was dating because this performance was actually Mike and Jenny's first date.
And Jen's reaction, of course.
A lot of red flags.
Every red flag.
Literally.
None of this was on poetrydates.com.
But I was like, this is awesome.
You got to keep doing this.
Jen's call to action from this was like, okay, you have these comedy specials I've seen on Comedy Central, and then you have what this is, you know, it's the solo show thing.
And she was like, this is much more interesting to me.
And I think that...
That's often something I think in art that people don't account for is that the person you're in love with in some ways so much has much more weighty influence on what you're what you are wanting to create.
I think there's so much in common between poetry and comedy.
And I was thinking about this.
Somebody asked me once, when was the first time you realized the power of language?
And I think they thought I was going to say something about the first Sylvia Plath poem I read in high school or the first time I ever memorized a poem and recited it or something.
The first time I read a really apt metaphor and the first time I realized the power of language was having witty banter at my dinner table as a child and realizing the power and sense of approval I got from my father.
If I could sit and listen to the stories and then find a way to bring a detail back around and have a little something kind of come full circle.
And it's not that different from, I mean, if I think about like the end of a poem, Jen, tell me if I'm wrong, but like when I'm writing a poem and I'm trying to think of how to end it,
It's supposed to be, to me, both surprising...
Inevitable like you're like of course that's where that was going but I never saw it coming at the same time and I kind of feel like the sort of set up punchline of a lot of jokes works in that same kind of full circle way where it feels like of course that's where we landed
But also I cannot believe they did that
To get us back to that place.
Does that resonate?
It really does.
And I also think sometimes like genre, like naming a genre isn't so useful in talking about
What we do because there's so much poetry in what Mike does.
And I think a lot of poets have humor in their work, but it's to bring out sort of a deeper truth.
And I think Mike as well uses humor to bring out a deeper truth.
And so I sort of think like,
One of the things that Mike and I really love to do is, I think, push the genre that we're supposedly in to see what's possible.
Which is how we arrived at Jokes and Poems, a book of humor that has poems in it.
Well, I mean, the fact that I think the blurb on the back that's from Ira Glass is,
This sentence got me.
Their diabolical writing trick.
Sometimes she delivers the laughs and he delivers the feelings.
And I love how... And it's true.
Like, sometimes, you know, comedy can...
Can be so poignant because you're tapping into something about the human experience and something that we share despite our many differences.
And poetry can be hilarious in that it catches us off guard or has some sort of interesting or strange observation about something.
And it's all about noticing.
Both things are about noticing.
Yes, that's right.
So can we ask you to give folks who are listening an example of how you do this thing, this jokes and poems or poems and jokes in whatever order?
Do you want to start?
So I'm going to do this one?
Yeah, sure.
That seems great.
Jen's going to start with a poem called Holy, Holy.
Holy, Holy.
Bless the word juggernaut it is silly bless pincer and rhododendrons they are silly too flowers are clownish and silly they are the perennial cousins come for a visit after a long winter
They summer with us and make our noses smile.
Bless the nose, it is silly on the face like that.
Bless the hair and the wind that points to every coordinate of sky.
Bless the butt.
It is very silly in all its forms and activities.
Bless each silly thing that walks the planet and falls, for falling is holy.
Bless each misspoken and misspelled word.
It is a kind of falling.
Bless the typo.
They are truths whispered to you by the miracle of a botched letter.
I am sad to kiss your party.
I mean, I am sad to miss moss your party.
The misspoken is silly and requires a human to make it so.
Holy are the children whose birthright it is to be silly.
Holy is the clown who falls backwards.
Holy, holy, silly.
For silly equals holy.
Holy is the clown who falls.
For when the clown falls, we see we are the fallen.
And when the clown gets back up, we see we have risen.
Let the clown slip backwards and let laughter ring.
So when Jen said that...
I said, well, what about this?
When Una, our daughter, turned six, Jenny and I asked her for her birthday, what would be the coolest thing we could possibly do for your birthday?
