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Cloud Poetry

283 episodes - English - Latest episode: 4 days ago - ★★★★ - 5 ratings

Who can speak shapes?
Who can hear colors?

I speak the Tongues of the Ancients
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Episodes

Selected Poems of Edith Wharton

December 08, 2021 02:26 - 20 minutes - 18.8 MB

Selected poems of Edith Wharton, the first female writer to win the Pulitzer Prize.

The Widow Ching - Pirate

December 08, 2021 02:26 - 28 minutes - 26.1 MB

Short stories from Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Widow Ching - Pirate”

Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil), Charles Baudelaire

December 08, 2021 02:26 - 8 minutes - 8 MB

Dealing with themes of decadence and eroticism, Les fleurs du mal, Charles Baudelaire’s volume of poems first published in 1857, was enormously influential in the symbolist and modernist literature movements. Read in French and English.

Yoshida Kenkō’s Essays in Idleness

December 08, 2021 02:25 - 38 minutes - 35.2 MB

Kenkō was born in 1283 to a Kyoto family of hereditary Shinto priests. His times demanded adaptability to an often inconsistent and multi-layered world, and he was a man well suited to his times.

Steven Millhauser short stories

December 08, 2021 02:25 - 44 minutes - 40.8 MB

Short stories from We Others

Louis Aragon

December 08, 2021 02:25 - 8 minutes - 8.19 MB

A selection of poems by the French poet Louis Aragon: Avec André Breton, Paul Éluard, Philippe Soupault, il fut l’un des animateurs du dadaïsme parisien et du surréalisme.

Deux Poèmes, Op. 34 (1898)

December 08, 2021 02:25 - 2 minutes - 2.6 MB

La chanson bien douce Paul Verlaine Écoutez la chanson bien douce Qui ne pleure que pour vous plaire. Elle est discrète, elle est légère: Un frisson d’eau sur de la mousse. La voix vous fut connue (et chère?), Mais à présent elle est voilée Comme une veuve désolée, Pourtant comme elle encore fière, Et dans les longs plis de son voile Qui palpite aux brises d'automne, Cache et montre au cœur qui s'étonne La vérité comme une étoile. Elle dit, la voix reconnue, Que la bonté c'est notre vie, Qu...

Curzio Malaparte

December 08, 2021 02:25 - 19 minutes - 18.1 MB

Xi’an of Eight Rivers. China is made of earth, of sun-dried mud. In this part of China everything is made from the earth: the houses, the walls around cities, and villages, the tombs scattered over the countryside. Even the people. There are hills below that appear to be piles of mud set out to dry in the sun, naked, without a single tree or bush. They crowd around the landscape like the coils of bulging intestines tossed on the ground outside butchers'...

Eye Level: Jenny Xie poems

December 08, 2021 02:24 - 43 minutes - 40.2 MB

“Funny, the way we come to understand a place by wanting to escape it”

Prayers of the Rosary

December 08, 2021 02:24 - 8 minutes - 7.54 MB

Latin creates a sense of sacred space and time to help focus on the sense of God’s otherness.

Jacob Boehme’s Signatura Rerum

December 08, 2021 02:24 - 39 minutes - 35.9 MB

“The Signature of All Things” by Jacob Böhme, who suggests that God marked objects with a sign, a “signature” for their purpose: the concept that every object in the real world has some hidden meaning, and particularly how these signatures interact.

Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)

December 08, 2021 02:24 - 36 minutes - 33.7 MB

A first century BC didactic poem by Lucretius (99-55 BC) explaining Epicurean philosophy to a Roman audience. Lucretius explores the principles of atomism; the nature of the mind and soul; explanations of sensation and thought; the development of the world and its phenomena; and explains a variety of celestial and terrestrial phenomena. The universe described in the poem operates according to these physical principles, guided by fortuna ("chance"), and not the divine intervention of the tradi...

Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking

December 08, 2021 02:24 - 13 minutes - 12.3 MB

Excerpts from Rebecca Solnit’s “Wanderlust: A history of walking”, 2000

Sacred Text Excerpts

December 08, 2021 02:23 - 1 hour - 73.1 MB

Biblical, ancient, historical sacred texts from dead and living civilizations

The Drowned World

December 08, 2021 02:23 - 30 minutes - 28.3 MB

JG Ballard’s dystopian novel set in a waterlogged London

A cup of sake beneath the cherry trees

December 08, 2021 02:23 - 19 minutes - 17.4 MB

Excerpts from medieval Japanese author and Buddhist monk Yoshida Kenkō’s (1283-1352) Essays on Idleness, or Tsurezuregusa.

Be drunk!

