The Daily Stoic - Allie Esiri On the Power of Poetry and Daily Reads

Episode Date: March 6, 2021

On today’s podcast, Ryan speaks to writer Allie Esiri about the Stoic’s infatuation with ancient poetry, how to read and find insight in poetry, how the greatest writing communicates to us on a subliminal level, and more. Allie Esiri is a writer and former actress in stage, film, and television. She has released several poetry anthologies including 2020’s, Shakespeare for Every Day of the Year, a collection of passages from Shakespeare's greatest works. This episode is brought to you by Beekeeper’s Naturals, the company that’s reinventing your medicine with clean, effective products that actually work. Beekeepers Naturals has great products like Propolis Spray and B.LXR. As a listener of the Daily Stoic Podcast you can receive 15% off your first order. Just go to beekeepersnaturals.com/STOIC or use code STOIC at checkout to claim this deal.This episode is also brought to you by Public Goods, the one stop shop for sustainable, high quality everyday essentials made from clean ingredients at an affordable price. Everything from coffee to toilet paper & shampoo to pet food. Receive $15 off your first Public Goods order with no minimum purchase. Just go to publicgoods.com/STOIC or use code STOIC at checkout.This episode is also brought to you by Talkspace, the online and mobile therapy company. Talkspace lets you send and receive unlimited messages with your dedicated therapist in the Talkspace platform 24/7. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to Talkspace.com or download the app. Make sure to use the code STOIC to get $100 off of your first month and show your support for the show.This episode is also brought to you by Manly Bands, the best damn wedding rings period. Freedom for your hand to look like you want it to look. Manly Bands has an insane selection of materials: gold, wood, antler, steel, dinosaur bones, meteorite, even wood from whiskey barrels. To order your Manly Band and get 20% off, plus a free silicone ring, go to manlybands.com/stoic and enter promo code STOIC.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Allie Esiri:Homepage: https://www.allieesiri.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/allieesiri Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/allieesiri/ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8NUg78orDuYMW1eH2Zs-EQ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoic, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here, on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers. We reflect. We prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school. When we have the time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with our journals, and to prepare

for what the future will bring. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wunderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, I'm so excited about today's guest because Allie is someone who is part of my because Allie is someone who is part of my nightly ritual. I know that sounds very weird, but every night I read two books to my four-year-old and my two-year-old.

They don't totally get it, but it's a ritual we love. I read them the days entry from a poem for every night of the year, and I also read them a page of Shakespeare for every day of the year. And both these books are by the wonderful Ali Asiri. She's a UK-based writer, poet, editor, and she's put together these magnificent collections of daily reads that I just can't recommend highly enough. If you're a fan of the Daily Stoic, you know the power of sort of daily ritual, the daily reads.

I'm always on the lookout for books that let me do that, that can be part of my morning routine or weekend routine. And that's where today's guest comes in, because she is a incredibly prolific editor of these books. She's done a poem for every day of the year, a poem for every night of the year, a poem for every winter day, a poem for every autumn day the year, a poem for every winter day, a poem for every autumn

day, and so many other books. She's done if a treasury of poems for almost every possibility, the love book, classical and contemporary poems. Look, people rave about her stuff because it's amazing. She and I, you'll see in this episode, nerd out over poetry. And look, I get it. If you're one of the people who has come to Stoicism because you love sports or an military and all these masculine things, and you think the poetry is not for me, as you'll see in this episode, the Stoics Love Poetry,

there's something special about poetry. And we're not just talking about beautiful poems about flowers and lakes and things. We're talking about poems that can make you better. We're gonna talk about really practical applicable poems. So I can't wait for you to listen to this awesome episode with my new friend, Allie Aceri, you can check out a poem

for every night of the year, which is where I would start. And I like her Shakespeare one as well. You can follow her at Allie Aceri, AL, L, I, E, E, S, I, R, I, I like her Shakespeare one as well. You can follow her at Allie Assyri, ALLIEESIRI, at on Instagram. And you can also go to her website at AllieAssyri.com. Well, I'm so excited to talk. I read every night, I read a poem for every night of the year with my son and then I also read

Your your daily Shakespeare book and so I think yesterday was Langston Hughes and merchant of Venice. Oh Good combination. They'd Langston Hughes was all around Martin Luther King Jr. Day I had like a round of poems about civil rights. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was really thrilled to get permission to put them in.

I just, you know, when I was doing, when my agent suggested that I do this book, the Daily Stillerick, I don't know. I wasn't, as someone who loves books, I love to just read all the way through. So the idea of a page a day thing didn't quite make sense to me, but I've really fallen in love with the medium and it sounds like you have too. Yes and yours came out in 2016 too, didn't that? The daily fact? Yes, yes. Yeah, that same, my first one, a poem for every night of the year,

came out autumn 2016. So we must have had similar idea at the same time. That's funny. Yeah, why do you think it works so well? I mean, it's sort of the opposite of how books are supposed to be. You're supposed to start the book and finish the book and the idea of of don'tling it out over a year seems a bit strange, but I found there's something very powerful about about doing it that way. Yes, I wanted to ask you actually, do you mind if people cheat and read the whole way through? I don't mind. Actually, the question I get more often is, well, should I start at the beginning? Or should I start with today's date?

Which strikes me with such a silly question, because you would obviously start with today's date and then go all the way back through around. But people are, and this goes to, I guess, my point is, people are so used to starting books at the beginning, that if they picked up a book on May 16th, it feels weird to them to start a good chunk of the way in. Yes, although, as I discovered when I was researching for my Shakespeare book, the New Year started around the beginning of April. So the beginning of spring was the new year

until like in the 1700s in Scotland and like even later in England. And like we still have a remnant, I don't know if you do in America of our tax year starts at the beginning of April. Yep, April 15th. So that's a remnant of when the year started. So and it doesn't make sense, doesn't it?

Like the beginning of spring for the beginning of new year, but it changed. So yeah, I know I don't mind, and I don't mind if people cheat. And I also like that sometimes I've discovered, because people have told me, that they've used it as a birthday book, and they can just open it. What's on your birthday or what's on your birthday? And I love that. Like a rounded office or within a family, just another way of using the book.

