“If you live in the dark a long time and the sun comes out, you do not cross into it whistling. There's an initial uprush of relief at first, then-for me, anyway- a profound dislocation,” Mary Karr writes in her memoir, Lit. “My old assumptions about how the world works are buried, yet my new ones aren't yet operational. There's been a death of sorts, but without a few days in hell, no resurrection is possible.”
It’s the first week of March and we’re hearing works along the theme of rebirth this month. Today, Sara Nicholson reads a poem by John Clare, titled “I Am!” One of the best-known working class poets in the Romantic period, Clare penned some of his work, including today’s poem, while confined to a mental institution, and much of his poetry only became widely known a century after his death. William Howard called him, “the quintessential Romantic poet.”
Something I Heard is supported by Idaho Commission on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.
