I Sing The Body Electric by Whitman -- With Guest Alex Spenser Artwork

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.

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The Troubadour Podcast

I Sing The Body Electric by Whitman -- With Guest Alex Spenser

March 14, 2018 • Kirk j Barbera

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For thousands of years the West has inculcated a "mind-body" or "soul-body" dichotomy. This is the idea that the body is inferior to the spirit, or consciousness. This dichotomy has given us religious ascetics who destroy their own bodies as well as sadism. In modern America it has given us a bizarre coyness and bashfullness to our own nudity.In this poem by Walt Whitman, he glorifies the body as equal to the soul. The poem is a song to the body electric, or our bodies that vibrant with the music of poetry.My guest, Alex Spenser of wordswithwings.com, and I had a really fun converse with verse with this poem. We also talked about the nature of art, how art affects our lives, the practicality of painting and poetry and literature. At one point in the poem Whitman talks about sex and we could not help but discuss modern male/female relationships, particularly with regards to feminism.