Yeah, in which effort or do you want to? The other thing I see, I'll see people will post pictures. They're like, oh, they're reading it today, but they've obviously decided not to do it based on the date because they're posting it. And it's like not even close to where we are. So yeah, I do tend to find you see a lot of people cheating, but I think there's something ritualistic about the medium that makes it very powerful. Well, I think it's something to turn to and I think sometimes you might feel a bit overwhelmed about embarking on your novel or it is just something that you can do

It's just a little piece of something that might help you or rouse you or console you It's a different thing, isn't it? I think it's just not trying to be a novel or a you know Or there's many other works of art But I think and it's sort of mindful in itself, just taking a daily poem or a daily message of soicism. And that in art, sort of just reading and concentrating the mind on that one short thing is, it's in a mindful in itself, I think. And it was surprising to me to see how far back the medium goes, like I was reading about something where I guess it's common to like split the Torah up over 52 chapters and read one one chapter a year every year. And then I don't know if you read Tolstoy as a calendar of wisdom.

So I didn't know about this book until maybe a year or two years ago, but Tolstoy did a sort of a daily book. It was his collection of favorite quotes and sayings and little bits of wisdom with some commentary from him, but he actually thought it was his most important work. The problem is it came out in the early 1900s and then Russia falls to the revolution shortly thereafter, and the book is more or less repressed. And so what he thought was his greatest literary accomplishment is basically lost until the late 1980s when it's rediscovered. But that's one of the daily books that I read every morning because you're I think obviously what we're doing is is is much more curation but to To get daily wisdom from one of the the greatest writers of all time that designed it to be daily wisdom I just absolutely love. Yeah, that's brilliant. I'm gonna look it up and do you think I was trying to think so your book of stoicism that the Stoics liked poetry, didn't they? I think they approved a poetry so I think we do.

We get along. They do that with something I was going to ask you about. Clientine is who's one of the early Stoics talks about and it seems to like poetry that most. He says talks about and it seemed to like poetry that most he says he had two beautiful ideas that I've thought I'd run by. He said that our lives are like half completed poems and our job is to complete the poem. And then he also said that you know life was like poetry in that the the rules and the constraints of the medium is how the art is beautiful. If you could just do whatever you wanted, it would be not as beautiful as the whole, the constraints, the fact that it's not all your control that it's supposed to be in stanzas or short lines or rhymes or whatever it is.

It's actually the things that are not in our control that that channels our creativity and and creates the beauty that makes the poem worth reading. That's so beautiful. And also maybe that life is obscure and so often. I think that sort of makes sense too. And it's not a puzzle. Don't have to solve it all. But you don't have to, I always think, you don't have to solve a poem, like don't be scared of life, but don't be scared of a poem. It doesn't have to completely make sense. And your job isn't to solve it. You can be moved by it, or you can reach your heart, but your intellect doesn't have to understand every word. And maybe

that's actually the same message about how you should approach life. Like don't worry. Well, I think the Buddhists are a bit closer to this where it's like, it's not supposed to make sense. It's supposed to be paradoxical and in fact, wrestling with the paradoxical nature of it is the mental exercise. Yeah, and enjoy the nuance. Enjoy it. And also, I think that a poem acts a bit like a spell, which is maybe why

in-chance children, they're not scared of a spell or something that doesn't wholly make sense, because nursery rhymes and nonsense rhymes are also nonsense. And it can communicate on a level, the first level it communicates on. You don't have to understand. You may be get an essence of it. And we could be well to be reminded by that in life. You don't worry, you don't have to understand everything. You can just let it in charge you, Mr. Fier and that's all right. That was one of the things I was thinking on. I think it's the second day of your poem book.

It was a bold choice. It's like a nonsense poem where you can't pronounce any of the words. You do, this is funny. It's a Scottish poet who writes, is a poem about the Loch Ness monster, and he speaks in Goble-de-Goo. Funnily enough, I was, I had a 12 year old weeded out the other day, who was really delighted by it

and read the whole thing aloud. And it made a bit of sense. It was very funny. And also like the funny idea of this, brilliant professor, that he was saying, well, why would the Loch Messe Monster come out and speak in English? Or any other language we understand?

So I just thought it was very, very funny, but it was quite bold to go with it so early in the talk. Yeah, I remember thinking with the Daily Stoke, it's like, how do you make this thing a habit for people? Because if you don't get locked in, you're going to quit. And I'm sure most people do quit. And so I was like, wow, she's really pulling out all the stuff, the second one, it's filled with words that no one can pronounce.

But I also thought, if you work, because originally, it was very much came out of Millen Children's books. And it was something that you imagine you would share with the family. And it has ended up reaching also to people who read it to their lover, their granny, their mother, their stuff, but I did think it was something that might would particularly grab children,

or the child in us anyway. But yes, I did weirdly, I picked it up the other day and I thought, yeah, go, I thought I put that, so I'm very happy. When you, were you very intentional, excuse me, were you very intentional about the dates up? So when I did Daily Sturco, what I was thinking more is I sort of wrote 366 meditations and then I tried to create some structure after the fact,

but I wasn't thinking like today is January 2nd, what do I want to write? But it seems like you were thinking Martin King Day. I did. Yeah, I did actually give myself a whole, you know, a kind of crazy extra level of the puzzle because I did think, you know, what fits in spring or what fits on Holocaust Memorial Day. And I did want to mark the obvious days

like Valentine's Day or mid-Summer's Day, but I also, and I didn't want to put in, you know, grandparents, secretaries day or whatever, but I did want to put in, you know, grandparents, secretaries day or whatever, but I did want to put in Diwali. Yeah, like I said, Holocaust Memorial Day, various ones, burns night, Australia day, and I did think that would be fun. So, I might sort of thought,

or it might just be interesting to learn something about that date as well, because you might, by the introduction more moving than the poetry of Ethan. But it was fun and I could go down little alleyways if you search, discovering things about history or cultural deep. And then the poem that fit. So actually I did enjoy all of that and for Shakespeare I done quite a lot of work already having done a poem for a very nice dinner for a visit and then for Shakespeare I had slightly different ones so I maybe

would put in more of what happened in his life. Did he marry or his son Hamlet died or Elizabeth the first came to the throne and so I probably put in more two debates along with actually things like putting Shiloh on Holocaust Memorial Day and you know how does it speak for us now. So it gives me something else. It sort of goes to you and maybe it was more appropriate because oh and it's all written about different times, whereas, you know, with the ladies still, they maybe didn't write to fit into that sort of book. That's right.

