Randall Jarell's guest appearances

Randall Jarell

The Troubadour Podcast

Jordan Peterson

Donald Trump

Frederick Douglass

Timothy Sandefur

Walt Whitman

Halelly Azulay

Ray Bradbury

Robert Frost

William Blake

John Keats

John Donne

William Cowper

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Herman Melville

OwlTail

How do you tell a child that he is dying?This poem terrified me. It made me never want to have a child. What if this were to happen to my child? Literature cannot solve all of our problems, but it can be a salve to many of them. In talking to my old high school friend, Dr. Lamar Johnson, about this emotional issue, I came to appreciate the grandiosity of life and our role in society. Dr Johnson is a pediatrician who has to think about how to deliver terrible news to people. How do you cope? How do you convey this experience? For me, it was a cathartic moment. That's poetry.Dr. Johnson and I conversed with the verse. And we also talked more broadly about life, philosophy, how to tell the truth, race relations, culture and oh so much more.

Dr. Johnson: "A Sick Child" by Randall Jarell