And she said, I want you and mom to dress up as clowns.
And we're idiots, so we went to a costume shop and bought full clown outfits, full clown makeup.
We get dressed up, and we wake her up on her birthday dressed
Dressed as clowns, and we go, happy birthday, Una, and she immediately starts crying.
I think she may have thought she was still in a dream.
And we said, Una, I thought this is what you wanted for your birthday.
And she said, I wanted you to dress as clowns so that I could walk you around town and everyone could laugh at you.
And I thought, that's what I do for a living.
That's when I realized she wanted to be my manager.
She wanted to make 10% on top of 100%.
And then from that, I think Jen should read this because it ties into something we were talking about before.
Voyager 2 and Voyager 1.
Sometimes my husband leaves bed for a little spacewalk and ends up with a case of aliens in his throat.
When I try to wake him, it's as though I've punctured a hole in the oxygen tank of his reality, and for a few moments, he is just gasping, a visitor here.
Hello, love.
We live on Earth.
From the outer rims of our solar system, Earth just looks like a pixel of blue light caught in a sunbeam.
Not even a pixel.
That's what Voyager 2 and Voyager 1 saw from the edge of our heliosphere.
And that's the way my husband looks at me when I wake him.
Like our life here on Earth is a half pixel deep and hardly to be believed.
Earth love.
We live on Earth.
My husband moves like an earthworm across the carpet, does his best monkey, motions as if to offer a string connected to something in sky and I take it.
We act as two animals holding invisible balloons.
So that's just like a snippet of us mixing the two things together.
I have to thank you because, well, I have to thank you generally.
And specifically, today is my daughter's 11th birthday.
And she makes me believe in reincarnation because she was definitely on the vaudeville circuit.
And she is the silliest person ever.
And every year, especially as she's going into puberty, I'm so grateful she's preserved her silliness.
Silly is holy.
Yeah, it's a premium for us, too.
Yeah.
And this morning, she was out among the balloons, which you can see behind my head here.
And I was making the pancakes.
Everything was ready for her birthday.
And she goes, everybody freeze.
It's my first fart of being 11.
And she turns her butt out and does like the most unceremonious little toot.
And I was just like, in Maggie's words, I'm sorry, but that little 11-year-old toot was a beauty emergency.
And a poem.
Yes.
I mean, talk about brevity, right?
Almost a haiku.
Just one syllable.
Just one syllable.
I think, Mike and Jenny, you are familiar with Maggie's notion of beauty emergencies.
Do you have any that are top of mind to share with us?
A beauty emergency that has occurred in your life?
I feel like my book, Little Astronaut, I was really in that headspace then when I had my daughter.
She's my only kid.
So like every little thing she did felt like a beauty emergency.
So like every poem in there is so like, I was just in this really, it was like I was on drugs.
And then I sort of tried to get myself out of that headspace because I want, like, want to give her space.
So right now, like, I'm almost in the opposite headspace.
So our daughter wants out a teacher.
A couple of years ago, who said that silly is dumb and witty is smart.
And she also was like, no daydreaming.
Maggie and I, if people could, both of us, our jaws dropped and stayed dropped.
Yeah.
So that's why I'm writing like I'm almost writing like it's the opposite of the beauty.
It's like the ugly emergency.
Like I have to fix that world and like create something that supports the opposite of it and creates a beauty, beautiful environment.
I had one I had one the other day where I flashed back to.
One of the first times we took Una to Rhode Island, my parents and my brother and sister live with their kids in Rhode Island, and we took Una to the beach, and they were all with their cousins.
They were bodyboarding.
And there was this thing where it was the first time I noticed Una gaining speed and velocity.
And you could just see on her face when she was bodyboarding that she'd never experienced something like velocity before.
And I was like, oh my God, this is like the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
That's poetry right there.
Noticing a child's velocity in the water.
And their joy in it.
This is one, by the way, this is a poem from the new one that is, I think, speaks to a sort of beauty emergency of sorts.
Okay.
This is Jen's.
Okay.
