On Being with Krista Tippett

I suppose it's no good telling you again that we're innocent. No good. It's not for myself, I'm asking. Other men with families who had to die for this sort of thing, it's too bad, but it's justice.

Justice? What do you care about justice? You don't even care whether you've got the right men or not. All you know is you've lost something and somebody's got to be punished.

Man just naturally can't take the law into his own hands and hang people without hurting everybody in the world. Because then he's just not breaking one law, but all laws.

The second book was Henry Ford's International Jew. And of course, immediately after it, I read Mein Kampf.

And of course, immediately after it, I read Mein Kampf. And before the age of 15, I was sufficiently anti-Semitic.

When I read Mein Kampf, it made so much sense to me. That my reaction to Mein Kampf was not denying Holocaust, but glorifying Holocaust. Saying this guy had a point. I hope somebody will finish the job, unfortunately.

I remember asking Tobias Wolfe when he saw his movie of This Boy's Life, you know, that great memoir, was it hard to watch? I watched it. I sat behind him and his family and his mother was there and I said, boy, that was so, I cried. I said, that was so hard for me. Was it hard for you to watch?

He's published several volumes of poetry and prose, most recently Hammer Is the Prayer.

There is no consolation in the thought of God, he said, slamming another nail in another house, another havoc had half taken. Grace is not consciousness, nor is it beyond. To hell with remembrance, to hell with heaven, Hammer Is the Prayer of the poor and the dying. And as wind in some lordless random comes to rest and all the disquieted dust within, peace came to the hinterlands of our minds. Too remote to know, but peace nonetheless.

His two new books are Hammer is the Prayer and Joy, 100 Poems.

I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear. Myself I stood in the storm of the bird cherry tree. It was all leaf life and star shower, unerring, self-shattering power. And it was all aimed at me.

What is this dire delight flowering, fleeing always earth? What is being? What is truth? Blossoms rupture and rapture the air. All hover and hammer time intensified and time intolerable sweetness. Ravelling rot. It is now. It is not.

The doctor went to see the rabbi. Tell me, rabbi, please, he said. About God.

Not for the usual sins, she said, for the sin of living small.

I gave you the blood of other religions, he blurted. She laughed out loud, lifting out the croissant. No problem, she said. I like what you gave me. It's great.

He saw his own erotic experience, and by extension the mixed up and in every sense screwed up erotic experience that we all have, as one of the ways that spiritual experience is offered to us.

that those of us whose experience of transcendence is rooted in our carnal passions still have a place at this staple.

Of all the books I've ever written, Krista, the one that was most important for me and to which I poured the most of myself in my own personal mythology was apparently a children's book I wrote called The King in the Window, which I wrote for my son Luke.

Then this book, the Traumarchan is like the opposite side of that, which is the immigrant. Not me in this case, but an immigrant I was writing about who gets shot in the face by a white supremacist after 9-11. And the only thing he heard from the shooter right before he got shot was where you from.

When Terry Shiva was dying I became I ordered 20 copies of five wishes and gave them to everyone I know

The topic of her book, it's complicated.

Have a book on art of meditation coming out. Is it coming out in English? It's coming out in UK in January.

So this was a book that was a symbol around an exhibition called Poetry and Process.

And it was an interesting conversation between the creator and I about the idea of poetry when people were not just talk about poetry.

And the work we influenced by poetry, they're almost always mean the content of the work. They work their inspired by a poet and then they make the work that you have, the image, whatever.

I'm interested in poetry as a certain kind of foundation of truth, a certain work in some metaphor.

And we're trying to look at that from the point of view of the very process of making work as suggestive a point in two poetry.

It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats.

Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid.