Saskia Hamilton's guest appearances

Saskia Hamilton

Poems Out Loud

Boston University World of Ideas

The Kenyon Review Podcast

Words in the Air

Eileen Myles

Maggie Smith

Mark Strand

Stephen Dunn

Danielle Evans

Rodger Kamenetz

Thomas Moore

James Joyce

Walt Whitman

Wallace Stevens

Colm Tóibín

Robert Frost

William Blake

Wilfred Owen

John Keats

OwlTail

Read by Juliet Prew Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Read by Juliet Prew Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

This Hour by Saskia Hamilton

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman In the CorridorBy Saskia HamiltonI passed through, I should have paused,there were a hundred doors. One opened.In there, someone whose nameis not yet known to me lived out his middle years in simple terms, two chairs,one place laid for early breakfast, one platewith dry toast and butter softening. Therehis mind raced through writings he had memorized long ago while he triedto get hold of himself. Oncein his youth he had studied with lovein the corners of old paintings matrices of fields and towns,passages intricate and particular, wheat,columns, figures and ground,classically proportioned in lines that were meantto meet, eventually,at vanishing point. They continued,nevertheless; they troubled the eye. He collected sets of books printedin the nineteenth century, unyieldingpages, memoirs of the poets,engravings of rurified private subjects in times of public sector unhappiness,frescoes of human oddity in gatefold printing.Why does it continueto chasten me, he says to no one. It does. It is a painful mistaking,this setting something down,saying aloud, “it is nothing yet”when he’d meant, not anything— but then nothing peeredthrough the keyhole, nothingtook possession. Snow on the roofs,snow in traces on the ground, passersby with wet trouser-cuffslooking to the pavement as the hill rises,light gathering in the riverand gradually spreading.

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman In the CorridorBy Saskia HamiltonI passed through, I should have paused,there were a hundred doors. One opened.In there, someone whose nameis not yet known to me lived out his middle years in simple terms, two chairs,one place laid for early breakfast, one platewith dry toast and butter softening. Therehis mind raced through writings he had memorized long ago while he triedto get hold of himself. Oncein his youth he had studied with lovein the corners of old paintings matrices of fields and towns,passages intricate and particular, wheat,columns, figures and ground,classically proportioned in lines that were meantto meet, eventually,at vanishing point. They continued,nevertheless; they troubled the eye. He collected sets of books printedin the nineteenth century, unyieldingpages, memoirs of the poets,engravings of rurified private subjects in times of public sector unhappiness,frescoes of human oddity in gatefold printing.Why does it continueto chasten me, he says to no one. It does. It is a painful mistaking,this setting something down,saying aloud, “it is nothing yet”when he’d meant, not anything— but then nothing peeredthrough the keyhole, nothingtook possession. Snow on the roofs,snow in traces on the ground, passersby with wet trouser-cuffslooking to the pavement as the hill rises,light gathering in the riverand gradually spreading.

In The Corridor by Saskia Hamilton

Kenyon professor of religious studies, Royal Rhodes, speaks to poet, editor and Kenyon alumna, Saskia Hamilton, about Robert Lowell, the importance of silence, and Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan.

53. Saskia Hamilton