Poetry, Peonies, and Peaceful Slumber | Calm Company for a Quiet Workday

In Poetry, Peonies, and Peaceful Slumber, Amanda and Marco guide you through a softly spoken evening of verse, reflection, and the quiet signs of spring’s return. The episode begins with poetic musings as they share favorite writers and explore what draws them to certain lines and rhythms. Along the way, they gently debate the use of cue cards, reveal Marco’s personal note-taking methods, and offer a peek behind the curtain at how they prepare to speak. Amanda reads a calming poem by Mary Oliver, while Marco takes on Irving Layton with endearing imperfection, creating a relaxed, human moment that feels warm and unpolished in the best way.
As this calming podcast continues, the conversation drifts from literature to nature — soil warming beneath the surface and the first peony shoots pushing upward, a quiet reminder that change can be gradual and steady. The tone is unhurried and reassuring, designed to help you fall asleep, ease anxiety, or simply provide gentle background listening when quiet racing thoughts need something soft to rest against. Let the poetry, the small observations, and the easy rhythm of conversation carry you peacefully toward rest.

​Poetry, Peonies, and Peaceful Slumber
(Original airdate: April 16, 2025)


Welcome to the Insomnia Project. Sit back, relax and listen as we have a calm conversation that is designed to help you find your way to sleep possibly. And if it doesn't, that's okay too. You can just listen and calm and everything around you. I'm your host, Marco Timpano.

Amanda: I'm Amanda Parker. I'm sleepy.

Marco: Are you Amanda? Well, thank you for joining us both yourself who's sleepy, and our listeners who might be.

Amanda: Thank you for joining us both, myself who's sleepy, and our listeners who are

Marco: soon to be Amanda, I just read something that asked me what my favorite poem is and you know, and it says, do you have a favorite poem, poem, poet, etc. So I had to think and I was like, you know what? I remember really enjoying the poems of Irving Layton. Do you know Irving Layton?

Amanda: Kind of.

Marco: He's a poet from Montreal who had. Who used a lot of satire in his works.

Amanda: Yeah, right. In the like the 20s.

Marco: He was. No, I would say in the 40s, 50s, 60s, I think he did a

Amanda: poem about William Ly and McKenzie King,

Marco: I wouldn't be surprised.

Amanda: And he kind of made fun of him, if I'm thinking correctly, because William Lyon Mackenzie King, for those who don't know, or maybe you've heard the name, he was our third prime minister, I think.

Marco: Sure.

Amanda: I think he was our third prime minister. And he was quite a colorful character. And so one of the things he said, and this would make sense if it was written in the 20s, but William Lyon Mackenzie King, when asked if he was going to send people off to war and conscription, I remember he said conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription. That was his big answer to that for the crowds. But that doesn't mean anything. But that was kind of how he was. And he also was really well known because he really consulted astrological charts to make decisions. And I think he, if I'm remembering correctly, not only did he have an astrologer that he would, you know, make decisions for the company based on this person's predictions, but then he believed his cat.

Marco: Who doesn't?

Amanda: I might be making this up. I don't know. I think he consulted his mother. When his mother passed, he believed that she was in the spirit of his cat.

Marco: Okay.

Amanda: So then he would consult his cat and then when the cat died, he had like seances to bring the cat spirit to life to tell him how to lead the country or something. I might be making this up. I don't know. This is buried in my consciousness.

Marco: He was the 10th Prime Minister, I just looked it up.

Amanda: So there you go.

Marco: But he was a prime minister. He served three consecutive terms, if that makes a difference to you. Yeah. So I love the satire of Irving Layton. And of course he was supposedly a predecessor or a teacher to Leonard Cohen, who I'm a big fan of as well. Who or what is your favorite poem?

Amanda: Oh, gosh.

Marco: Or poet.

Amanda: Well, we've talked about it many times before. I do love Robert Frost. I know it's. That's a. Maybe not an obscure reference, you know, maybe that's a really well trod path to use his own imagery, but I really do love Robert Frost. So probably Robert Frost. Mary Oliver is also fantastic.

Marco: I don't know who that is.

