The Troubadour Podcast
"It is the honourable characteristic of Poetry that its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the human mind." William Wordsworth The Troubadour Podcast invites you into a world where art is conversation and conversation is art. The conversations on this show will be with some living people and some dead writers of our past. I aim to make both equally entertaining and educational.In 1798 William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads, which Wordsworth called an experiment to discover how far the language of everyday conversation is adapted to the purpose of poetic pleasure. With this publication, he set in motion the formal movement called "Romanticism." 220 years later the experiment is continued on this podcast. This podcast seeks to reach those of us who wish to improve our inner world, increase our stores of happiness, and yet not succumb to the mystical or the subjective.Here, in this place of the imagination, you will find many conversation with those humans creating things that interest the human mind.
The Troubadour Podcast
The Artistic Genius of William Blake
William Blake wasn't just a poet; he was a revolution in human form. Discover his bold declaration, "I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's," and see how it reflects the revolutionary spirit of his era. We'll delve into Blake's unique process of engraving and handmaking each book, emphasizing his philosophical and artistic genius. Our three-step approach to reading poetry will guide you through a transformative experience, allowing you to connect personally with Blake’s work and engage in what we call a "converse with verse."
In this episode, we bring you an interpretation of individual poems like "The Piper and Lamb," exploring themes of innocence, transformation, and the significance of the written word. We'll ponder why the child disappears when the piper starts writing and consider the metaphorical journey depicted in the "Introduction to Songs of Innocence." By the end of our discussion, you'll not only have a deeper understanding of Blake’s poetry but also a refreshed perspective on our relationship with nature and art. Don't miss out on this profound exploration of poetry with William Blake.
Hi, my name is Kirk. I am the creator of Troubadour Magazine and the Troubadour Channel and I believe that poetry, literature, art are the best tools for elevating your life, for a better enjoyment while you're here on this earth, and I also believe that poetry and literature and art are the best trainers of consciousness, or at least one of the best trainers for the human consciousness. This is the first video in a series of videos. Each video is standalone, but this video is going to cover the first poem in a book of poetry by William Blake called Songs of Innocence and Experience, showing the two contrary states of the human soul. We're going to cover the whole book in the end, but I hope you'll stick around for this one video to see if it's worth your time, and I'm going to try to convince you of the value of the individual poems and then I'll try to say a little bit about the value of the work of art. And this particular book, I think, is the best introduction to poetry you can get. Hear that again, you cannot get a better introduction to English Poetry for ages five years old to 106. It's a book that illustrates the profound power of poetry without having to go through all the complications of reading Shakespeare, who I love, and all these other poets that I love that are more difficult to approach. So my claim is that by exploring this work with me, you will walk away with an understanding and an appreciation and an enjoyment of poetry that you've never had before, and if you don't have it already, you'll have it in spades. And if you do have some love for poetry, it will change the way you look at poetry as an art form. And the way we're going to approach this is by looking at each individual poem and then looking at the broader work, because William Blake thought of this as a total work of art, and to read any individual poem in this work by itself is defeating the overall effect that Blake is trying to accomplish.
Speaker 1:This is a very short work of poetry, so it may take you. I would say, if you're reading really slow, you could do it in 20 minutes, 25 minutes. It's not that many poems and it's not that long, but it is worth spending time with, which is what I'm going to help you do, and I'm also going to help you with a revolutionary new way, a new approach you will not get in school. You will not get in college, you will not get anywhere. Some of it is things that I've learned in reading about poetry for many years, but also studying the history of poetry and how poetry was taught in school 100, 200, 300 years ago. So that's a basic setup of what this course will be about and what we're going to try to accomplish. I hope that this course is really for anybody, but if you're a teacher, a parent or a lover of poetry, I hope you'll come to troubadourmagcom, sign up and get more information. And that's troubadour, spelled O-U-O-U, troubadour the British way. That was me when I started this, trying to be a little highfalutin. I kind of regret that now, but it's okay. I'm not going to go over absolutely all of my view of literature and poetry and all the things that I think are necessary to get the most out of it, but I want to give you a couple of ideas and things to think about as we go through. Remember, this is just the introduction to this series, but I do want it to stand on its own.
Speaker 1:So let's start with the idea that verse comes first. As talking animals, we naturally speak in rhythm. This is our first experience of understanding the world. Consider how ancient explorers, in recording their experiences often did so. They wrote down what they saw or they recited it really before they had writing in verse. For example, the ancient Greek poet, aretas, whose Phenomena, which is about 3rd century BCE, is a didactic poem that describes constellations and weather signs, and this poem was widely used by ancient travelers and seafarers to navigate and understand the skies. The verse itself was not only natural. We naturally are inclined to verse.
