The First Page The First Page

The First Page

The First Page offers poetry for the everyday. This is not a lesson or a lecture—we're here to carve out a small space for delight, for reflection, for good attention. Each episode, writer and poet Hailey Gaunt chooses a poem to read and explore, drawing listeners further into a poem through insights and anecdotes. But, as usual, poetry is its own explanation:

The poem is not the world.
It isn't the first page of the world.

But the poem wants to flower, like a flower.
It knows that much.

It wants to open itself,
like the door of a little temple,
so that you might step inside and be cooled and refreshed,
and less yourself than part of everything.

—from "Flare" by Mary Oliver
Occasionally English South Africa Arts · Society & Culture Narrated by Bryan Keidel
10 Episodes

At the fishhouses

A moment is more than the sum of its parts, but a sum it is--of the sensory input we take in, memories we call to mind, the conscious and unconscious experiences that have accrued in our bodies. Savouring the moment is savouring all of this. Paisley Rekdal's "At the fishhouses"…
11 Feb 7 min

Oral Fixation

Poetry allows us to explore who we are while moving beyond understanding. In "Oral Fixation" Alison C. Rollins's examines iconic family lore, piecing together who she is from what has been told and retold. She borrows from linguistics and psychology, looking for meaning even in the slippery in-between.
27 Jan 8 min

Poem Number 7

Pablo Neruda was the quintessential poet, prolific in his quest to not only speak music from the heart but also to inspire humanity in love and revolution. Neruda's career spanned from his teens into his late sixties, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature two years before his…
22 Jan 8 min

Telling the Wasps

Sorrow undoes our sense of order. But that doesn't stop us from wanting to organise it into stages or map its timeline. In "Telling the Wasps", poet Paisley Rekdal creates an intimacy with grief, speaking to rather than about it and enlisting other species as audience for her pain.
20 Jan 6 min

Black Magic Brother

Addiction casts a spell. It can bewitch and beguile and create an illusory world within a world. It is a sort of theatre with a stage, performer and involuntary audience. For the closest of audience -- friends and family -- denial and hope prolong the painful drama. In "Black Magic…
2 Jan 8 min

Wake

With so many appeals for us to be happy all the time--and with these appeals usually advertised as products and services promising to help us achieve it--it's no wonder we feel so trounced by the very act of seeking. In "Wake" by Camille Rankine, from her collection Incorrect Merciful Impulses,…
11 Dec 2024 7 min

In the Winter of my Thirty-Eighth Year

What is more elemental than the passage of time on our bodies? And yet growing older (a precondition of living, after all) comes with so many torments, frictions, denials. In W.S. Merwin's "In the winter of my 38th year", the poet wrestles with his own ideas about his years, drifting…
6 Oct 2024 7 min

Twenty Couplets

Chinese poetry translator Bill Porter (aka Red Pine) describes translation as “standing between two worlds”—between the rigors of language and the artistry of interpretation. In this special interview episode Porter describes the tradition of rebel Chinese poets and reads “Twenty couplets” by Liu Tsung-yuan, found in Porter’s collection: Written in…
6 Aug 2024 8 min

I Talk to My Body

Polish poet Anna Swir was called a 'poet of the body'. Her direct, intimate, visceral lines speak Feminist sensibilities without any note of rhetoric. "I Talk to My Body" is a bright, sharp anthem.
6 Jun 2024 6 min

The Snow Goes to the Gallows of a Warm Grass and What Survives

As climate fears are born out, fear can become quiet acquiescence to the forces of nature seemingly too big to resist. With the acceleration of such loss--of species, of life as we know it--we can become alarmingly unalarmed. From her collection Soft Targets, Deborah Landau's poem intimately accounts for this…
21 Apr 2024 7 min