December 08, 2021 02:23 - 6 minutes - 5.78 MB

Baudelaire’s lovely poem encouraging drunkenness

Excerpts from How to Disappear

December 08, 2021 02:23 - 59 minutes - 54.7 MB

Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency by Akiko Busch

The Art of the Stage Set, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres, Gernot Böhme

December 08, 2021 02:22 - 31 minutes - 28.6 MB

Atmosphere. A familiar yet extremely vague phenomenon The term atmosphere has its origin in the meteorological field and refers to the earth's envelope of air which carries the weather. It is only since the 18th century that it has been used metaphorically, for moods which are "in the air", for the emotional tinge of a space. Today this expression is commonly used in all European languages; it no longer seems artificial and is hardly even regarded as a metaphor. One speaks of the atmosphere o...

Fernando Pessoa Poems

December 08, 2021 02:22 - 38 minutes - 34.9 MB

If ever there was a writer in flight from his name, it was Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa is the Portuguese word for “person,” and there is nothing he less wanted to be. Again and again, in both poetry and prose, Pessoa denied that he existed as any kind of distinctive individual. “I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist,” he writes in one poem. “I’m the gap between what I’d like to be and what others have made of me. . . . That’s me. Period.” ... “Through these deliberately unconnected impressi...

Jorge Luis Borges Short Stories

December 08, 2021 02:21 - 57 minutes - 52.7 MB

The Aleph and Other Stories

Book of Psalms

December 08, 2021 02:21 - 1 hour - 82.2 MB

The Book of Psalms, commonly referred to simply as Psalms, the Psalter or "the Psalms", is the first book of the Ketuvim ("Writings"), the third section of the Hebrew Bible, and thus a book of the Christian Old Testament. The title is derived from the Greek translation, ψαλμοί, psalmoi, meaning "instrumental music" and, by extension, "the words accompanying the music".[2] The book is an anthology of individual psalms, with 150 in the Jewish and Western Christian tradition and more in the East...

Seneca

December 08, 2021 02:21 - 1 hour - 74.5 MB

'We wear the helmet when our locks are grey.' We are they who are so far from indulging in any leisure until we die, that if circumstances permit it, we do not allow ourselves to be at leisure even when we are dying.

Confucius The Analects

December 08, 2021 02:20 - 14 minutes - 13.2 MB

A collection of Confucius’ (551-479 BC) sayings expressing a moral code by which he believed everyone should live and upon which the official government examinations were based. In order to meet his moral responsibility, he believed, a man must think for himself.

Poems of Li Po in English

December 08, 2021 02:20 - 28 minutes - 25.9 MB

Li Po (Chinese, 701-762 AD) wrote dream poems depicting spiritual journeys, sometimes making his countrymen forget their problems in unthinking garity, and for such joyful escapism was criticized by his peers and later, Communists. He was explicitly anti-Confucian in his thought and behavior, expressing his admiration for the man of impulse over moral and intellectual qualities (such as patient literary scholarship) most admired in the Confucian ttradition. In his youth, he lived for a time a...

Erotica Romana By Johann Wolfgang Goethe

December 08, 2021 02:20 - 58 minutes - 53.9 MB

The Roman Elegies (originally published under the title Erotica Romana in Germany, later Römische Elegien) is a cycle of twenty-four poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. They reflect Goethe's Italian Journey from 1786 to 1788 and celebrate the sensuality and vigour of Italian and Classical culture. Written mainly after his return to Weimar, they contain poems on many sexual themes.

Four poems on Time

December 08, 2021 02:20 - 13 minutes - 12.6 MB

Litany in Time of Plague, When I consider how my light is spent, The Sick Rose, A Birthday

Three poems by Langston Hughes

December 08, 2021 02:20 - 6 minutes - 5.74 MB

Let America be America again, Dreams, Dream Deferred

Five short Chinese poems

December 08, 2021 02:19 - 3 minutes - 3.12 MB

1. 永鹅 Ode to the Goose by 骆宾王 Luo Bing Wang (640-684 AD), 2. 静夜思 Thoughts in the Silent night by 李白 Li Bai (701-762 AD), 3. 悯农 Toiling Farmers by 李绅 Li Shen (772-846 AD), 4. 春晓 Spring Morning by 孟浩然 Meng Hao Ran (689-740 AD), 5. 七步诗 Seven Steps Verse by 曹植 Cao Zhi (192-232 AD)

Poems by John Burroughs

December 08, 2021 02:19 - 23 minutes - 21.4 MB

John Burroughs (1837-1921) was an American naturalist and conservationist who spent most of his life in the Hudson Valley. He is best known for his observations on birds, flowers, and rural scenes, as well as religion, philosophy, and nature.

Petrarch’s Canzoniere

December 08, 2021 02:19 - 12 minutes - 11.3 MB

A collection of 366 poems by the writer Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374, Arezzo) in service of his love for Laura, a woman he had met once on a Good Friday. Other themes throughout the Canzoniere are equally important: religion, poetry, politics, time, glory. The love theme itself should be considered as the nucleus around which Petrarca develops his deep psychological analysis: thanks to his poems inspired by Laura (laurus is the symbol for poetry) the poet aspires to reach glory, which in tur...