Speaker 1:If you listen to children, you'll notice this. They love a verse. You give them a rhyme and they won't stop with it, and that's because it's much more natural for them to hear the sounds before all the meaning. And something that comes after verse is prose, where we analyze, we synthesize, we integrate. It's more logical and you know this has to follow. That has to follow that in a very rigorous logical order, which is amazing. It's one of the great inventions of human existence. But there's something very powerful and important about the natural ways that we begin that we should never lose track of and that our society has lost track of, and that is using more verse and poetry.
Speaker 1:The verse for the early people and I think for us sometimes could help is crucial in making complex knowledge memorable and easier to pass down to other generations. So this is the way that they would do this prior to prose. But even in a world of prose I want to stress this even in a world of prose that we live in right now, it's still the way that we pass down some of our most important and fundamental ideas. And they call this, you know, something along the lines of from the mother's milk type thing. And these are the deepest moral, epistemological, metaphysical, the deepest understanding of the world on the most basic level, that is, cross-culture, any culture and any specific culture also is pretty relevant.
Speaker 1:It happens often in nursery rhymes and little jingles that we tell each other, tell mothers and fathers tell to their children. So in today's education we don't get this. This is a neglected thing. If poetry is addressed, it is very marginally and put aside, and there's a couple of dates that you get. You hear something about Shakespeare. You're supposed to. You read a poem. It's boring, you don't understand it, it sits on a blank page and then the teacher moves on to something more interesting. That's not the teacher's fault, that's the teacher's. Teacher's fault, the people who are teaching. The teachers are wrong and they're not doing it correctly. There are very few places in the world that properly help you integrate experience, appreciate, enjoy poetry as an art form, and that's what we're going to try to rectify.
Speaker 1:Art offers a meaningful illustration of life and the world we inhabit as seen through the eyes of a craftsman. So art offers a meaningful illustration of life and the world we inhabit as seen through the eyes of a craftsman. The finer the craftsman, the more wide and meaningful the experience they are capable and able to demonstrate in their art. This could be sculpture, painting, music, poetry, movies, whatever. Now, a good artist can depict a view of life relevant to, let's say, a middle-aged man in 2024. This is one example. But a grandmaster artist can depict a view of life relevant to all humans across all times. That's why there are a few books that are read from not only generation to generation male, female, high class, low class, poor, rich, multicolored doesn't matter and also across vast distances of time 50, 100, 500, 1,000 years, 2,000 years. What are the works that still speak to us today? And those are the finer and finer works of art.
Speaker 1:In Songs of Innocence and Experience, showing the two contrary states of the human soul, william Blake provides us with a meaningful universe of experiences, of universal, universal of experiences. He does so in a way that's relevant to everyone, from a six-year-old to a 96-year-old and beyond. This universality is a hallmark of great art, and William Blake's work is no exception. The only way to grasp the art of William Blake is to investigate it personally, to experience it for yourself, to ingratiate yourself in the artwork, to spend time contemplating for yourself. I cannot emphasize the yourself enough.
Speaker 1:What I'm going to be demonstrating in some of my practices is things that I've done for myself. You have to do this for yourself, and if you do this with children or teenagers or adults, if you're going to teach, then you need to be able to model it for yourself and then give them the opportunity to do this on their own in an enjoyable atmosphere. What I'm trying to accomplish here is to help you use this work of art to then expand into other works of art in a whole new approach and method to reading poetry. I want you to get the most out of this literary art. So if that's all you get get more out of this art, great. Then I hope you will expand and move into other works of art and other works of literary art, whether they're novels or plays or other poems, epic or short or lyric or whatever, and also into painting, sculpture and things of that nature.
Speaker 1:So who was William Blake? William Blake is often overshadowed by some of the other romantic English poets of the time, such as his contemporary, william Wordsworth, who actually is my personal favorite of all poets. William Wordsworth, I believe, is the undisputed champion of the 19th century English poetry and Blake, in contrast, stands out as a different, imaginative type of figure. Wordsworth rarely spoke fondly of other poets, but he made an exception for William Blake, at least in a certain context. I'll let you decide. Wordsworth was telling his friend Mr Crabb Robinson about Songs of Innocence and Experience, and he said it is undoubtedly the production of insane genius. Is that an insane person? I'll let you decide. Continuing the quote, there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott, two great literary artists of the time. So Blake, his era, his time was 1757 to 1827. This is also, you can think of this, as the revolutionary period in human history, but especially in Western history. You have a Haitian revolution and you also have the French Revolution, of course, and the American Revolution, but there are other revolutions happening in science and mathematics. Everyone's trying to be in the game of revolutions and poets are no different. Blake, you can fit him in if you need to categorize him in the era or an era in terms of poetry. He is considered one of the big six English Romantic poets. That's Blake Wordsworth Coleridge in the Elder and Keats Shelley Byron in the Younger.
