St. Louis poet Vincent Casaregola embraces life by confronting death

Support comes from Mosby Building Arts. Sometimes the smaller home projects make the biggest difference. Mosby creates custom spaces that help you love your home even more. For projects big and small, visit callmosby.com. This is St. Louis on the air from St. Louis Public Radio. I'm Elaine Cha. It's been about six and a half years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. With so much else happening, it can be easy to forget the uncertainty, stress, and trauma of that time. The patients lying alone in hospital rooms, the overworked healthcare workers bearing witness to suffering, the families who couldn't gather to mourn the passing of their loved ones. More than 7 million people died. While the more challenging aspects of the pandemic are now in the rearview mirror, we still deal with the systemic, physical and psychological traumas brought about by disease, homelessness, roadway collisions, mental illness, and gun violence. In his 2025 collection of poetry, Vital Science, St. Louis University Professor Vincent Casaragola invites us to confront such traumas, to explore suffering, death, and grief in order to fully embrace life and find meaning in the present moment. He spoke with producer Emily Woodbury, and this hour we're revisiting their conversation. Vincent, thank you so much for joining us today. You're welcome. Thank you for having me. So you wrote these poems over the course of 12 years, but most of them were written in the past six. Was the reflection on death an intentional exercise, or did it come up organically for you based on what you were dealing with at the time? I mean, it's something as one ages. become something you reflect on a lot, but it came organically out of many relatives and friends who were passing away at this time. In the summer of 2019, I lost about... four colleagues within just two months. And admittedly, they tended to be on the elderly side, but not all of them. And just the prior year, my father had died and my mother was very ill. So it was something that was very much on my mind. And then in 2020, when the pandemic hit, it was so pervasive. None of the people I knew who were dying at the time actually died from the pandemic, but many of them died during it. So it's something that was growing out of my experience, though I had written about it before. And grief and loss at any time is really hard, but to have so much in such a concentrated moment of time, that must have been really hard. It was difficult.

The poetry was a way of cycling through that difficulty. I mean, it's one thing you expect people who are older, they will become ill and they will die. But a number of the situations, I had a colleague who was actually younger than I was, who died as a result of a fall, and it was shocking. It was during the pandemic, and my last experience with him directly had been a virtual trivia contest that he ran, you know, and we were having fun with several other people doing a trivia thing. And the contrast between that and the announcement that he had fallen was, you know, very severely injured. And he hung on for a while, but he was pretty much... pretty much gone by that time and it was so stark and so sudden and you know the realization it can be anyone anytime it can be anyone anywhere Many of the poems in this book draw attention to the little details within clinical settings, the reflection of a patient on a sprinkler system head, the sounds of machines worrying. Are these the little things you noticed and that stuck with you from your own experiences? Absolutely, yes. I mean... When you're in a kind of heightened emotional state, little things stick out to you. And it's like things you don't usually notice will kind of call out. and they stick in your mind, they stick in your memory, and they become focal points, they become nodes of memory. And if you think about that thing, it takes on this iconic quality. And a lot of the poems emerge from going back to that moment and that object in space and time, and reflecting on that, and it's almost as if the object calls forth the poem from you. In a sense, it's not... unlike meditative exercises and has parallels with things like the Ignatian spiritual exercises where you meditate on observations of certain things in the scriptures and you reflect on them. But, yeah, observing concrete objects in a situation is very important to my writing. I'd like to have you read a poem that was inspired by a hospital visit. Would you share respiratory monitor with us? Yes, certainly. They have softened the room's light to near dusk, matching the mood, and the machines speak their lines in a concert of soft pulses while the monitor tracks the vitals across its impassive face. Breath.