And when the cats died of old age, your eyes gathered light and grew feline in the wink.
You grew me a beard for fuzz to pet.
And I said, hey, Beardo, I missed you while we were sleeping.
I just thought I was growing a beard.
I think that I used to like...
I think I used to do beauty emergencies about Mike, you know?
Like every day I would just like...
I was probably like over observing him.
Like when he first got married, like the first...
Five years, probably all my poems are like obsessing over Mike and then all my poems are obsessing over my daughter.
So it was like a beauty emergencies over Mike and then beauty emergencies over my daughter.
And now I'm like trying not to objectify them.
It's hard to be an abandoned muse.
Oh, I know.
You're like, oh, I'm not.
It's sort of how I feel around my parents now that I have children.
I'm like, oh, it's not about me anymore.
I was just the conduit.
Right.
It was never about you.
It was never about me.
That's the reveal.
I know.
Is there a poem that's really special to Una?
Like to your family's life?
She was really into this poem called Keep a Poem in Your Pocket.
Remember that?
Yes.
I'll read a few lines of Poem in Your Pocket.
It's by Beatrice Schenck de Regnier.
That's right.
And it goes, keep a poem in your pocket and a picture in your head, and you'll never feel lonely at night when you're in bed.
The little poem will sing to you, the little picture bring to you a dozen dreams to dance to you at night when you're in bed.
So keep a picture in your pocket and a poem in your head, and you'll never feel lonely at night when you're in bed.
My parents weren't very physically affectionate.
And, of course, Jenny and I are the opposite.
We just squeeze her and hug her and say, I love you.
And, you know, which is too much.
Whatever too much is, we're going to find out when she's an adult.
You know...
Kids say the darndest things and the way in the way that kids express themselves is so often poetry without them knowing it
And I remember when what you just said too much when my when my daughter was four and I was like do you know how much I love you
And she she still had a thumb in her mouth and she said so much more than so much
And that is now our catchphrase in our family.
It's always... That's just shorthand.
Well, it's actually longhand for saying I love you.
But it's so much more than so much.
It's the only way to live.
All kids are poets.
I mean, I firmly believe this.
I think we like... We have it scrubbed out of us by...
Teachers and life and the news and I don't know, just growing up.
I was reading this book called The Grammar of Fantasy by Gianna Rodari, who's a children's writer.
And it's just in relation to what Maggie just said.
What this book is really concerned with is the imagination of children.
And in the foreword by Herbert Cole, it says, there is no imagination curriculum or pedagogy.
Of the imagination in our schools.
Yet if as poet Wallace Stevens wrote, the imagination is the power of the mind over possibility of things, then to neglect the imagination is also to impoverish children's worlds.
And to narrow their hopes.
And so I've been thinking about this a lot in relation to world's problems.
And just like when we don't teach the imagination, we sort of end up in this cycle of not figuring out solutions that require the imagination.
Oh, my gosh.
And lead us to hope.
I want to remind everyone that your poems are published under J.
Hope Stein.
And I love that you, I, Faith, love that you lean into hope.
That's one of the things Maggie writes about is an essential ingredient of creativity is hope.
Yeah, I agree with that.
And that's what we love about her work and why it's on our wall.
Y'all, thank you so much for spending time with us.
Your silliness is holy.
We are so grateful.
Thank you.
Coming up, a masterclass in metaphor, including some we know.
I'm over the moon.
And some we do not.
It's almost a cliche.
They say, oh, yeah, I was sick as a parrot, you know, after that game.
Wait, we don't have that cliche, Peter.
What the heck does that mean?
That means you're very upset.
Don't be sick as a parrot.
We'll be right back.
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You want to talk about poetry?
Yeah, we do, Henry Winkler.
I'm journalist Faith Saley.
I'm poet Maggie Smith, and we are the co-hosts of You Could Make This Beautiful, where we talk to actors.
Oh, my God.
Poetry emergency.
Comedians.
We met on poetrydates.com.
Yeah.
And teachers about poetry in all its forms.