Speaker 1:Blake was an engraver, a painter, a poet, an illustrator and a revolutionary and an active reformer. Blake famously said I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's. And when you think about the era he lived in, where they were throwing off the shackles over and over again of kings and tyrants and all different types of systems and trying completely new systems of approach, this idea is a powerful one. And think about it. I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's. Do you think that's even possible.
Speaker 1:Songs of Innocence was a book of a very small couple of poems that we're going to read as we go through, was published separately by itself in 1789, with engravings. Songs of Experience was followed up in 1794, after what is called the Reign of Terror in France, where there was many beheadings Together. In 1794, blake personally engraved and handmade every book sold during his lifetime. So there were not a lot sold during his lifetime because he would hand create and engrave everything by himself. He had his own little process of doing this to speed it up a little bit, but it was not as quick as the printing press, so he did not do a printing press.
Speaker 1:And the title, as I said before, was the Songs of Innocence and Experience, showing the two contrary states of the human soul. And that's going to be very important when we look at the totality, because he is putting forth a philosophical framework and understanding of all of his poems. But we need to experience them one at a time and then look at them together. In this course, we will read and discuss each poem individually on its own merits together. In this course, we will read and discuss each poem individually on its own merits, but then, more importantly, and I think more importantly, we will pair certain poems, one from innocence and one from experience, to comprehend Blake's broader vision. Remember, this work is not a treatise on human nature meant to be studied in low light and discussed abstractly in quiet book corners. It's a work of art meant to provide a meaningful vision for your contemplation. Moreover, it is a work of art designed to reshape the souls of its audience during Blake's era and perhaps our era as well.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to try to focus on three basic approaches that I take when reading poetry. And again, this is very replicatable. That's the goal here is it's for you to be able to replicate this. I do have specific ideas and things I've done in the past to help you with students. If you have students, go to troubadourmagcom to reach out to me that way, or I'll leave links below for you to learn a little bit more about that.
Speaker 1:But here's the first thing to do, always first, first, first is to simply read the poem. But that seems obvious. Let me explain this a little bit. You always want to start with as little precondition as possible. Just read it and reread it, get a sense of the words and the rhythm. But don't worry about analyzing it, don't worry about understanding it, don't worry about knowing everything to say at a cocktail party to make yourself look good. You're here. You're here, you're reading in order to hear what the poet has to say.
Speaker 1:Wordsworth said that poetry is a poet speaking to men or it's a man speaking to men. That's really what it is, so not breaking it down for an essay. That's not the purpose of this. You're not going to write an essay. We want to understand, enjoy and experience the art before we quote unquote murder to dissect. It's another Wordsworth. You could tell that I love Wordsworth but I also love Blake. So stick around for the Blake.
Speaker 1:As Samuel Johnson said, when reading one must remove all cant or can't. C-a-n-t, that means remove all the jargon, including an especially academic jargon. So that's number one Just read the poem. Read it a couple times, read it out loud. Number two understanding. So all you have to do in this phase after poem, read it a couple times, read it out loud. Number two understanding. So all you have to do in this phase. After you've read it a couple times, you have ingested something, even if you don't really understand much at all.
Speaker 1:Pause and ask yourself what you think the poem is about and what it means to you right now. The point of most good poetry, great art in general, is to reach you where you are. Not where you think other people think you should be, but where you are. What do you know? You're trying to get into your consciousness and think to the best of your abilities as you read more, study more, learn more, you'll have more to say. You'll have more thoughts, more things, more experiences. But the answer is not to think what is the most clever thing I can say at a cocktail party.
Speaker 1:The answer, and what you're trying to look for, is what do you think of this poem right now? What are your thoughts about what the poet is trying to say? And I want to say a word here about evaluation. This is before evaluation. So if you're trying to understand a poem, you need to first read it. Read it aloud, give it a chance, chew it in your mouth a little bit, think about it, contemplate it and then later you can do an analysis and an evaluation, which is a very positive thing to do. But first is when you're understanding is start where you are. That's the point of art. It's not about getting the right answer. It's about building on your consciousness yours, not Google's, not AI's, not that person yours. It's not about getting the right answer. It's about getting to what you think is the, what you understand about it in this moment. Now, ok, and then the last thing.