that can barely be heard by the tired natural ear of the drowsing aged spouse who sits in the bedside chair is loud enough for hidden sensors in the omniscient machine look The line traces hills and valleys as a soul continues its last steps, its arduous course. The lighted spot ascends and drops methodically, like an ancient monk in a far kingdom, journeying up and down steep mountains for wisdom that even he, in his antiquity, has yet to comprehend. Did you write that in the hospital, or was that something that you reflected on the experience afterwards and wrote about it? It's something that occurred to me while I was there in the hospital. My mother had suffered a severe fall. My father was also ill, but he was not hospitalized at the time, and he was there in the hospital room. My brother and I and my sister-in-law were there, and my mother was in the hospital bed. She was... sedated and the monitors and everything were there. And, you know, I was staring at the monitor, you know, and, you know, watching it and listening to its little noises. And then a little later on, when I had some time afterwards, I drafted the poem. And one of the things that influenced me was an old Yates poem, Lappus Lazuli, which talks about, you know, this... statue and the image of the monks going up to the little meditative retreat and that stuck in my mind too and I made the leap from going up and down to mountains and the movement you know and thinking about the soul's movement so all those things kind of converged and that's what's being observed and that image of the monitor Your collection begins with, you know, a section called The Sight of the Trauma, and it includes a note about how returning to the scene of a traumatic event is often recommended in therapy for treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. Is that what the process of writing and compiling this collection was for you, of the moments that, you know, you experience or were inspired by those moments, that returning to them... was part of your healing process? I think in the end it is because I don't think it's a process that is concluded. But it wasn't so much intentional in the kind of overt overarching way as... You know, you get the idea and you start working with it and it pulls these things out. The emotions start to call forth other images. And it becomes something that sort of evolves in the process. But yes, it's very much like that. And at the same time, you know, it goes back to that Wordsworthian definition of powerful emotion recollected in tranquility, you know, from...

the lyrical ballads introduction, that you're not just writing the emotion. You're writing the impact of the emotion after reflection. And that reflection is the... I think essential step because the raw motion is is a bit too raw and that's more about me whereas the reflection allows you to translate it into a voice that can be about the reader as well as about me. And so it's a process. And I, you know, much is made of that romantic definition, but I think it has a certain resonance with my sense of how poetry emerges from my experience. This idea of going to the site of the trauma or exploring something that you went through rather than kind of pushing it down and forgetting about it. Do you have any tips for doing that, having gone through this exercise yourself with this collection? Well, I think it is something where you have to be willing. to experience some of the pain in a secondary way. You can't shield yourself from that. But at the same time, you want to be in an emotional state where you're just not going to plunge yourself into, you know, a depression or something. You have to be at a point where it's like when you're in physical therapy. There's a point where you have to put pressure on the injured part in order to get yourself back in shape. But you want to wait until there's enough healing that it can sustain that or you re-injured yourself. So you don't want to create... new trauma out of the old. And I think the other thing is having an environment in which you feel secure enough to do it. I mean, a relational environment, people you are with, people you know, who are supportive of you. It's hardest to do this when you're in absolute isolation. And, you know, I mean, I don't think writing is an isolated act apparently. in one sense, but it isn't because there's a kind of infrastructure of emotional engagement that helps you to be a writer. And if you don't have at least some degree of healthy relationships, it's very hard to build into that. It's hard to speak when you think you're hidden inside your own little cave.

There are several notable figures in vital signs. One is a musician who, an old age, finds himself homeless on a cold winter night. He seeks refuge by a bridge. And, you know, the next poem, someone's body is found by a Department of Transportation employee. This is Coventry Carroll and the Mummy's Curse. This seems like it was the story about the same person. Was I write to connect these two poems? And what was the inspiration for them? One of the things that does concern me a lot is homelessness. And I've known people who've lived on the streets. I know people, a few people, who are living on the streets now. And it's hard to know how to address some of these concerns. Sometimes there's nothing you can do. And there are all sorts of different things. My response is often to treat people as they are, as people. I think their stories need to get out, and both of those are fictions based on reality. In other words, they're based on different kinds of people at different points and blend them together. The mummy's curse actually came first, and that was based on, you know, reading about people who had... died from hypothermia in, you know, who are living on the streets. And also the person who lived in my old neighborhood when I was a child who was severely plagued with PTSD from World War II and was, he should have been cared for, but they didn't have the circumstances or situations for it back then. And my understanding was that he wandered off. I mean, he did have a place to live. He wasn't homeless, but he was always out on the street and he lost his way and he froze to death in a doorway. The other poem gets back to that and builds off that and it brings in the Coventry Carol song is such a... It's both soothing and mournful, you know, and, you know, it's very Christmassy. But I wanted to... contrast our usual sense of Christmas, you know, everybody's off celebrating, but there's that person alone out there, that person who's, you know, completely lost. And, you know, based on things I'd read, I sort of wove together a character study of a person who tried and who was good at things, but for whom things did not work out and was now... lost and, you know, people are out there now, right now, experiencing that. I wanted to make that kind of story known in the context of a Christmas situation where the music fades into it in the background at the end. And, you know, this is a man who on Christmas Eve doesn't know if he will survive to Christmas morning. And that's something that...

