Poems for Company – July 24th, 2023

“Inanimate Objects”: Have you inherited an inanimate object that carries emotional weight?  Have you bestowed a name on your bicycle or your car?  The poems featured in this episode respond in a variety of ways to inanimate objects.  Leigh Stein, “What Happens If You Click It,” from What To Miss When (NY: Soft Skull Press, 2021).  Richard Polt, “The Typewriter Manifesto,” from The Typewriter Revolution: A Typist’s Companion for the 21st Century (Woodstock, VT: The Countryman Press, 2015).  Robert Wrigley, “Box,” from Box (Penguin Books, 2017), read with kind permission of the author.  Stephen Dunn, “The Sacred,” from The Not Yet Fallen World: New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton, 2022).  Sharon Olds, “Adolescence,” from The Wellspring (NY: Knopf, 1996), read with kind permission of the author.  The show’s theme music is Philip Aaberg’s “Going-to-the Sun,” from his CD Live from Montana (Sweetgrassmusic.com).