If you enjoy listening to talk about books, ideas, and poetry, and to voice recordings of some great literature – then this is the podcast for you.
Openings: Books, Poems, Voice
An audio series with an edge – featuring great books, poems, words, and voice recordings. The podcast discusses classic works within the Western literary canon. It focuses on particular books, poems, or book passages, discussing some of the basic information about the writers, key themes, and ideas. It presents some analysis and discussion, but features voiceover narrations at the front and end of the podcast. The podcast will also give news and brief updates on Dennis’s creative and work projects or the worlds of writing and voiceover as they relate to literature, the arts, and culture.
A Podcast for Our Strange Times
A key motivation behind this podcast was Dennis’s sense of literature in the West being under assault by a strange form of philistinism which seems to reduce all art forms and social phenomena into kinds of power relations.
What’s being referred to here is identity politics, of course. Identity politics refers to the intense politicisation of people’s demographic categories. Lurking at the root of it is the notion that group identity – a person’s race, gender, or sexual orientation – constitutes the most important, essential aspect of their being. According to this narrow way of looking at the world, a person’s individual complexity is much less important than their membership within a group identity. A person’s particular race, gender, or sexual orientation is the determining aspect of their entire existence, and it dictates their political beliefs, social attitudes, and essential characteristics.
For Dennis, poetry and literature have always represented openings, primal ways of connecting with realities that lay outside of ourselves. This podcast is about using great books, words, poetry and voice – the human voice – to recapture these elemental ways of connecting.