needs to be remembered. And so I brought that together. And, you know, what I wanted to emphasize also in the mummy's curse was the witness who then can't escape the knowledge. You know, what's that line? I think it's from T.S. Eliot, after such knowledge, what forgiveness? This really is a kind of Garden of Eden moment for that character that I created and reflects my own state of mind. You now have the knowledge of good and evil. You have the knowledge that people die because nobody cares. And now he has to live with that knowledge. And it's not his fault directly, but he's part of a world that does that. And so it's their wake-up calls. What specifically is the wake-up call for? What is the kind of call to action, if not very direct? I think the first call, it's to awareness. What action needs to be taken? I don't know for sure. I've talked to, I've had students who've been very active in working with the homeless, and I get different perspectives on policy. I have friends who are public policy analysts. I'm not good enough at that stuff to know. What I think I have some talent for is to get people to see a homeless person. to witness what's going on, and with that awareness to begin to be inspired to do something.

That was St. Louis University professor and poet Vincent Casaragola speaking with producer Emily Woodbury. We need to take a quick break. When we come back, we'll explore collective memory of pandemics over the course of human history and how that's changed over the centuries. This is St. Louis on the air on St. Louis Public Radio. Support comes from Gemma, architects, planners and designers, seeking to bring joy to their clients and communities. Details at J-E-M-A-S-T-L.com. Welcome back. I'm Elaine Cha. We're listening to producer Emily Woodbury's conversation with Vincent Casaragola, whose new poetry collection explores how illness, injury, loss, and grief are vital signs of the current condition of our culture. Let's dive back into the discussion. Many of the poems in the first section of your book, Vital Signs, deal with gun violence. And... As in your explorations of spaces within a hospital, you write about these scenes marked by violence by focusing on the very little details, you know, the juxtaposition of yellow police tape and bullet casings alongside chalk drawings left by children playing on the sidewalk. And one of your poems you write from the perspective of a bullet that's, you know, appalled by its impact within the human body. You know, these scenes detail the... intimate physical trauma experienced by a victim of gun violence and also the trauma experienced by a neighborhood, by a community. What are you hoping to do by writing about gun violence an issue that unfortunately is not going away anytime soon? I mean, day after day, we get more and more headlines. Well, I suppose my first motivation in writing about it is just that it affects me emotionally. I grew up. Though I was fairly secure in my household, you know, because it was run by my matriarchal grandmother who, you know, kept a strong rain on me and so did my mother. So I didn't get out and join with the kids who were getting into trouble. But about half the kids in my grade school class and the class ahead of it, half the boys died before the age of 30 because of drugs and violence. So I was aware of what violence does on a personal level. and the increase of it, you know, and the constant presence of it in the news to the point where people get inured to it. It's like, oh, that's just more, you know, so many people shot and how many in the hospital, how many dead, and did they catch the person? Did he kill himself? What? And it becomes too superficial. So the people are bouncing off the surface of it. And my goal with the poems is get people to stop, to pay attention. And I think the small details in context, if you can create a sense of them with their resonance, that makes it possible for people to be aware.