It's just one of those poems where you're like, if I read this to someone on a day, we're going to get the check.
You know what I mean?
You could make this beautiful wherever you get your podcasts.
We are pigs in mud to be back talking poetry.
We are kids in a candy store.
Especially because we're talking to a man of metaphors who thinks of himself as... A little gift in a box of cornflakes.
Peter Kessler is many things.
I am British.
Are you?
Everything I am in life is former.
I'm a former TV producer.
I'm a former English teacher.
I used to have hair on my head.
But he is a current gift in a box of cornflakes, as he says, because Peter lives at Magdalen College at the University of Oxford, where his wife is the president of the college.
As for Peter...
I basically come free with my wife and I do various activities here in the college.
I run a film club.
I run a film studies program and a comics studies program.
And I'm just about to start giving the students therapeutic woodworking lessons.
Peter Kessler was here not to give us therapeutic woodworking lessons.
He was here because of one of those formers in his title.
Peter was an English teacher at a boys' school, and included in the curriculum was, of course, poetry, which he defines in a very particular way.
An artificialization of reality is where you take something real and you force it into
Through a meat grinder, you force it through a process of being turned into verse.
And I love poetry that is in verse, because I love that feeling of thought and feeling being, as it were, trained into a shape, being given a kind of discipline, which
One at the same time is both a restriction to it and also somehow becomes a liberating agent, a kind of catalyst that through that sort of concentration that is forced upon the mind of the writer, you produce something that feels created already.
And then still is a kind of messenger for the original thought that went into it at the other end.
In other words, there's the noticing that Faith and I talk about with regards to poetry, but there's also the craft that goes into transforming the noticed into something else entirely.
Does that make sense?
It makes sense to us.
As for the ninth graders Peter was teaching?
They are the worst.
They have no interest in poetry at all.
What they want to do is play football.
And a lot of these kids, they can't see the point in this kind of writing, which is just...
Hard to understand.
Why write a poem?
Why write something that has got to be basically deciphered so that we can understand it?
Why don't we just say what the thing is instead of coming up with another thing that isn't the thing we're talking about?
So I remember explaining to them, well, you know, for a start, football is completely full of imagery.
In fact, we need, as human beings, we need imagery and metaphor.
In our everyday lives, we use it the whole time.
Without it, we actually don't understand what each other are talking about.
And the same boys who would say to me, sir, I'm not interested in metaphor.
Immediately afterwards, they would say I'm over the moon about the result of that football match.
So I say to them, yeah.
You've just used the metaphor, haven't you?
Why did you do that?
Why?
And they say, well, because it kind of made it easier for him to understand what I was saying, sir.
It's like a shortcut.
Precisely, yes.
So I had this one kid who was a really big 14-year-old boy.
He was in the rugby team for his age group.
And he said to me, because of jovial disregard for my professional status, you know,
So you will never make me interested in English because I'm not interested in it, you know.
And I remember saying to him, I take that as a personal challenge.
And so I devised this lesson, which was all about...
Imagery and why we use it and also how to create great metaphors.
And the process was something like this.
First of all, think of an object that means something to you, that means a lot to you personally.
And then I want you to describe it simply, not using images, just what does it feel like?
What does it smell like?
But what they had to do, the rule I gave them was
In describing it, they had to search for something that was really honest about the meaning of that object to them, something that no one else has ever thought about it, not just that it's
Big or small.
They had to keep thinking of ways to describe it until they found one that felt emotionally true to them.
And then stage three was, okay, well now...
Think of something else that that object that you've chosen is like, okay?
And write down everything you can think of, no matter how silly it might seem.
For example, you might go, okay, maybe my left foot is like a snake, you know?
You might initially go,
Well, my left foot isn't like a snake.
But if you really think hard about it, you might be able to find a way.
Like, for example, if you're waiting to, like, trip someone over when they come into the room, your leg could be just lying across the door like a snake hiding in the grass, couldn't it?
So this guy...
Came up with, I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was something like his watch smells like his father's memory or something like that.
And it turned out that his father had died quite young and he wore his father's watch.
And his memory had a particular smell for this boy.
And it was something like that.
But it was absolutely beautiful.
But he was just trying to write down, you know, what I said.
And I said, well, you've just...
You've just written something that nobody else could ever have written.
And it's completely true.
And it's poetry.
And he was so proud of himself.
He was going around boasting to people the rest of the day.
So, yeah, there was one of those breakthrough moments.
I love that so much.
Honestly, Peter, when I teach poetry, particularly to high school students who are, I agree, sometimes a hostile audience
And because they're distracted and it doesn't seem that cool, oftentimes what I do is say, okay, have a sensory experience, describe something, and then make a comparison.
That's it.
It's just describe something and then compare it to something else.
And so this idea of poetry being so tricky and difficult and like a riddle that has to be solved
I just think it's not true and it's just an error in approach.
Yes.
And also, of course, there are other art forms that people are perfectly happy to accept that they may not fully understand where they're experiencing them.
For example, music.
Music.
Yes.
Yeah.
So sometimes you can listen to a piece of music and you don't really get I don't really I don't understand this tune or why.
But but you kind of go with it.
It still persists in in in especially in young people's minds.
It's arguable that the further away you get from straightforward explicability.
The more you're actually exploring the opening of your mind, because you have to move into realms of inexplicability.
And when you're in the realm of inexplicability, then you're kind of getting close to removing
Your sophistication from the process of communication between you and the poet, and you can get something purer.
So I remember there was one poem I had to teach by a poet called, I think she's called Gillian Clarke, a poem called Catrin.
Which is a short poem about a woman who's remembering the experience of giving birth.
And it's written as a direct address to her daughter.
And it's saying, I remember...
And then she describes the hospital room, but she does it in a very elusive way.
It's not obvious that she's even talking about a hospital room.
She's talking about, I remember white squares on the wall.
I remember traffic outside the window.
I remember painting that wall red with my screams.
So you're sort of going, what's she actually talking about?
But if you let go of wondering what she's talking about, the kind of experience of birth pain somehow comes through it.
And she starts to talk about the red hair.
Rope of love connecting her and her daughter, which in simple terms is the umbilical cord, but in other ways is something much, much deeper.
And you shared that poem with 14-year-old boys?
Yes, you do.
It's on the exam syllabus, this one.
And at the end, it finishes with her saying, you know, I still feel that rope tightening while you're 12 years old, standing there in the darkness, asking me if you can stay out skating for one more hour.
That gets me.
I don't know about you.
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
That puts a shiver down my spine.
This is what metaphor can do.
This is why.
It makes me cry.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's that red rope.
What was the reaction of the boys?
What did move them was they went, Mr. Kessler's crying.
Look, look, Mr. Castle's crying.
Oh, my God.
So they sensed there must be something going on here.
You were clearly meaningful in these boys' lives as the teacher who taught them to understand metaphor and perhaps even embrace it
Was there a teacher who did that for you with poetry?
Oh, yeah, there was.
In fact, I've got a fantastic story because it actually relates to my favorite poem.
So I was in the final year of school.
And in those days, if you were applying to go to Oxford or Cambridge, then you had to stay at school for one extra term after everybody else left.
So I and my best friend Nick were both applying to do English at Oxford.
So we had to stay at school for an extra term.
And during that term, you don't have any formal lessons.
You just grab teachers when they're free and you kind of have a chat with them about whatever it is you're reading at the time.
And they give you little sort of projects to do.
It was great.
It was lovely.
And anyway, so we had this, there was this one day, which was a lovely autumn evening in October.
And we were with the head of English, Mr. Price, and in one of the school's kind of little conference rooms, it wasn't even a classroom.
And outside, the sun was just sinking behind, you know, the playing field.
So it was a kind of magical moment.
And in that setting, we read this poem by George Herbert, which is called Prayer.
Would you like to hear it?
Yes, please.