Speaker 1:This is the thing that I think is somewhat unique, if not completely revolutionary to me, and that's what I call converse with verse, and I'm going to model this with you, rather than taking an analytical look at meter, rhyme, voice tone, theme style, etc. We or you, I and you doing this on your own will muster the best of our intellectual and experiential faculties and bring them to bear on the poem. And I hope if you're a teacher, parent, you're getting a kind of sense of the value of poetry. Poetry is not about teaching to a test. Poetry is really about the understanding and the development of your consciousness, your mind, at the most basic, important level of experiencing the world. It's more akin to the reason you go to the gym, you exercise, you run.
Speaker 1:It's not just for the marathon. Although the marathon can be a motivation, that's not the fundamental purpose. It's for the development and the training of your body and that's the same thing with mind. And I have to say something, because the Olympics 2024 just ended as I'm recording this, and people may not know this, but there was an era in modern Olympics where people poetry and reciting and writing of poetry was an Olympic sport, and that's because the creator, one of the creators, wanted to meld mind and body in the same way that the Greeks wanted to. That was one of the inspirations for the Olympics, where it wasn't just the emulation and the admiration and the reverence of the body at its best, which is a beautiful, wonderful thing, but also at the mind at its best. And what do they choose? Poetry. And there's a reason for that, and I want you to think about that in the development and training of young characters, young souls, young people.
Speaker 1:If you're an educator or a parent, so we will muster the best of our intellectual and experiential faculties to bring them to bear to this poem. That's the point, this is the key to all art, really, particularly literary art. Art is a symbiotic process. It's a symbiotic relationship between artist and audience. The good artist has something to say, something to convey, something, to communicate something, whether it's good, bad, political, ideological, metaphysical, whatever there's a view of man, human, women, relationships, anything, something they want to say. Our job as the audience is to understand and integrate, using the best knowledge that we as individual minds have, not just what we have as a society. So that's why I try to stay away from Google until later, and I will Google things, by the way, but I don't want you to do that right away. I want you to really stick with the poem at first. Just be alone with the poem for a little bit.
Speaker 1:Now, this, my approach converse with verse is most starkly seen in this book of poetry and it's most effective with Blake's work, because every single one of these poems can be read to a six-year-old, who will have one experience of the poem, and to a 96-year-old who will have a different understanding of the poem. But both are correct. Both are 100% valid. Okay, thank you for bearing with me through that introduction, which will be longer than the other poems that we do, but I wanted to give you some kind of an overview of what we're trying to accomplish. So now we're going to go into the actual poem itself and we're doing the first poem from Songs of Innocence and Experience. Now, remember when you approach the poem from Songs of Innocence and Experience. Now, remember when you approach the poem in this particular poem, because I'm trying to emphasize art, literature and poetry as an art.
Speaker 1:This one's very interesting. So you need to get a book and a book you need to buy the book. You can do it online and I'll give you links for a free one online, because I want to encourage you to do this, but you need to go through the book because you need to see the artwork William Blake hand drew and then engraved every single one of his books with color, and he colored them in individually, every book he sold in his lifetime, and so that's very important to the creation and understanding of this work. So get yourself a book, or go to the link below and check out the, if you want to follow along with this one, so you can see the works of art as you open this book up and I'll, you know, like I said, have links for that.
Speaker 1:But you see, for instance, a man with a cherub or some kind of you know representation of Cupid Eros or something we don't know for sure, piping down the valleys, wild piping songs of pleasant glee, on a cloud. I saw a child and he, laughing, said to me pipe a song about a lamb. So I piped with merry cheer. Piper piped that song again, so I piped. He wept to hear Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe, sing thy songs of happy cheer. So I sung the same again, while he wept with joy to hear Piper sit thee down and write in a book that all may read. So he vanished from my sight and I plucked a hollow reed and I made a rural pen and I stained the water clear and I wrote my happy songs every child may joy to hear.
Speaker 1:When we're looking at this, we want to bring to bear and muster all of our knowledge. But first, before we start doing something like that, we want to try to ask what the poem means to you, whatever that happens to be, or what did you see in the poem? What did you understand the poem? And this may require you to read the poem several times, or at least twice, and out loud. Now, I'm not gonna do that, because you could always rewind it or read it yourself, which I recommend you read it yourself. So pause now if you want to do that. So that's the second part. Just what does it mean to you? What did you see? What I'm going to do is model the converse with verse, and I want to emphasize that my conversing with verse is going to be different than yours. Mine is going to include more knowledge and I'll probably even learn something as I go through. That's what happens in a good conversation Converse right, you're going with something else. With back and forth there's a relationship. So what am I looking at here?