Amanda: And I didn't know who she was until just recently. I don't read a lot of poetry. It's kind of sad. When I was a kid, I loved poetry and I would. I loved it a lot. I would write it, I would read it. And very often late at night, I'd be just kind of falling asleep, and then out of nowhere, this sort of lightning bolt would come to me of a poem, almost like a fully formed poem. And then I would have to write it down. If I didn't write it down, it'd be gone the next morning, so. But it would mean getting out of bed, which I never wanted to do, but I would jump out of bed and write it all down and write it down until it was out of me. And I heard once that Paul Simon wrote the Sound of Silence. Very recently, I heard this. He wrote the Sound of Silence that way.

Marco: Oh, wow.

Amanda: That. It just sort of struck him like a lightning bolt, fully. Like a fully formed song almost. And he just had to get it on paper and write it, both the lyrics and the melody. And he went into his bathroom at like, four in the morning in, I think, Brooklyn, where he lived.

Marco: Sure.

Amanda: Or Queens, and wrote it all down at 16 years old. The sound of silence.

Marco: Wow. That's incredible.

Amanda: So I'm no Paul Simon, I mean, because I couldn't do the melody. And I miss that because I don't really have those sort of strokes of creative inspiration. Have you had that?

Marco: Not when it comes to poetry. And I, you know, me and sleep. Right. So I'm not the type of person to wake up and write, write something down, though I probably should be.

Amanda: But have you had that feeling of like, I've got to get this out of me, this thought, this poem, this idea?

Marco: Yeah, yeah, I have, and I do, and sometimes. And Amanda knows this about me, but listeners might not know. I like using cue cards. And so there's always a plethora of cue cards in our home that I'm constantly writing on or using for work. It's interesting when you see the work that I do. I often use a lot of highlighters. I use lots of certain pens. You know, I love certain pens that have a nice flow of ink. And so I'll make a lot of cue cards that indicate what I need to know. For a client today, I had a very challenging client. They weren't difficult at all. It was just a very heavy, heavy subject, I guess you could say. And so it was a. It was a long process and a long day with. With These clients who were lovely. But I used a lot of cue cards, and I have a lot of cue cards around the house. And today I couldn't find my white cue cards. I needed to white cue cards. And I was like, where are my. All my cue cards? And they're not where they usually are, which means I've used them. But I'll often write because, you know,

Amanda: I'm not using them.

Marco: No, you. You don't really use cue cards.

Amanda: Well, I had a cue card agenda forced onto me when I was, like, in my. When I was, like, 13. It was like. They made me write speeches on cue cards. And I didn't want to.

Marco: Oh, wow.

Amanda: But we were told we had to. That the only proper way to give a speech was to have it on cue cards. So I would write out these speeches and cram them into cue cards, but I would much rather have paper.

Marco: Okay.

Amanda: That's just who I am. And so to me, they feel less scattered, less messy. If I just have a couple good sheets of paper laid out in front of me. Can't always. You don't always have the space for that. But. Yeah, but they were always like, no, you have to write it on a cue card. And it has to be point form the touch points. I get the concept, and I did do it, but I always felt like it was, like, forced on me.

Marco: And that's more my style. The cue card and writing pointing form on cue card.

Amanda: Who introduced a cue card? Was there also a cue card agenda in your school? No.

Marco: What's interesting, I never used cue cards in high school, grade school, or university.

Amanda: Really?

Marco: Yeah.

Amanda: That's so funny. We didn't know this about each other. That I was forced to use. So much so that my entire Mount Allison application was all done on cue cards.

Marco: Oh, my goodness.

Amanda: Embarrassingly so, I think. I don't know how they let me in.

Marco: But anyway, if you see a lot of my work today, I use a lot of highlighters. It's very colorful. It's very bubbly. You would think it was, you know, a grade schooler writing my notes. But I make very thorough notes, and they help me separate ideas and keep concepts together. So for me, that totally works. Yeah.

Amanda: So, yeah, your notes are always great.

Marco: Mine are not going back to poetry and poems. One of my favorite poems that you could not fit on a cue card would be Leonard Cohen's A Thousand Kisses Deep, which is also a song, but it was a poem that had constant evolution because he was always adding to it. Yeah. And so one of my Favorites.

Amanda: Can we read our poems or some of our favorite poems?

Marco: Oh, yeah, we can, but that's a really long poem.

Amanda: Well, there's a poem called Wild Geese by Mary Oliver that I really, really.

