"Why Everything You Notice Matters" with James Navé

Welcome to provocative conversations from Twice 5 Miles Radio. I'm your host, James Navé. Today I'm going solo. In this hour-long wandering through memory, poetry, and place, I invite you into a journey that begins in Manila—fifteen million people, dense layers, and a heat that never quits—and circles outward into the deeper weather patterns of a poetic life. From Robert Frost's Dust of Snow to John Keats' On the Grasshopper and the Cricket, we explore how the natural world awakens our inherent poetic disposition, whether we realize it or not. I take you back to my early days, hitchhiking across America, discovering the cold, haunted power of the Pacific Ocean, and then finding my younger self mirrored in Robert Frost's "Once by the Pacific." I talk about what it was like to co-found Poetry Alive in the 1980s—performing poems in gymnasiums, bringing playfulness to classrooms, and teaching thousands of students that the little things matter just as much as the big ones. We dip into thought-beats, memorization, and why Emily Dickinson's "I'm Nobody! Who are you?" works for five-year-olds and grown-ups alike. And we venture into heavier terrain with Sharon Olds' The Food Thief, asking what poetry demands of us in a serious, complicated world. I also read new work generated during Imaginative Storm writing sessions—pieces like Rip Curled Edge and Ivory in the Night Sky—and reflect on time passing, aging, and the themes that keep returning. Enjoy this hour of poetry, memory, travel, performance, and the ever-present possibility that something is going to happen.