Well, I think you have the benefit of, you know when most of the things were written or there's much more background about when they happened, which I appreciate because you're like, yeah, this happened here, this is the date. But I think, you know, people I think would probably assume that these books are relatively easy to write. It's like, hey, go find, you know, you're not writing the poems, go find 366 of them. But it really becomes, there's this hilarious bit, I think, Gary Goldman in the comedian,

but he's talking about, in the United States, obviously, 50 states. And he does this bit about how difficult it was to come up with the abbreviations for all the states. So you think it would be easy. You'd start an alphabetical order. You'd go with Alaska, OK, AL, and then you're like, and then Alabama.

You know, like, it actually becomes, there's way more variables that play than you think. And I think with the daily book, it's, you can't repeat yourself. You want a mix of short and long. You want it to be rooted in what's happening in the world. You can't cite too many from the same authors. It actually becomes so,

it's almost like a computer algorithm. Like there's all these different things that you have to match and then you move one of them and it screws the whole thing up. It's really a difficult puzzle. I really enjoyed it there. And I wanted diversity and I wanted more women traditionally up here. Like if you pick up the match, you can go from your grandparents bookshelf.

It would be nearly all dead white men. Women were writing poems that they were largely ignored or sideline by various things in history. And so that was fun. It was like, oh my fault, all of these poets. And so that was sort of thrilling to be able to include poets who would talk to, you know, all of us. So actually I did enjoy the puzzle. I was kind of grateful for the challenge. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show.

Stay tuned. Is this thing all? Check one, two, one, two. Hey y'all! I'm Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, a singer, an entrepreneur, and a Virgo, just the name of you. Now, I've held so many occupations over the years

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them the questions that have been burning in my mind. What will former child stars be if they weren't actors? What happened to sitcoms? It's only fans, only bad. I want to know. So I asked my mom about it. These are the questions that keep me up at night. But I'm taking these questions out of my head and I'm bringing them to you.

Because on Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, no topic is off limits. Follow Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, whatever you get your podcast. Hey, prime members, you can listen early and add free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon music app today. No, I totally agree. And I think that actually goes to the Client These concept, which is the constraints add difficulty, right?

Like the decision, okay, I wanna have diversity, the decision I want some to be fun and some to be serious. And I want them to be relevant. And I want them not to be all from, you know, Elizabeth and England and so on and so forth. This is creating all sorts of difficulty because now it eliminates things and it makes it infinitely more complex. But that's anything this is a good metaphor for life. The challenge of the puzzle is why the puzzle is fun and solving for it is the creative part of the experience. Yes, and actually interestingly, so there's different types of poems, so a sonnet, for example, you have to fit in those constraints of 14 lines and excileables per line and a high-cue.

fit in those constraints of 14 lines and exci-l-able per line and a high-cue. So it may look incredibly simple, but 17 syllables is a challenge. And so you work within those constraints to make something perfect and beautiful. And so actually, you know, you can narrow it down a poem itself as, you know, is constrained. Yes. And poets enjoy that challenge, but actually to write within those rules is a talent, but out of that something beautiful comes. Hooray. No, and I think people put, oh, that poem is, you know, ten lines that must have been easy to do. It's actually the constraints that make it extraordinarily difficult. And I think it's also the constraints that the writer is putting upon themselves, right? You know, Twain has that famous line about the difference between lightning and lightning bug is, you know, the difference between the right word and the wrong word. These people, and I'm sure you came to understand it as you poured over these poems, they sweated over every single word. And so, yeah, this might be a 130 word poem,

but it could have taken six months to write. Yes. Code which famously said that prose is the best words, but poetry is the best words in the best order. Ooh, I love that. But yeah, I might as well probably enjoy the difficulty too. that. But yeah, I imagine they probably enjoy it to be difficult to. You have to, I mean, writing is painful, but you become almost addicted to the pain of it and you come to love it.

If you didn't, you would never do it. Yeah, I always think it's a bit like a sit-drawn press A, you know, the sort of fresh, too squeeze lemon juice, the sort of pain and pleasure. the first two squeeze lemon juice, the third pain of pleasure. Well, I wanted it. So, so I, I love all different sorts of poems, but the poems that tend to strike me the most, and you have a lot of them in the book, is that sort of Victorian England era of poems. And I don't know why I like them the most, you know, whether you're talking about a sort of a kippling or, you know, there's something about the poems where, like I think my favorite poem, and I guess he's Victorian but not English, I love a psalm of life.

I think it's, to me, just the sort of the ultimate poem, the word's worth poem, or is it Longfellow? Anyways, what I love about the poem is that he's actually giving you advice. And I think there's a beauty to poetry in general, but what I love about that Victorian era of poetry is that they were really using the medium, I feel like to say something.

The poems have a sort of a moral urgency. No, you're right. There was, it was called, Didadic poetry, which was an instructive. You've got famously, if, by Roger Kippling, no treat, and just ask just the same and everything, which kind of really stands up. And then people, also like,

interestingly started to sort of make parodies of it. So there was someone called Isaac Watt, who wrote, how Duff the little, you know, busy bee, and then Lewis Carroll sort of skewers it and threw Alison Wanderland with, how Duff the little crocodile. Like most of the poems that Alison Wanderland are parodies of more famous poems.