Marco: Do you know it off by heart?

Amanda: No.

Marco: Okay. You can certainly read it.

Amanda: I'm trying to remember. Do you know any poems off by heart?

Marco: Just some dirty limericks, but I won't share those. I will say this. I will say this. Amanda, do you remember we went to a hotel, this really cool hotel, which we may have mentioned on the podcast, but it's worth mentioning again. And every room in this hotel, it was in Paris or it is in Paris, Ontario, Ontario.

Amanda: So funny. You're like, it was in Paris while it was in Paris, Ontario.

Marco: And some would say Paris, Ontario is as dynamic as Paris, France.

Amanda: It's the Paris of Ontario.

Marco: Yeah, it certainly is. So they have this wonderful hotel where every room is themed that of an author. So it has a theme that reflects an author.

Amanda: Do we remember the name of the hotel?

Marco: I don't.

Amanda: It begins with an A.

Marco: Let me see if I can find the Ambassador Hotel. I'm going to guess.

Amanda: No, it's like a name like Alderwood or something. Let me look it up because I feel badly talking about it and not mentioning the name for one source.

Marco: Well, Amanda's looking that up. I'll tell you this. So we went with some friends and we had two rooms and we were quite, you know, excited to see what author reflects our Arlington.

Amanda: The Arlington.

Marco: That's what I. Yeah, that's what I meant, the Arlington. So. So our friends went in their room and they turned the key and they opened. And this was around Halloween too, so it was really interesting.

Amanda: It was the weekend of Halloween. Yeah.

Marco: Right. So they opened the door and they had the Edgar Allan Poe room, which was wonderfully designed and certainly thematic for the weekend.

Amanda: Yes, there was a raven. Most definitely not a live one, but there's certainly a raven. And Poe's poetry. And it was done in sort of an eerie kind of dark lavender. Indigo, kind of the color of like twilight darkness.

Marco: It was very somber, too. It wasn't very somber. It felt very relaxing in a way.

Amanda: A lot of blacks, a lot of dark, sort of purples and lavenders. Yeah.

Marco: And of course, Edgar Allan Poe is a poem.

Amanda: Poet.

Marco: Poet who? A lot of people like. Like that poem you mentioned, the. The Raven.

Amanda: Yeah, he's a poet. I don't. I always think of him more of a short story guy, but yeah, I guess he was a poet.

Marco: Isn't that the raven.

Amanda: A poem.

Marco: His poem. I'm going to guess it is a short story poem. Whatever.

Amanda: Cloth. The raven nevermore. Yeah. Because there's, there's repetition there.

Marco: So we were glad to see our friend's room. And they're like, okay, let's go to your room and see yours. And we were quite excited and we turned the key and. And open the room and it was the Maya Angelou room. So it wasn't thematic with Spooky, with Halloween.

Amanda: So.

Marco: But I remember that we were hoping,

Amanda: like, there's a Mary Shelley room, for example. So we're hoping for like a Frankenstein, you know, something Halloween.

Marco: And I remember that above the Bed was her poem Still I Rise. And they painted it on the. Above the bed frame. And it was actually quite, quite lovely to see that. It's like one of your favorite poems written above your bed. And it's an inspirational poem especially thematic with Rising from bed too. Like, I just thought it was really, really cool in that way.

Amanda: Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah. Like, I took a writing. I took writing in university. I wrote poems in university a bit more. And we had all these different assignments of forms of poems that we had to write.

Marco: I remember in school, whenever we had to do a poem assignment, I would always choose the haiku because I thought it was easier to write because they were short poems, actually.

Amanda: Harder to write.

Marco: It is harder to write, but not when you want to get it done quick and you don't care about what comes out as long as it meets that standard.

Amanda: No, I loved it. I mean, any type of class or assignment where I had to write a poem was joy for me. I loved it.

Marco: You know what I love, too? When you're on the ttc, which is the Toronto transit system, for us, it's the subway system. They have reader poem or writer poems on the. I don't know what you call it. Like, the little area above where you sit. There's an area where you'll often see advertisements, but they'll also add writer poems. So if you're a writer, the tdc, you can submit your poem and it might be featured there. And you know when you're standing because there's no room to sit and you know you're waiting, you know you've got a bit of a way to go. Those, those can actually help pass the time and you can really appreciate it. You know, I read a haiku recently that was really beautiful. And I was like, oh, that's why these are so great. And I couldn't I couldn't tell. Tell it to you right now.