And so little things like, you know, it occurs, and the way certain things are ironic, it's like those little plastic things they put down, those little curb plastic things by the bullet casings, remind me the things you get in a restaurant when you got your tray and they put it on there and you go to the table and they're going to bring the food out to that number. And it's like these objects connect the stuff for me. And it's like, we're in our... just ordinary mode with that, but that object is also there on the street with that bullet casing. And I'm trying to use the objects in a way that will really cut to the concrete moment and therefore force people beyond the superficiality of it. It's not in the book, but I've written another poem that's actually... a recitative. It's in the voices of bullets. It's chorus with solos. And the composer, who's a colleague of mine in our performing arts department, Aaron Johnson, has composed music for it. And we've had a sort of trial performance of it, but he's still working on a larger orchestration of it. But the idea being... Let's hear what the inanimate object says about us. It's like what the alien coming to look at us, you know, says about our behavior. Try to get the perspective altered so that you see things differently. And not the usual screen of, you know, there was a mass shooting. such and such a place, so many people died, so many people are in the hospital, you know, and people are sending their thoughts and prayers. And it's like, it just becomes a cycle of surfaces. And I want to cut through that. And I think the best way is concrete, clear, focused description of the objects. And having the object speak is even more important. Yeah, I was really struck by... your poem, what the bullet knows because it did, you were hearing from the bullet's perspective, and as I mentioned, you know, the bullet is appalled at what it's doing, but also, and I almost don't want to read it on air because it's, it almost needs. Trigger warning. The trigger warning because it's really impactful to hear what even just clinically, again, a bullet does within a human body. And I don't think we focus on that enough. I know I've heard physicians say, we don't talk near enough. We say, oh, you know, this many people were even injured. Even if someone doesn't die, they're so affected by what these tiny objects do to us. And the way you wrote it just really. stuck with me. Well, again, I think the way for me as a writer is to get into the situation in a way that I can imagine myself there physically and to concentrate on the physical things that are there and getting into the granular because I think what makes an image compelling is its sense of reality.

the way light reflects off it, the way it has a shadow, the way it feels in your hand, the touch of it, the scent or the taste of something. Those are things you get into the sensory and then you can cut through the abstraction. A major section of your poetry collection is devoted to the COVID-19 pandemic. Would you read one of those poems? This is titled Six. Yes, certainly. Six. The recommended distance from one's breath to another's with a mask of simple cloth and the space of open air are shield. The distance in miles from home to that remembered place, sectioned and sheltered by trees, but cluttered and clotted with stones. The enforced distance at the site, guided by small blue markers spiked into hard but giving soil beneath the tamped down grass. The number still allowed to watch a slow and somber lowering six times six around the whole trying to square the circle of grief. And last, a cliched measurement of downward motion into earthen dark. Of course, around us now, we always keep the space of graves. Six feet under, referring to a burial, six feet apart for social distancing. And when this conversation airs in January, it will be about six years since COVID-19 became a part of our lives. And something I've been reflecting on is that even though we're still reeling from the effects of the pandemic and we talk about them, at the same time, it also feels like, you know, we've tried to move on from it and never fully. have acknowledged or reckoned with our collective grief as a society. Is that something? Do you feel similarly? Oh, yes. Before the pandemic, there were documentaries about pandemics that talked about, you know, how we've forgotten the 1918 influenza pandemic. We don't think about it. And... When it comes, it's shattering. It's like the earthquake or the, you know, the tornado or the tsunami, you know. You forget, but then it's gone and you clean up after it and you bury the dead and then you pretend it's not going to happen again. But it always happens again. And it will happen again. And I teach a course in pandemics, a literature and medicine course. I make it into a pan-artistic course. I do literature, film, visual art, et cetera. It grew out of the experience of the COVID pandemic, but I look at the plague of the 14th century. I look at the influenza pandemic. I look at AIDS, which is still...