So they poems were, you know, for a while really as I got to, it was telling children how to behave, telling all of us how to behave, and it's full of, I'm not a really good wisdom. And then I think the parodies came along and that probably slightly undid that, that style of poetry. But still, I think if you think of Diciderata and, you know, the still or the profit by Gibram, you know, all of those, you know, great words full of advice are amazing and in poetry form, you know, there may be just easier to remember, you know, there's a rhythm, there's something soothing and comforting in it. So, yeah, I think, I think there's a lot, you know, still, yeah, that still sort of moved us today.

I loved the Victorian poet, English poet, Christina Rosetti when I was growing up. And actually she talked a lot about death. But I think I was particularly macabre, but I think it answered maybe lots of questions that I had because she spoke of death and remembering people and lots of worry and move on in a really, really beautiful way like again, oh, it's managed to express what most of us find inexpressible.

And so I think we turn to help us, but maybe the ones that you were saying, like they're instructive or the ones that are incredibly beautiful on a subject like level death, that most of us find really hard to put into words. So we turn to the great poet because they've expressed something really beautifully. So we turn to them and the big things in life, like a wedding or a funeral. But I was, you could turn to them every day. If there was, if there was a poem you'd recommend from her, where would you start? I would start with remember me. Remember it's called actually's sort of about remembering when

how did you spell her name Christina Rosetti aro double s e double t i there's quite a few in my book and she she started writing when she was really young and and actually she had you, she got great fame. Even though she was a woman, so it... But then you have Emily Dickinson, too, you know, so some did really well, you know. Aside from that set, although Emily Dickinson didn't hardly publish anything during her lifetime. And then it was her sister who found these 2000 hidden poems

in her room, and then helped me in her then I think about those instructive poems. It's partly in a Psalm of life. He says, life is real. Life is earnest. There's kind of an earnestness to those Victorian poets. And it's probably what the parodies are mocking. You know, to really say like, hey, this is what I think is important in life

as opposed to just, I don't want to say hiding behind sort of, you know, pain or love or any of the sweeter topics to these poets really, even in Invictus, you know, it's just sort of like life is hard, here's how to get through it. There's a, there's an earnestness and an accessibility to that poetry that really strikes me. Yes, yeah, I agree. And it does have good advice. And I think those poems, if you learn them by heart, you can always draw on one of those

lines in times of need. You know, out they pop, they're kind of comfortable. Or help, or help console a friend with a good bit of advice. But yes, I think the other thing is that they are probably more accessible than some of the other poems, which is why they're, you know, maybe that's why they're so popular, or powerful, or in victors that was famously, that Anelsa Mandela turned to when he was in prison, you know, that's the film was named, and very powerful for him. And they're really powerful. Again, I suppose, because they're the best words and the best word.

Well, my totally, and my son, this is how we ended up getting into your book as we started doing poems, and we would read them, and I would notice that I'd read them many times, he would start to be able to fill the lines just like a children's book. And so also he wanted to get into watching them.

So it's cool as you can go on YouTube and they have really good voiceover actors read a lot of these poems. Anthony Hopkins has done a number of them, which are always beautiful. And so there's something to where he obviously has no idea what Kipling is talking about in if yet. But I the ideas and I think this is the role that those poems played in public life for many, many years

is that they would almost kind of become part of the cultural consciousness or the muscle memory. And maybe you heard them when you were young, and only when you were old and actually going through something, you know, meat, triumph, and disaster, all the same, you hear that 50 times, you know, in grade school, and then you really get your ass kicked in life, and the meaning of that sort of filters back to you, and it hits you for the first time. Yeah, it's so true. I think T.S. Eliot said famously,

a great poetry communicates before it's understood. So your thumb is finding it's communicating to him. And that's so powerful and brilliant. And yeah, I think you go back to a poem later in life and you do read it in a completely new light. Oh, I've got it. I had no idea. There's this really famous poem by English, she's called Stevie Smith and not waving but drowning. And I loved it when I was young, but I had no idea it was sort of metaphorical. You know, she was struggling. You know, she wasn't waving. She was struggling, you know, she wasn't waving. She was grounding. I love the poem. Imagine her, you know, Alcobstee. But it didn't matter,

because it sort of works on another level. But you're so right about people, yeah, YouTube is incredible fun. There's an English poet called Michael Rosen, whose YouTube poem is for much younger children, absolutely brilliant. And, and in fact, on my second anthology, a poem for every day of the year, a Helen and Bonham Carter reads them on the audiobook with Simon Russell Beale as one of our greatest

cast collectives. They are so much fun, they're readings. They just completely bring them alive. And YouTube, like Billy Collins, who's a great American poet. And actually, Richard Barton, you can find Reading Thumb, who was again, you know, classically trained, and there's incredible Welsh voice. So yeah, YouTube's a really good font. But I think for, well, for all of us of any age, but yeah, from children, right up to, old.

It's funny that you bring up Helen Bottom-carrer because we're watching the crown, which is obviously an incredible show. And it's interesting. Yeah, then it's not quite Victorian England, but even in the 1950s England, the role of poetry in these people's lives. There's famously a scene where the word mountain reads the road to Mandela. He's giving a speech to a old bunch of veterans and he recites from memory the road to Mandelae by Kipling. Is it a British thing that poetry just plays such a greater

role in life or is it a 19th century, you know, early 20th century thing? Where did the familiarity with poetry go? Well, that's a really good question. So in, in more like Mount Battern's Day, it was definitely part of the school curriculum that you learned poetry by heart. It then went out of fashion, and it's not really taught so much anymore over here. And actually in America you buy more poetry, you read more poetry. But in the period that the crowns portraying that you're watching now with the Helen Abondale goddesses. And in fact, she gets to do a really funny numeric when she goes in the episode when she goes to Washington DC.