Speaker 1:When I think about it, I think, piping down the valleys, while piping songs of pleasant glee. On a cloud I saw a, a child and he, laughing, said to me I hear that and I think, okay, so someone's piping, you know, we have this verb Someone's piping down the valleys while there's a person. There's a nice clue that there's a picture of a person piping. So it's like, okay, now we got something here. He's giving us some contextual clues here. So we have a person who's going down those wild valleys, he's piping some pleasant songs and he sees a child on a cloud and the child, laughing, is talking to him. He says something. So what does the child say? He says because it says, and he, laughing, said to me. The child then says or the angel child pipe a song about a lamb. So I piped with merry cheer. Okay, so he tells me to pipe. I pipe this song about a lamb Now lamb, lamb of God, probably Jesus, something or something along the lines.
Speaker 1:This is also something called innocence and experience. Lambs are often associated with innocence. Okay, and then Piper piped that song again. Now I know that this is the child speaking, because it says Piper pipe, he's telling him. So I piped, he wept to hear. So the piper is telling a story in song of this lamb and the child is crying. Then the child goes on Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe, sing thy songs of happy cheer. So I sung the same again while he wept with joy to hear. So he, you know, wept at the piping.
Speaker 1:But now he tells the piper to drop the pipe. Sing. That means words are coming out right. So pipe is just music. Music is more, I think, in tuned with nature. It's more a relationship between nature. It's like the sounds of larks, wind thing, you know, some rain. You're putting those together into rhythmic patterns and that's how you're telling a story through your music.
Speaker 1:But the angel, the cherub, tells the child in a cloud, tells the piper to drop thy pipe and to sing. That means to, like Homer, sing the muses. He's singing out loud words. So I sung the same again. It's the same story about the lamb, while he wept with joy to hear Piper sit thee down and write. So now he's telling to no more pipe, no more singing. Now write, piper, sit thee down and write. So now he's telling to no more pipe, no more singing, now write, piper, sit thee down and write in a book that all may read. So he vanished from my sight and I plucked a hollow reed. So this is to me. You know he voice words, oral words specifically. Then there is the written word and notice, something really important happens when he starts with the written word. What happens? So he vanished from my sight. That's important to me. Everything that happens in a work of art is really critical. Tell, that's important to me. Everything that happens in a work of art is really critical. But that triggered something in me. So why did the child on a cloud disappear from the piper? Why do you think? And then the last stanza is so I made a rural pen and I stained the water clear and I wrote my happy songs. Every child made joy to hear.
Speaker 1:Now there's a lot we're going to talk about, about the happiness, the joy, the weeping. Along with that, what kind of stories are being told? What's happening? This is a book Remember this is Introduction to Songs of Innocence and Experience. So this is a book about the telling of stories, in a sense, and the vanishing.
Speaker 1:I'm just going to give you a hint of my view in conversing with this.
Speaker 1:What I'm seeing happening is a simplistic nursery rhyme that any child can hear. There's actually a whole world of the history of human experience and knowledge. It starts with a complete, a unified relationship between man and nature and that's when he's singing and he's literally. There's a just like the gods from the Greeks. You have the gods come down to earth, you have Eros, you have Pan, which is where we get the word panic from where you go out into a forest and you see this god Pan out there. And ancient people probably really believed they might see Poseidon if they went in the ocean, which is kind of terrifying, but also there's an exhilaration, I think is the idea. So that's how it was in the first era of human existence Music, nature, direct connection.
Speaker 1:Then there's the song, which there's still that connection, but we're now losing a little bit of that connection to it. The moment we pick up that pen, that direct relationship to nature vanishes. No more direct relationship. And I really liked the line and I stained the water clear, because remember, he made a rural pen, stained the water clear and I wrote my happy songs Every child made joy to hear. So that's just the introduction to Songs of Innocence and Experience. So this series of videos is about more than just reading William Blink, although if that's all you do, I think you'll have a profoundly new experience and a new art form to explore and enjoy and expand your living on earth. And we will do the next poem soon, which is very short. So some of these videos I think are going to be very short. But I hope you'll stick around, go to troubadourmagcom and check out what I'm doing and by the end I hope you'll have a new toolkit for experiencing and appreciating and teaching poetry.