You know, all over the world, we just are, we've suppressed our awareness of it. And I think the thing about pandemics is they are always there as a presence. But one of the things you see historically with the plague of the 14th century, which was so devastating in Europe, North Africa, Eastern Europe, Western Asia, the Middle East, you know, maybe. They don't know the exact number, 50, 70 million people may have died. It ravaged Europe, maybe a third to a half the population, gone. But because that... that bacterium kept coming back. There were periodic outbreaks, never more that kind of pandemic, but it was always present. People were aware of it. And the arts of the later 14th century into the 15th, 16th centuries continued to make reference to this, like Peter Borgle the elders, the triumph of death. or the, you know, John Dunn's poetry about Time of Plague. Things like this were present in people's minds, and they kept it aware, kept people aware of it. And we tended, we really forgot about the 1918 influenza pandemic. It's like, oh, yeah. I mean, a lot of bad things have happened since then. World War II, the Holocaust, all these things. But we have to realize that probably two and a half to three times as many people died as a result of that pandemic has died in World War I. And so our problem with the pandemics is that we don't keep it alive. We don't keep that awareness alive. Right now in the American Southwest is a rodent population, prey dogs, et cetera, in which the plague bacterium thrives. There's no reason why it can't develop an antibiotic-resistant form. That could happen any time, and the ability of the plague bacterium to jump from one species to another is there. All you need is the right set of circumstances, and you could have another... plague pandemic that would be antibiotic resistant. What do we do when that happens? We scramble around and, you know, look like some kind of Keystone Cops thing because we're all running around different directions. We don't keep ourselves aware of these things, and that's one of things that occurs to me in teaching this course, and it influenced the poems. And though most of those poems were... written at the time or just after the time of the pandemic and looking at the actual direct experience. What are we going through? What's this isolation like? And so that's and I wanted to end with that, close with that, because of the need to keep people aware of that. And what do you think it is about us that we aren't remembering pandemics in the way that we used to many centuries ago? I mean, is it just that

Even since 1918 to now and especially now moving forward, there's just so much happening at all the time. And with technology and communications, we're so aware of it on a level that we never were before. Is that it? Or why do you think we're not kind of remembering the period after the great plague of the 14th century in Europe? I think the continued awareness came from perpetual outbreaks. And it's like, let's say you had a massive, a massive fire that burned out many blocks of a city, square miles of it. You know, every time you saw a house burning. you'd get kind of tensed up. Well, their house burnings occurred. In other words, they were having outbreaks all the time every 10, 15, 20 years. The outbreaks were not as severe. People had developed some greater immunities, perhaps. It's impossible to judge at this point, but they didn't spread independent. In the middle of the 17th century, there was a horrible outbreak of plague in London. and tens of thousands of people died. So, I mean, this kept them aware. And I think it's that which was making them aware. It was still there. We're not seeing people, you know, COVID breaking out all the time. So, and plus, the other thing is we got vaccines. And once you think, well, we got vaccines, we can, we can solve something. Perhaps. But. You know, they're not absolute things. And until the things there, you can't really figure out the vaccine for it. And it's the next thing that could happen. And, you know, epidemiologists and virologists will tell you that, you know, we live in the context where global spread of any microorganism is, you know. hugely possible, very quickly. And that makes it much more dangerous because something, like that movie Contagion, which is about 10 or 12 years ago, I mean, that's a very good example, you know, and spread of populations into animal areas, environmental areas, that kind of thing. So I want people just to be aware that, you know, this happened. People died. We're still suffering the effects of it. I know multiple people who suffer from long COVID, and it's changed their lives. But people aren't thinking about it. I know I've seen... calls for submissions to journals saying no poems about COVID. Really? Yeah. And it's like, well, they had too many. And, you know, I understand that. You know, they have to edit. But the thing is, you've got to be aware of the presence of these things. And the memento mori, the memory of death was important in the arts of those times. And, you know, you see it with Hamlet in the grave with York skull.

and that presence. And I guess that's part of my academic history, my academic upbringing. We're listening to Vincent Casaragola's conversation with producer Emily Woodbury. We need to take a quick break, but we'll be back shortly to continue this conversation. This is St. Louis on the air on St. Louis Public Radio. Welcome back. I'm Elaine Cha. This hour, we are revisiting producer Emily Woodbury's December 2025 conversation with St. Louis University Professor Vincent Casaragola about his poetry collection, Vital Signs. Let's return to their conversation. I'd like to ask you about the importance of being aware of grief. You know, too often I think we think about or consider grief as a thing to experience and then move past. It can be uncomfortable. How is your thinking on processing grief changed while and since writing this collection of poems? I just took a deep breath, and I think that's part of it. You sort of take a breath and pause. You recognize that there's shock grief and there's not much you can do about shock grief except hope that you get through it. I mean, you know, you witness a terrible accident or you're in a terrible accident. You're in shock physically and or emotionally or someone you love is suddenly terribly ill or dies. The shock is something that just hits you like a wave and knocks you over and knocks you out. You need help usually to get up and start moving around after that. It takes time. It takes time to, and the grief, it's like physical wounds, you know. You don't know. where it's going to hurt when you get out of bed tomorrow because you've been in an accident. You don't know whether your shoulder or your knee or your, you know, whatever. And it affects your movements throughout the day. And little things that you take for granted, walking across a room, pouring a cup of coffee, all that. It physically challenges you. Well, on the emotional level, the same thing's true. You cycle through. this process, well, you never know where are certain objects going to just trigger it and really the sharp pang of loss. But there are times then where if you've started to recover, you can absorb that and begin to reflect upon it. And I think processes of organized reflection, you know, pausing.