And she's a friend, she's read lots of poems from Liverpool Park, and she was like messaging goes, you know, what do you think of this word? What do you think of this word? And numerics are famously really baudy and rude. And so she really had fun doing that. I think, so, you know, Dan, you came out of school in those days and you had a golden store, it's actually as words with Father Calls, that golden store of books inside your head. It's just come back a bit more here that they've made it between five and eleven, you have to

speak poetry aloud, but no, mainly it really went out of fashion. And what happens is that teachers aren't taught how to teach it, so they're scared of it and librarians are a bit scared of it. And I'm not all, but since it's stopped being taught in schools and then it stops being taught at teacher training schools, it just diminishes because people can be scared of poetry. And a big thing of what I try to do is, with these books, it's just make it really accessible. You know, there's a little intro and, and his a burp or you can listen to

Alan the one who can't bring in them aloud and, and so actually just don't be scared of it. But no, it has, you know, it's really, really lessened, you know, the days of a mountain baton, you know, and although politicians have always, you know, sort of got poems into their speeches, so famously. But you, you know, you're coming, you know, in orgration. There's always a poet that reads the journal. That's so cool. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show.

Stay tuned. Now, it's such a beautiful scene. He recites it and the whole audience stands and they recite it for memory. And there's something special when, again, when the words sort of get ingrained in the consciousness and I, it's funny that you mentioned poetry being more popular in the US. I've actually found a version of the opposite being true in that my my my stoic books are popular here in the US, but but as my publisher in the UK profile, the books have have way they haven't

outsold what they've sold in the US, but but for a country with many fewer people, they've sold proportionally much better in the UK. I think really? I think there's just a natural stoicism to sort of the British ethos that I've always felt a kinship towards. So it doesn't surprise me that poetry or that the Stoics would be popular in England. Yeah, we're quite stoical. That's what it is.

Yeah. Oh, I'm really pleased that's doing well. I think it's in the bestseller charts, no? Yeah, yeah, it hit the Sunday Times. Yeah, that's a really good idea. Yeah, Sunday Times list this week, having been out for five years, which is a total surprise and pretty cool. Yeah, that's really cool.

I think it helps. And I think in the pandemic, like what a brilliant thing to turn to. I found two with poetry and great writing. One of my favorite books, you might like it, it's called Lincoln, a biography of a writer. And so it's basically it looks at Lincoln not as a president, but as a writer, because he wrote all his speeches. He wasn't particularly a particularly great speaker who's just a great writer. And they sort of break down different sort of Lincoln speeches as almost as if they were poems. Like they render the Gettysburg address for instance as a poem. And that's one of the ones we watch as a family. Like that you're your point about sort of poetry communicating. There's this one YouTube video my son's probably seen it like 50 times

of the Gettysburg address where, you know, it's showing images on the screen and you know, he says, and we take from this an increased devotion. And so as it's showing that for whatever reason, it shows a cemetery on the screen. And it shows, you know, a civil war cemetery with a stone cross. And so we were in

Louisiana a few months ago and I was taking him for a walk and we walked through a cemetery. And he goes, Dad, Dad, it's an increased devotion. I said, what? I said, what? Like, I couldn't understand what he meant. And then I realized that he had connected the word increased devotion with cross and that had meant something to him. And so I think the great texts and the great writing communicated at almost a subliminal level to us. Yeah, and actually people do turn to their religious texts so much less than they did. And I think that maybe that what a poem or your, you know, meditations can offer are these beautiful words that maybe we're reading less by attending church

of synagogue or mosque, you know, less. And, and, and this is a sort of a, you know, a kind of a replacement. That just what you do want to see great words. Yes, yeah, I was in Budapest, this is before the pandemic, and I walked through this church. It's the church where they have some relic or something, and I was walking through, and then they said they had a sort of a Latin concert that night. And I didn't have anything to do when I went back. And I watched, it was like a two hour Latin concert, if priests and stuff.

So obviously I had zero understanding of what was happening. But I at some other level knew exactly what was happening. Because I think you're in a building designed for a certain kind of acoustic. They're expressing some sort of religious truth. It's like, even if you don't understand what's happening in a great work of art, somehow you understand what's happening. Yeah, because I think there's music in the words. Yes.

And, you know, in a poem, the music's in the words. You know, where it's a lyric to a song, there's the words in the music's in the words. You know, whereas a lyric for a song, they're the words, and then the music, but it a great poem, the music is in the words. And so that can move you, even if you don't understand it, whether you don't understand the English, or you don't understand it in another language. And I think you have in the book,

don't you have some poems that are not actually poems? Like don't you have a Martin Luther King speech? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I managed to get the Martin Luther King speech, the Gettysburg address, either in one or other of the books. I got some lyrics in, I got in a Beatles song and a Bob Dylan. I did think, oh, there's all sorts of poetry. Nursery rhyme.

There's, you know, there's, I sort of just argued like you were saying about the Gettysburg address or Martin Luther King, there's poetry in those words, you know, the way we've expressed some together. And so I was really pleased to get permission to put those in. There was enough room with 365, the variety. Have you seen the Ken Burns documentary, The Address? No. It's incredible.

I don't know if you have Ken Burns over there, but Address? Yeah. It's incredible. I don't know if you have Ken Burns over there, but he's sort of our great documentarian. He did this documentary a few years ago about this boys school in upstate New York or something like that. It's a school for troubled boys who have ADHD or behavioral issues or they're just not working in regular schools. And so these are kids of all different levels, but they're one assignment,

they're big assignment every year, and you get like a medal if you do it, is you have to memorize and perform the Gettysburg address for an assembly of the parents. And so you'll cry like a thousand times watching it because you watch kids with speech impediments and you watch kids with speech impediments and you watch kids with the tension deficit disorder and you watch kids, you know, disabled kids. You watch these kids

struggle over these words, but you also watch them sort of get changed. I mean, because it's perhaps, I think, one of the greatest accomplishments in all of literature that he managed to express in such a short amount of time, in such poetical language, such a timeless truth that anyone and everyone can understand, including a kid and can memorize and give as an address. It's an incredible documentary. So that's so interesting. I think I go into some schools of judge poetry, competitions and stuff. And honestly, it's as if the children have grown three inches in confidence, you know,

standing up and reciting a poem, don't have to be academic. It's doable. Children don't find it that difficult. And it's much easier, of course, like you asked any actor, it's much easier to learn lines that are well written. So I think it's a brilliant thing to be, you know, that they're doing in that school, you talk about, or like in and judge something that often the person who gets the commendation often the teachers after that, oh, I'm so pleased. The she or he never normally wins anything. What I love about the Gettysburg address too is the irony of he says like no one will remember

what we said here. And of course, everyone remembers what we said here. Yeah, yeah, I think I've got a solid to be like that. Everyone remembers what we said. Yeah, that's the first thought that's a bit like that. And I, yeah, they will remember that. And I think, I think somebody said that about Churchill and his Nobel Prize where it's like words aren't supposed to be as important as deeds. And this is a really big stoic theme.