And it's worth noting, you are the second Peter on our show to read a George Herbert poem.
What are the odds?
This particular poem, it's literally just a list of definitions of prayer.
But as it goes on...
To my mind, it becomes something more than that.
And it becomes definitions of things that reach somehow beyond the mundane world that we can understand.
So it kind of becomes a poem about poetry as well as being about prayer.
And Ars Poetica.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it goes like this.
Prayer, the church's banquet.
Angels age.
God's breath in man returning to his birth.
The soul in paraphrase.
Heart in pilgrimage.
The Christian plummet sounding heaven and earth.
Engine against the Almighty.
Engine, it means it's like a siege tower, as if attacking heaven to try and get in.
That's what an engine is.
Engine against the Almighty.
Sinner's Tower.
Reversed Thunder.
Christside Piercing Spear.
The six days world transposing in an hour.
A kind of tune which all things hear and fear.
Softness and peace and joy and love and bliss.
Exalted manner.
Gladness of the best.
Heaven in ordinary.
Man well dressed.
The Milky Way.
The bird of paradise.
Church bells beyond the stars heard.
The soul's blood.
The land of spices.
Something understood.
You were told by Mr. Price to read this at sunset?
It just so happened that's when we were reading.
We were looking at lots of metaphysical poets at that time.
But anyway, I think – and I was incredibly moved.
And I think the others – you know, there was just three of us in the room.
And we didn't talk about it afterwards.
But many, many years later –
Like 30 years later, my friend Nick, he was working in advertising, but he wanted to give up advertising and go and be an English teacher.
And he was talking to me saying, wait, how can I get into English teaching?
I mean, do I have to go and do a whole load of training?
Oh God, I can't face that.
I said, well, why don't we get in touch with Mr. Price?
Because he might still be teaching.
And maybe he would let you go and do some work experience at our old school.
So he said, okay.
So I literally looked at the phone book and there was Mr. Price.
So I just phoned him up out of the blue and I said, oh, hello, Mr. Price.
My name is Peter Kessler.
I don't know if you remember, but I was a student of yours many years ago.
And he said...
Oh, do you remember when we read George Herbert's prayer in that room on that evening?
And I said, oh my God, yes, of course I do.
So it was clearly one of those special moments that just touched everybody.
I love that.
I love what poems make possible.
Peter Kessler.
Yes.
Thank you for sharing your lessons about poetry and for introducing us to that stunning George Herbert poem, Prayer.
It's a pleasure.
I love what Peter said about poetry and prayer both being something understood.
Yeah, I mean, you are writing, but you also want to know your words will be received by someone or many people.
I always think of every poem I write as being a message in a bottle that I kind of toss into the waves.
And I have no idea what shore they might wash up on and who might find that bottle and what the message might mean to them.
And I've never thought of that in relation to prayer, but it makes so much sense.
And those bottles are sort of what we ask for when we invite people to ask for a poetry prescription.
We have bottles that wash up on our shore from listeners who want to know if we have a poem we can offer, a song, a prayer of sorts.
As a way to help someone feel more understood and less alone.
Let's open this bottle.
Here's a recent request we got.
Hi, my name is Ezra Fox and I'm currently living in San Francisco.
For me, something I'm dealing with is just being in a season of transition.
So getting acclimated to a new place, a new state, a new city, trying to find and make new community and adult friends, which seems more and more difficult as we get older and our lives become more and more busy.
I'm 28 and I feel like so many people in their 20s, like I'm falling behind and that I should be doing more while at the same time having time to be doing much less.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so I'm just in this massive period of transition and I would love a poem or a song recommendation that is examining transition or just this stage of life.
Thank you.
Ezra, Maggie and I are smiling gently because we so relate to that feeling of being in your 20s.
And for me, I didn't have lots of those answers until my 40s.
It's so relatable, that liminal feeling.
Yes, those in-between spaces and stages.
And I mean, I think about this all the time because I think we're all kind of in a constant state of transition and becoming and the idea that you get to a place and then that's the real life.