There's this ignation exercise of the examine. You know, at the end of the day you look back over the day. You pause, you look, you experience what, you reconstruct that experience for yourself and you think about what has happened, what you have done, where you have to go tomorrow. And it doesn't have to be in a religious context. You can be in any context, but that kind of structured reflection. allows you to absorb the pain to some extent. And I mean, some pains are so great, it's very hard. You need therapy. You need help, professional help. And you also need a context where there are other people around. There's nothing, I think, more difficult than to try to endure that level of shock and pain if you're so isolated. And I think that's what drives people, in part, into very severe depressions. after loss. You see this with older people. I used to work in a nursing home when I was young. You see this with older people. Once they're really isolated. There's nobody around them. And, you know, the people they've known have died. And... There's no shock absorbers around them. There's no familial or friend or community environment to help them. That's terrible. And I hope that doesn't happen to me or other people, I know. But I think one of the ways is also to think about the other person's pain. I'm suffering. What about this other person? And not, you know, project my suffering onto them, but it's like realize I'm not alone. Realize there are other people suffering. And that's not something you want to tell somebody who's suffering. Oh, you're not alone. Well, thanks a lot. But it's something I want to tell yourself. make a bond to the person. I mean, that's why people have these groups. Like, I knew people who had, this was a long time ago, had lost a child, and they were part of a share group, you know, that meet once a week and talk about their emotional state. And, you know, you need other people. And, you know, poetry is a way that an individual may express themselves. But you've got to be aware of a community. I think having a local poetry community where people give readings and open mics and all that is important for having resonance, having context, and it helps a lot. But I mean being with people and having people be with you. And that means when you're not suffering, you've got to be open to other peoples, you know.

I remember somebody giving a eulogy for a friend of mine who died. And she herself had lost her husband and was talking much earlier. And she talked about how this friend, our mutual friend, who had previously lost his wife, told her, you know, you don't get over it. You get through it. And with other people. And I think that's what happens. I think the possibility of getting through it is what I'm trying to get at in the poems and the invitation to be aware of other people and what they're going through. That helps you. You have to be part of the resonance yourself before you're the sufferer. Reading your poem, Where is the Shadow? I was reminded of how it feels to hold on to someone's memory. Would you share that poem with us? Certainly, yes. Where is the shadow that once you left behind in the late sunlight of a winter afternoon? I know I saw it drawn clearly then across the bare hardwood floor. Has it slipped beneath the bed rolled with those old posters, their jagged edges, gathering dust? Or in those long, flat boxes where you kept the trophies from your victories at school? Was it left in the closet where the old uniform hangs, crisp undertaught plastic, along with three generations of ties, wide or narrow, subdued or loud? Or even in the shoes tightly closed in a neat row of cardboard boxes? Perhaps it passed down the stairs into the hall or living room or waits at the dining room table near that growing pile of mail, or even in the kitchen against the counter, expecting empty cups to be filled. I fear that cleaning one day and shaking rugs from out the window on the second floor, mistakenly I cast it out into the Lomi garden among the stalks of last year's flowers. beneath the layers of fallen leaf and seed. Thank you for sharing that. I think that poem, for me, it brings up the pain of, that comes not just with the process of losing someone, but of occupying the spaces that you shared with them before they passed. Part of it is based on... After my father's death, my brother and I, my mother was in long-term care by that point. My father had died, and we were arranging to sell their house in order to put money into her account for her needs.