They go, you know, sort of words, or they go, deeds, not words. And yet in Churchill, it was the words that inspired the deeds. And I think in Lincoln and the Gettysburg address, it's the reason we remember the words, is they so perfectly capture the deeds to which we want people to aspire. And I think great art does that.

Yeah, it does inspire, move us. Yeah, and it's very powerful. Do you, the other thing, you know, about the familiarity of poets, and you see this in, in the Stoics, often they're, they're quoting playwrights more than poets, but, you know, in, in meditations, Marcus is clearly quoting all these different poets and playwrights from memory, you know, and, and what's, what I love about the quotations, maybe you're reading Montenna or you're reading Seneca, or whomever, they'll quote a line from Virgil in Latin. And it's never, and Churchill will do this, will quote some French poet in French. And the assumption, I guess it says something about their elitism, but also the sort of

the audience they thought they were talking to, they'll cite these poetic lines in the original language without attribution, assuming that you will of course be able to read French or Latin, and that you'll recognize that this is obviously a quote from Virgil. Yeah, but maybe people did. No, I think of course they did. I'm just saying it's incredible. Yeah, that's incredible. Yeah. And so sometimes yeah, you'll hear from like all here from people, how do I introduce my children to the still ex like they're not old enough and you're like, well, how old's your son and they'll be like, he's 14. And it's like 500 years ago, he would have not only read all the stokes,

he would have read them in Greek and Latin and had large chunks of the memorized. There were, we sort of infantilized kids. And when you read these ancient poets and Victorian poets, you're like, oh, no, the bar was much higher before. And Shakespeare would have been taught all of that. So, you know, we know that he went to Grammar School in Stratford, although there are no records, but we assume he went to this Grammar School in Stratford, on A-Fan because of the job that his father did. And we know

that what they taught in Grammar schools was nearly wholly the classics. So he would have learnt, you know, by heart, you would have performed them to claim them, learnt them, rhetoric, everything. And you can see it in so many of his plays. You know, he's drawing on the stories of Albert and, you know, he's endlessly quoted, and it was sort of there.

And so, you know, if it was good enough for him. Yeah, I mean, Shakespeare is basically all his best plays in my opinion are all ripped straight from the pages of Plutarch. Yeah, nothing is original with him. There's one play, the Mary Wife of Windsor, that no one's worked out what the source was, but all his plays. So they're either from Plutarch or the Remy and Juliet's from a famous Italian poem,

or there's not original sources. And his genius was that he could put the words in the right order. and Juliet's from a famous Italian poem. There's not original sources. And his genius was that he could put the words in the right order. Yeah, just better. And then you look back to even like somebody original, please start and then you look at what he did with it. And you know, you're like, oh, you're really magical. Oh, no, of course I do.

I in my most recent book, Lives of the Stokes, I do sort of the Plutarch rendering of the, the sort of Porsche and Brutus arguing over, you know, the scene where she stabs herself in the leg to prove her worth to Brutus. And then I do the Shakespeare version. And you're just like, oh man, you were definitely a thief, but you were so good that you surpassed the person

you stole from. He really does every time, doesn't he? Yeah. Yeah. But that's a skill. I mean, and I think this is why your book is so great. I think people are often intimidated by art or creative projects because they think

they're not, you know, let's say an artistic genius, like they're not able to come up with something new, but even what you did, to take 366 unrelated poems and put them in order and put them in a package and even come up with a title like a poem for every night of the year, that cumitively becomes a new thing and becomes its own work that is able to reach hundreds of thousands of people and introduce people to something that quite frankly, they were probably not reading all 366 of these poems on their own. I think people weren't reading poetry at all.

It was definitely a way of making more accessible. And it was sort of just something I really liked to do when I was young. I really liked reading poems. And so I just thought, oh, if I could just, you know, get some more people reading poems, I'd be happy. And I think, and I think having an introduction to each one was also demystifying. Of course. And it was sort of way in for the kind of, yeah, the nervous adult or the curious child. And I just wanted to make it more accessible. But the internet really helps as well with poetry,

because it's massively shared online, especially actually in trouble times, you know, after 9-11 or during the pandemic, so many poems being shared. I think it's a short thing. You can share with your mother, your know, after 9-11 or during the pandemic, so many poems being shared. I think it's a short thing. You can share with your mother, your granny, your best friend, your WhatsApp group, but it really takes off in times of need. I suppose because it's just, you know, the art of reading a poem is contemplative, it is consoling in itself. Yeah, and I've gotten that sort of on the daily stove, people go, oh, he's just popularizing

or the originals are better or whatever. And I sort of agree the originals are better. But it's actually really hard to take something that people are intimidated by and to make it accessible. And if the originals were, so there's one of the, a student of Epictetus, one of the Stokes was, he heard some students bragging about how they'd read Cricipus, another early Stoke, and they were sort of proud that they'd managed to make it all the way through. If you sort of the David Foster Wallace of the Stoics,

it's very dense, very verbose. And Epic Titus says, if Crasipus had been a better writer, you'd have less to be proud of, meaning that if he was less obscure, anyone could have read it. And the truth is these these great poets and these great writers, they are super talented, but there is something about them

that is inaccessible and and even what you do to to to to pick the right one or to pick the right section from the right play of Shakespeare and to introduce it, this is an artistic feat that I think has a lot of value and I'm very grateful that you did it. But also it's a way in, isn't it? So I could read your book, The Daily Stoic. And I'm sure you'd be only too pleased if I then went off and bought all the works in the original. And I could. You go around a museum, like to say