Three Poems by Baudelaire

December 08, 2021 02:19 - 14 minutes - 13.3 MB

Baudelaire in French and English

Hafiz’s Account of Holy Dervishes

December 08, 2021 02:18 - 12 minutes - 11.6 MB

Hafiz describes holy dervishes

Stabat Mater Dolorosa

December 08, 2021 02:18 - 7 minutes - 6.76 MB

One of the seven greatest Latin hymns of all time, Stabat Mater Dolorsa is based upon the prophecy of Simeon that a sword was to pierce the heart of his Mother, Mary. The hymn originated in the 13th century during the peak of Franciscan devotion to the crucified Jesus and has been attributed to Pope Innocent III, St. Bonaventure, or Jacopone da Todi (1230-1306)

Poems from the Divan of Hafez

December 08, 2021 02:18 - 11 minutes - 10.5 MB

Select poems from Hafez (1315-1390), a Persian poet who "lauded the joys of love and wine but also targeted religious hypocrisy".

Footprints on the sands of time

December 08, 2021 02:18 - 1 minute - 1.6 MB

Footprints On The Sands Of Time Tell me not, in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream! – For the soul is dead that slumbers, And things are not what they seem. Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art, to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul. Not enjoyment, and not sorrow, Is our destined end or way; But to act, that each to-morrow Find us farther than to-day. Art is long, and Time is fleeting, And our hearts, though stout and brave...

Selected Poems

December 08, 2021 02:18 - 10 minutes - 9.33 MB

From classic English poets and writers

Shape of Time

December 08, 2021 02:17 - 39 minutes - 35.9 MB

Excerpts from George Kuber’s “The Shape of Time”, Remarks on the History of Things. Drawing upon insights in anthropology and linguistics, Kubler replaced the notion of style as the basis for histories of art with the concept of historical sequence and continuous change across time.

Musical Literacy

December 08, 2021 02:17 - 20 minutes - 18.8 MB

Excerpts from “Musical Literacy” by Jerrold Levinson, Journal of Aesthetic Education Spring 1990

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

December 08, 2021 02:17 - 8 minutes - 7.69 MB

T.S. Eliot’s classic poem

Short Stories by Guy de Maupassant

December 08, 2021 02:17 - 27 minutes - 24.9 MB

Short stories by Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893). A protégé of Gustave Flaubert, he was a representative of the Naturalist school, who depicted human lives and destinies in disillusioned, even pessimistic terms. “I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing”.

Song of Myself

December 08, 2021 02:17 - 13 minutes - 12.6 MB

Classic Walt Whitman poem, 1892

Night readings

December 08, 2021 02:17 - 5 minutes - 5.49 MB

Some interesting excerpts and such

The Wasteland

December 08, 2021 02:16 - 24 minutes - 22.7 MB

Classic poem by T.S. Eliot written in 1922, The Waste Land is in part personal, the voices projected universal. Eliot later denied that he had large cultural problems in mind, but, nevertheless, in The Waste Land he diagnosed the malaise of his generation and indeed of Western civilization in the 20th century.

Howl

December 08, 2021 02:16 - 16 minutes - 15.4 MB

Allen Ginsberg’s Classic poem “Howl”, 1955

Summation of Genealogy of Morals

December 08, 2021 02:16 - 20 minutes - 18.8 MB

Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and others on Asceticism

Propositiones ad Acuendos Juvenes

December 08, 2021 02:16 - 3 minutes - 3.2 MB

Problems to sharpen the young, recreational math problems

Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet

December 08, 2021 02:16 - 23 minutes - 21.4 MB

Excerpts from Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet

Ma’at - Truth, Balance, Order

December 08, 2021 02:15 - 4 minutes - 4.35 MB

Ma'at, Symbol of Order Ma'at, Goddess of Truth, Balance, Order... Ma'at, unlike Hathor and Nephthys, seemed to be more of a concept than an actual goddess. Her name, literally, meant 'truth' in Egyptian. She was truth, order, balance and justice personified. She was harmony, she was what was right, she was what things should be. It was thought that if Ma'at didn't exist, the universe would become chaos, once again! For the Egyptian believed that the universe was above everything else an ord...

Bernard of Clairvaux: Apology

December 08, 2021 02:15 - 13 minutes - 12.2 MB

In 1115 Bernard became abbot of the new Cistercian monastery at Clairvaux, a position he held until his death in 1153. Bernard had little time to tend his flock, though, since he soon became a religious superstar. Recognized as the foremost preacher of his day, he traveled widely, wrote prolifically, and was involved to the hilt in papal politics, opposition to heresy, and the planning of a crusade. Bernard was the chief spokesman for Cistercian values. Monastic life was to be austere and di...