I remember things there, my father's shoes and boxes, his ties, you know, he had one of those things you just screw into the back of the closet to hang the ties on and his military uniform and other things in that room and just other things around the house and nobody was living in the house at that time. And so the very concrete images of moving in and through that house. And it did feel ghostly at times. You know, it felt, you feel presences. And it's like you can... It's like in a movie when they just sort of flash back and impose that or you split the screen. It's like I could remember being there with him. And the things that you see, the concrete things resonate with all the feelings. And what I was trying to do is it's sort of a catalog. You know, in epic poems, they have epic catalogues. Well, this is a poem that's more about the ordinary occasion. So it's an ordinary catalog. It's what do people have? Their clothes, their shoes, the posters they may have had, or trophies they had, or things they kept. And the sense that those are, you know, artifacts now. They have a new meaning because now... They were things that were touched. They're relics, in a sense. Earlier, you mentioned the Latin phrase memento mori, meaning, you know, remember you must die. That's something I found myself reflecting on a lot as I read through your book, Vital Signs. How is reflecting on death and grief and suffering change the way that you approach life, your interactions with others? Well, I'm hoping that it gives me more perspective. I hope that I have... less tendency to be judgmental and to be angry. Some of that may just be lack of energy as I age, I don't know, but I'm hoping that I'm getting perspective that I realize, you know, what's going to matter? You know, this little thing that's ticking me off today or making me irritable or the awareness of another person as that person, flaws in all, and being able to be with them, you know, this day, in this moment. And also to be with them, you know,

We spend a lot of our time with people, but not really with them. And it's an exercise. And, you know, I accuse myself of this as much as anyone else, you know, sitting there with somebody like your spouse and, you know, you're both on your phones. You know, you're checking out your emails or whatever. Really being with one another. And it's hard. It's hard because they're always, it's a difficult process. Being with the person is being with their aches and pains, their physical and emotional aches and pains. It's with the things they do or don't do. And yet it's being with them. That's what's, and I think, you know, when I'm trying to create people in this context of poems, I'm trying to ask the reader to be with this person. And I'm trying to learn to be with people more to listen and observe more. I love to talk, and anybody in my family, my students also, I will know that if you get me started, I'll talk forever. But I'm trying to learn to listen more and more and to listen carefully and to get more observations before I make judgments, not rush to judgment, not allow a kind of confirmation bias to slip in, but to see the complexity. Vincent, would you leave us with a short poem that you actually end your collection with? I think despite being a book that is about a lot of heavy experiences, I didn't leave it, and I read it almost all in one sitting, I didn't leave it feeling hopeless. And I feel like this poem that you leave us with at the end of the book really, really hits at that note.

Lathay, no sting, no ache in rains so warm, so soft that walking in it, even for hours, I feel no chill, only a new nakedness without fear. Once I had been rushing to leave somewhere and reach somewhere else, but now I forget. And sensing light behind layers of cloud, I make this rain, my new home. It's the hope of transcendence. It's looking at moving into something where you've let go of a lot of the superficial things that are unimportant. And you're in a new way. And I try not to be judgmental about people's beliefs about the afterlife one way or the other. I think everybody has their own versions of it and, you know, in different traditions and contexts. But what I've hoped for, for myself, for others, is that sense of the moment of both transcendence and peace that gives people a sense that all that I was worrying about. can be let go, and I can be in this new kind of place, this new kind of condition, which is almost impossible to imagine, but you can speak to an effort at imagining it. That's what that's about. Interestingly, even though that's the final poem, that is one of the earliest poems in the collection. Oh, really?

But I was trying to imagine that and trying to get at that sort of condition. Vincent, thank you so much for sharing your poetry with us and for joining us. Really appreciate it. Thank you very much for having me. I really enjoyed this. That was St. Louis University Professor Vincent Casaragola talking with producer Emily Woodbury. His poetry collection, Vital Signs, was published in August 2025. This episode was produced by Elaine Cha. Audio editing by our executive producer Alex Hoyer. Audio engineering and podcast design by Aaron Doer. St. Louis on the air is a production of St. Louis Public Radio. Understanding starts here. Do you find yourself regularly listening to episodes of St. Louis on the air? Suggest us to a friend you think might enjoy our conversations. And leave us a review and rating on Apple Podcasts on the App Store. It's the simplest way to help people discover our show. Thanks. St. Louis Public Radio is a member-supported service of the University of Missouri, St. Louis.