the amazing art institute in Chicago, which takes you through so many different periods and artists, but you might, during that exhibition, completely falling up with money, and then go to the exhibition on just money. And I put a thing, if someone reads my book and falls in love with Emily Dickinson and then goes out and buys her collected poems, that's wonderful. That's the idea, it's a sort of way in, a way in, discovering something and you might want to take it deeper and then

her way. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. Right. Or if they actually go see a Shakespeare play now because they get it and get what's that. Oh, this isn't just weird, obscure, you know, sort of rhyming. this is an incredible story that he's telling or that these are real fascinating characters and I'm going to go try to I'm going to go try to make it through a Shakespeare play. Yeah or I'm going to steal that sonnet

on Valentine's Day. I'm going to go to my mom here. post it on Instagram. Yeah, definitely. You're very welcome. Well, you're a book like nearly every other light I want to be. Text bigger friends or post your other Instagram. Well, thank you. I had two poems I wanted to talk to you about. I don't think it's in the book, but have you read Maggie Smith's poem, Good Bones? Well, I love Good Bones. And that is a poem that has really, really sort of taken off and gets shared and troubled times. Yeah, it's such a good poem. And funny. Yes, yes, it's so good and so

accessible and I just I love it so much. And although a good one where it doesn't seem to really be following any rules. No, she's really good. Does have a square work there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, she's so, so good. I love that one. And then the title of it is what is it?

Don't go quietly into that into that good night. The Dylan Thomas poem is another one that's sort of very viral on YouTube, but it's just an incredible work of all. Yeah, yeah, I do have that in the book. Rage, rage against the dying of the lights that people think was written when it's far the dark, but actually a father hadn't tried yet. It's a really, really good book. There must be Richard Burst in reading that on YouTube.

There is and there's an Anthony Hopkins reading that's quite good. And then of course, there's, what's his name? Is it Michael? Michael Cede? Michael Cede, the British actor? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. These are all the Welsh actors. The Richard Barclay, the memory-hand Hopkins,

and then Michael Cede, they're all brilliant, brilliant. Because it's in the movie interstellar is sort of very beautifully done. And Dylan Tom was actually, boy, he famously sort of went to New York and you know, he'd wild New York. And then Drake himself to death there. I'm trying to tell you, poets do not tend to have happy endings. They've really turned into that. have happy endings. They've really done that. I don't know, maybe just, you know, insular, troubled, they nearly all, maybe all very, very clever, very, I don't know, I'm not sure there's a link, but I could barely think of a poet who has reached all day. Shakespeare didn't do badly. I mean, he got to do, which was not actually very old

for his time. Like, if you weren't killed off by being an infant or in a war, or the plague. Yeah, or the plague, of course, which was mainly happened, he was quite young. Oh, and again, no, that's true, and again, so he didn't get the plague, not as an infant, or not in a war. He got to 52, but as far as the 70s and his wife lives, you know, famously longer than him. But, and we don't know how he died, but yeah, that's true. But in the, in the plague, he writes a poem, he writes this incredibly successful poem called Venus and his Onus, which is not that well known today, but it was his most successful thing he wrote in his lifetime in terms of sales. We know that it had a gazillion reprints and only one copy remains because it was so sexy, it was basically the Bridgeton

of Shakespeare's era because the one copy that's left, which is in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, is really, really well-thumb. So we think that this poem would have just been read and re-read and re-read, because it's so sexy that it just didn't survive. The copy is didn't survive. And he wrote one of his one or two of his best plays during a pandemic as well, right, or during a plague. Yeah, yeah, I'd loads of them. Yeah, there wouldn't have been Liam Beck, you know, quite a few. That was during another. If more than, ah, some hundred people, you know, died in London that the theatre shut down.

So they shut down a couple of times, you know, during his lifetime. Yeah, and then I think it was in the first, in the first sort of shutdown, who wrote Venus and the Jonas, and then later on. And I suppose you could, you know, people were maybe wanting to buy more, because you couldn't go to the theatre and watch it.

Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Marcus really writes meditations during the Antenine Plague. There is something about using the shutdown for artistic good. Yeah, I found it a very good time to be writing and working, actually. Well, I wanted to talk to you about maybe my favorite

or my second favorite poem, which I was introduced to by an English band. I'm, of course, talking about charge of the light brigade, which Iron Maiden has a famous song about. Why is that poem so damn good? Well, I think what happened was Tennyson read a newspaper report about this sort of disastrous charge and he wrote a poem about it.

And I suppose it was sort of telling a bit of history. So I think it was very popular in it's time because it was very topical and it's incredibly powerful, you know, because these ordinary men were just, you know, sent to their death by this, you know, just terrible leader. So it's sort of like, you know, sort of like comes around. it's really powerful and I often do live events and I was doing one at a festival and then at a reddit and instead I was sort of you know, gingoistic, you know, hooray, soldiers charging way. It's tragic. Yeah, it was really, really, really tragic. And it was a tragic instruction for the cavalry to charge and all get,

you know, and obviously very few come back, you know, into the valley of death and, you know, the 600 to not... But not the 600. But not the 600. So, and also, I suppose it's quite easy to understand, doesn't it? Yeah. And earlier, you know, it's kind of straightforward and it's really powerful.

There's a Cecil Woodhem Smith, the English author, wrote a book called The Reason Why. There's not to reason why there's this book to do and die about the charge. And it's also incredible. Yeah, you realize like the story is not one of heroism. It's of sort of bravery, but a sort of a pointless insane bravery that didn't need to happen at all. And they were told. So, you know, the person in charge, there was a miscommunication in the

chain of command, and the soldiers were just told to go. So there's no choice as a soldier. So I think you should have imagined that could be you, your son, your brother going in. And again, I suppose, in World War One, those poems that have just been so successful because then they were often written by soldier poets like R Rupert Broken, Wolf or Owen, and it was sort of, the ordinary person was sort of sent off to fight and, you know, just right into the eye of the storm. Whether Blackout did it so powerfully at the end of that comedy series, or the poem, that I always found them more powerful than a history,

but it was like, okay, I'm now in your shoes. I think a poem can just make you stand in someone's shoes, and especially with the soldier poets who were there and then reported it in a poem. And I think Tennyson does that in charge of the light brigade. There's a scene in the reason why that isn't in the poem that just like floored me. So, so, you know, the the 600 go out and, you know, 200 come back. And their discipline was so good and their loyalty so unquestioning that they that, you know, first off the surgeon comes or the veterinarian comes out and begins putting down the horses who are wounded. And the soldiers assemble to charge again.