You know, like, well, once I figure out X, Y, and Z, then I'll be living my real life and everything.
Or I'll be a grown-up or whatever that is.
That'll be the thing.
And I think, honestly, I think if we're doing it right...
It's never the thing.
No!
Yes.
I mean, the unknown can be scary, but it's also exhilarating in a way.
If you think about the less that you have determined for yourself
The more choices you have and the more possibility is still there.
And so, Maggie, I'm so excited.
I even brought this to show you.
This is a birthday card that I was given when I was 35.
So that's...
Just about, oh my gosh, 20 years ago.
And I've kept it.
And I can't even see what the friend who gave it to me wrote anymore because the inside is all faded.
But on the outside, this is from Rilke, from his Letters to a Young Poet.
And these words have become a prayer, actually.
These have been a prayer over and over for me for two decades.
This is Rilke.
I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.
Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it,
Live your way into the answer.
Faith, live the questions now.
Yeah, and embrace them.
I mean, I look back to how, in retrospect, how exciting when so many questions weren't answered.
And I'm grateful for the answers I have lived my way into.
But if I could go back and tell 28-year-old me or 35-year-old me who was going through a horrible divorce and hadn't even frozen her eggs yet and wasn't the sitcom star she thought she was going to be, if I could go back and tell her, I would say...
The questions will be answered in ways you cannot script right now.
And they will be, the answers will be better than you could even imagine.
That is so true.
And that's one thing that, frankly, writing and reading has taught me, which is, you know, what is that quote, you think you're alone and then you read?
Oh, I've never heard that.
Or read a poem, especially.
Yes!
You think no one has had their heart broken the way you have.
You think no one has grieved the way you had.
And then you read.
And so part of what I love so much about poetry and about getting to share poetry
Poems with other people is this feeling of the hands around you, getting to reach a hand out to someone else and say, yes, this is difficult.
Not to diminish the difficulty.
This is difficult.
We are all just trying to figure it out.
I'm still trying to figure it out in the
And that's the fun part, actually.
Even if it doesn't feel fun, that's what makes life worth living is that we don't know what tomorrow will bring.
Exactly.
And I have mentioned my husband on this show.
May he rest in peace.
My ex-husband had this one nugget of wisdom that I will share with everybody and especially Ezra.
Don't be afraid of good news.
Don't be afraid of good news.
Because it's coming.
It's coming.
All right, Ezra, that's your prescription from Rilke and your Aunt Faith.
And I have to say, too, Aunt Faith is a friend I made in the middle of my life.
Yes.
Right?
That's exactly right.
So here we are.
Here we are.
If you are going through something that you want a hand-picked, heart-plucked poetry prescription for, please send us a voice memo to poetryprescriptions at gmail.com.
That email address is in our show notes, where you'll also find links to all of the poems and jokes that were mentioned in this episode.
You Could Make This Beautiful is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR.
It's produced by Amory Severson.
Mix and sound design by Paul Vycus, production manager of WBUR Podcasts.
Our managing producer and multi-platform extraordinaire is Samita Joshi.
WBUR's Director of Digital Audio is Ben Brock Johnson.
I'm Maggie Smith.
I'm Faith Saley.
Thanks for listening.
Hey, this is Anne-Marie Sievertson, the producer of You Could Make This Beautiful.
Just jumping in really quickly before we go to say that if you loved these three episodes and you want more of this show, tell us.
Write to us at the email address that Faith and Maggie mentioned, poetryprescriptions at gmail.com.
You can also leave a glowing review of the show in your podcast app of choice and specifically mention You Could Make This Beautiful because, as you know by now, we release these episodes in the Dear Sugars feed.
Leaving a review and rating is also going to help more people find the show, which makes a huge difference.
And tell other people about You Could Make This Beautiful.
Shout it out on social media.
Recommend it to friends.
These three episodes were really just an experiment, so if you want to keep making your podcast feed beautiful with this show, we need to hear from you.
Poetryprescriptions at gmail.com.
Thank you so much.
