The Quest for Meaning in Poetry with Charles Upton

Charles Upton’s first books of poetry were published in 1968 and 1969 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Light Books in San Francisco. He was then considered the youngest member of the “beat generation” as he was still in high school. He has subsequently written many books associated with the traditionalist school of spirituality including What Poets Used to Know, The Science of the Greater Jihad, Folk Metaphysics, Alien Disclosure Deception: The Metaphysics of Social Engineering, Day and Night on the Sufi Path, Dugin Against Dugin: A Traditionalist Critique of the Fourth Political Theory, System of the Antichrist, and Vectors of the Counter-Initiation. His most recent book of poetry is Wars of Love and Other Poems. His website is https://charles-upton.com/

Note: There is a GoFundMe page for Charles Upton who is dealing with colon cancer. See https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-charles-upton-survive-colon-cancer

To download a copy of See, Sing, and Know: The Art of Poetry in Five Lessons by Charles Upton, as referenced in this interview, go to https://newthinkingallowed.com/See.docx

Here Charles Upton reflects on more than a half-century of involvement in the world of poetry. He explains the three main functions of poetry as meaning, sound, and imagery. He laments the downfall that poetry has experienced in recent decades. He reads from some favorite poets as well as from his own work. He also reflects on the sad tendency of poets to die young.

00:00:00 Introduction
00:03:38 The debt owed by poets
00:13:20 Good and bad poetry
00:28:59 The loss of meaning
00:44:02 The danger of poetry
00:55:13 The sound of poetry
01:05:20 Reading from The Wars of Love
01:30:32 Poetry needs an audience
01:37:24 Let meaning and wisdom find you
01:42:24 Conclusion

New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science.

(Recorded on April 9, 2025)

For a short video on How to Get the Most From New Thinking Allowed, go to https://youtu.be/aVbfPFGxv9o

For a complete, updated list with links to all of our videos, see https://newthinkingallowed.com/Listings.htm.

Check out the New Thinking Allowed Foundation website at http://www.newthinkingallowed.org. There you will find our incredible, searchable database as well as opportunities to shop and to support our video productions – plus, this is where people can subscribe to our FREE, weekly Newsletter and can download a FREE .pdf copy of our quarterly magazine.

To order high-quality, printed copies of our quarterly magazine: NTA-Magazine.MagCloud.com

Check out New Thinking Allowed’s AI chatbot. You can create a free account at ai.servicespace.org. When you enter the space, you will see that our chatbot is one of several you can interact with. While it is still a work in progress, it has been trained on 1,600 NTA transcripts. It can provide intelligent answers about the contents of our interviews. It’s almost like having a conversation with Jeffrey Mishlove.

If you would like to join our team of volunteers, helping to promote the New Thinking Allowed YouTube channel on social media, editing and translating videos, creating short video trailers based on our interviews, helping to upgrade our website, or contributing in other ways (we may not even have thought of), please send an email to friends@newthinkingallowed.com.

To join the NTA Psi Experience Community on Facebook, see https://www.facebook.com/groups/1953031791426543/

To download and listen to audio versions of the New Thinking Allowed videos, please visit our new podcast at https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/new-thinking-allowed-audio-podcast/id1435178031.

Download and read Jeffrey Mishlove’s Grand Prize essay in the Bigelow Institute competition, Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death, go to https://www.bigelowinstitute.org/docs/1st.pdf.

You can help support our video productions while enjoying a good book. To order To order a copy of New Thinking Allowed Dialogues: Is There Life After Death? click on https://amzn.to/3LzLA7Y (As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.)

To order the second book in the New Thinking Allowed Dialogues series, Russell Targ: Ninety Years of ESP, Remote Viewing, and Timeless Awareness, go to https://amzn.to/4aw2iyr

To order a copy of New Thinking Allowed Dialogues: UFOs and UAP – Are We Really Alone?, go to https://amzn.to/3Y0VOVh

What are children for? In conversation with Anastasia Berg

Reading Our Times

Has Parenthood Become a Meaningful Choice?

The AI-powered Podcast Player