And I was just all like, it was easier for them. Their instinct was to run into the jaws of death again, rather than ask, should we do this? Is this a good idea? Yeah, but I could say even today, in the army, you don't have any choice to you. And I think, you know, the poem and that really short space of time, I just, yeah, just illustrate all of that. Yeah, someone, someone had blundered. Yeah.

There, there's some, there's a quip I have, I'm, I'm, I write a little bit about the poem in the book that I'm writing now. And one of the things I found to be fascinating is, so Tennyson, and I'd be curious, your thoughts, maybe you could tell me this is totally unfair. But so, so Tennyson writes this beautiful poem essentially an ode to the, to the bravery and the courage of these soldiers. And then he signs it as a pseudonym because he doesn't want to be associated with the poem because he thinks it's a pseudonym because he doesn't want to be associated with the poem because he thinks it's too low brow.

I didn't know that. That's interesting. Yeah, he thought it was not. And this is the irony too, is he doesn't realize that he's probably written his best work. You know, the greatest poem. And he thinks it's like sort of it's like newspaper trash. That's funny. Probably is his best food poem. I think so. Yeah, I think it probably is.

I just I love that one. And also another great YouTube video because they're able, they've made so many movies about it, they can actually illustrate, you know, what's happening. So it's got more action than a lot of the other problems. I'm a doubt of copyright. Yes, also true. I'm a copyright bank. Yeah. Anyone can recite that on YouTube without getting into trouble.

Unlike the Dylan Thomas, he's very much still in copyright. Well, and so are the King's speeches. That's the other tricky part. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I was thrilled when we got permission to put that in. Yeah, you have to, you know, pay the estate fair enough, you know, absolutely. But in England, if an author has been dead over 70 years, that works in the public domain. That just happened. The great Gatsby just went into the public domain here in the United States. Oh, okay.

The wealthy, uh, there'll be many copies of that coming out next year. Yes, well, they were, they were joking that it's going to collectively save the Department of Education hundreds of millions of dollars because they no longer have to buy copies of the great Gatsby for their students. I hope what they can, it's just be online. Yeah, or it just, yeah, they can, yeah, it'll just be online or they can get, the editions will be cheaper now that they don't have to pay royalty. Yeah. But have you heard the Iron Maiden song inspired by, by, by, by charge of the Lypergain? Oh, I have.

Funnily enough, I've got like a whole list of poems to, you know, like, you know, that singers have made songs about, but I haven't listened to that. Yes, I iron maiden is probably single-handedly introduced a lot of angry young white boys to poetry. Perhaps more than any other thing, they have a poem or they have a song called The The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. They have a song called The trooper about about the charge of the light brigade. And they even like when they, it's one of the most incredible experiences in my life, they start the song. They, they, they sort of, they begin with a stanza from the charge of the light brigade. And you watch, you know, 50,000 people recite this poem together.

It's a, it's a surreal experience. Oh, funny. Thank you, I think you would like it. But yeah, but to me, that's also continuing the cycle and the way that Shakespeare is drawing on poems and then, you know, in turn, you know, rock bands and movies and art is now being reinspired by the poems. Yeah, always.

Yeah. Like endless Hollywood movies have been based on Shakespeare's plays from, you know, The Lion King using Kamlert or... And then Nomeo and Juviets, you know, you name it. And Storm Z in Big Hit from a year or so ago, and I have you as the head that wears the crown as a line taken from the Shakespeare's Henry's. Yeah, I think it's a good thing. And again,

I just Shakespeare, we have no evidence that it was an embarrassing thing that Shakespeare was plagiarizing. These works, it was completely expected. It was normal. It wasn't criticized. It's just quite interesting. No, and it's actually, I think, the secret power of it. And I think my books have tapped into this in yours too. When your thing resonates harder because there's kind of an institutional DNA memory of the idea. So you're able to, it's like the show law and order in the United States, you know, the beginning of it always goes, you know, ripped from the headlines. And because you know that this is based on a real case, which you have some vague familiarity on, you really get much more engaged in the material because

you, it's almost as if you've seen it before. I think there's something in that in Shakespeare, some of these poems where you're like, oh, I know where this story goes, because it's based on a trope or something. And so you really do love the language of it, because that's the creative act, is the language. Yeah, especially with poetry, how well expressed. What of Alexander Pope said?

What of the thought about their so well expressed? And I think this is why your books are powerful and why people have liked the Daily Stoke and others is that you read it every year. And so you have read it all before, but the Stoke's talk about how we never step in the same river twice. So the third time you read the charge of the light brigade on, you know, November 27th or wherever it is in the book, you're now thinking, you now, obviously know what's happening,

but you're, you've evolved even though the materials stayed the same, and you remember how you felt about it. The first time you have it, it's just a different experience each time you reread something. Yeah, that's true. You could have made take on a deeper level or another level and that feels good. You can, Oh, I understand it on another level. I too, I'm gonna grow three inches now.

I love it. No, this was so good. I'm so glad we talked. Thank you and I'm gonna be making my way through all your books. Thank you so much for inviting me. Thanks for listening to the Daily Stove Podcast. And if you didn't know, I also have another podcast and Daily email. Every day I write something at dailydad.com, which gets delivered to thousands of people all over the world. I record the meditations just like this one on the podcast for free. So if you're a parent, if you know a parent, if you're an expecting parent, I think you'd really like it. It's called Daily Dad, but has nothing to do with gender. I'm a dad. That's why it's called that. We'd love to have you over at dailydad.com. And of course, subscribe to the Daily Dad podcast.

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