In this episode, dramaturg, poet, and academic Matthew Goulish and director Lin Hixson talk about their innovative approach to theatre with Torgeir Fjeld. Their ambulating theatre, Every house has a door, stages performance works and performance-related projects of historically or critically neglected subjects in many media. Based in Chicago, their company has become a hub for diverse, intergenerational project-specific teams of specialists, including emerging as well as internationally recognised artists. We spoke to them in conjunction with Matthew's keynote address to the 4th Ereignis Conference in Gdynia, Poland, on 11 August 2024.

Image by Nathan Keay, 2020. Used by permission.

This podcast features an interview with Dr Adam Staley Groves, who teaches a course on Wallace Stevens and the technique of poetry for Ereignis Institute. To Dr Groves, to be a poet is to become aware of circumstances that are in our lives; it is to understand the poetry that is with us all.

In this podcast, we also discuss the figure of former US president Donald Trump as an artist, as someone who creates the familiar from the unfamiliar. The important thing for Dr Groves is that by 'understanding him as an artist we can get past some of the barriers we have to accepting him as a human being, and then we can guard in a supremely sympathetic way our own humanity from the sort of gross polarisation we see.'

In this podcast, we hear Christopher Norris read from and discuss his new collection of poetry, Damaged Life: Poems After Adorno’s Minima Moralia, in a recording from the launch event for the book on 9 December 2021. The poems respond to some cryptic and dialectically wiredrawn passages from Theodor Adorno’s book Minima Moralia with its highly condensed and, on occasion, strikingly poetic prose. Christopher Norris is Emeritus Professor in Philosophy at the University of Cardiff and author of many books on philosophy, literary theory, music, and the history of ideas. Hosted by Torgeir Fjeld, the ePod gives you fresh views on philosophy, art, and society.

The poems include:

• 'Commitment: Adorno/Brecht' (selection);
• 'Little Nails';
• 'Magic Flute';
• 'Splinter' (read by Val Norris);
• 'Hegel and the Robot-Bombs';
• 'Gaps'; and
• 'Promise me this, my child’ (read by Val Norris).