The 2010 winner of the “Best Picture” Oscar has a Seattle woman wondering about the term hurt locker. Ben Zimmer wrote about it recently in his column at the Visual Thesaurus and we talk about it, too. Here’s the searing poem by...
Martha shares the famous passage from the poem by Catullus that begins, “Give me a thousand kisses…“ Grant reads an excerpt from the 1883 volume, The Love Poems of Louis Barnaval by Charles de Kay. This is part of a complete episode.
Why do subdivisions and office complexes have names invoking landscapes and animals that don’t exist there? A Fort Wayne, Indiana, listener got to wondering about this after passing the “Bay View Apartments” in her hometown: there’s not...
The hosts talk about some verses from Essential Pleasures, Robert Pinsky’s anthology of poems meant to be read aloud. This is part of a complete episode.
Martha tells the story of the creepy, spooky, surreal, and downright weird Robert Burns poem behind the name for that flat hat called a tam. Read it in translation here. This is part of a complete episode.
Grant reads another poem by Carol Ann Duffy, “Valentine.” This is part of a complete episode.