Amanda: What? I really. Should I read Wild Geese?

Marco: Of course you should.

Amanda: Okay, let me just angle it so that it's a little more legible.

Marco: Amanda's a great reader of poems. When she reads poems, I always enjoy that.

Amanda: Really?

Marco: Yeah, I do.

Amanda: You think so? I don't know about that. Okay, let's see how good I am. I have no glasses on.

Marco: Should I honk while you're doing this? As a goose for geese? Just for sound effects.

Amanda: No.

Marco: No.

Amanda: Okay.

Marco: Might be disruptive for our listeners.

Amanda: All right, so this is Mary Oliver's Wild Geese. I'm feeling a lot of pressure now that you said man is a really good poem. I mean, I'm just gonna read it.

Marco: Cold read.

Amanda: It's a nice cold read of a warm poem. You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile, the world goes on. Meanwhile, the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are making moves across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains, and the rivers. Meanwhile, the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely the world offers itself to your imagination calls to you like wild geese, harsh and exciting, over and over, announcing your place in the family of things.

Marco: And there you go. Wild Geese by Mary Oliver. Very nice. Thank you, Amanda, for sharing that. I love hearing you read poems. We should have an episode where you just read a whole bunch of poems.

Amanda: Sure. I could read all my favorite. I have a Robert Frost book upstairs. I can blow the dust off that.

Marco: Let us know if you'd like to hear that. And please share with us your favorite poem, and maybe we'll include that in the poetry readings that Amanda will do. On the podcast, we mention these things and then we forget about them, but if that's something you'd like to hear, let us know.

Amanda: Yeah, you know, I was just. I got a text from an old friend today, and I haven't talked to her in a long time, and she. It just reminded me that she gave me a poetry book, and I'm trying to remember which one it was. I think it was poems. There was a Kennedy reference. So it was like the favorite poems of Jackie Kennedy or something like that, I think. I don't think it was just Robert Frost, although I associate Robert Frost with sort of that time frame, you know, 50s, 60s. But I don't. I think I have to think about it. I think she gave me. Yeah. I'll have to look anyway. I'll remember that to her. Although I don't know if I still have the book, but I probably do. I don't keep many books.

Marco: You don't? You don't.

Amanda: I try really hard not to keep books.

Marco: The books you have are the books that you cherish and might go back to.

Amanda: Mm. And there's very few. I mean, I'm reading Emily St. John Mandel's books right now and realizing that all of her books are interconnected in fairly thin threads. Like, they're not. It's more like little Easter eggs throughout the. Throughout the text of different characters or people that you might know sort of passing through other people's narratives, which is really interesting. That term Easter eggs. That's a video game term, right? People say that. Easter eggs.

Marco: Oh, that's a good. I don't know where did that.

Amanda: I mean, obviously we know Easter and Easter hunts and things like that. Egg hunts and finding treasure sort of buried. But we now say it for literary references and movie references. I'm just trying to think of where that came from.

Marco: I don't know.

Amanda: I don't know either.

Marco: I will read here Irving Layton's poem, Whatever else, Poetry is Freedom.

Amanda: Okay.

Marco: That's the title of it, and it's a cold read, so I'll read that just to share one of Irving Leighton's poems, Whatever Else, Poetry is Freedom. Forget the rhetoric, the trick of metaphor, the painted face it wears. Believe me, not for a moment did I think the word arrangement and sweet sounds were all. No, it's the naked face which I approach. Others may sing white peak. But I have seen it and prefer to celebrate the smell of human sweat. These poems. I guess I should stop here because these are my p**** fencing with death.

Amanda: Wait, what? People are falling asleep.

Marco: I didn't expect that turn.

Amanda: People are trying to fall asleep.

Marco: I know. I just wasn't expecting.

Amanda: You went crazy.

Marco: I didn't. It's just, you know, when you pull up a poetry. A poem called Whatever Else, Poetry is Freedom. You don't expect that.

Amanda: You could have glossed over.

Marco: I guess I could have. Whatever Else, Poetry is Freedom. I shall not make it pretty with.

Amanda: I looked up and he was kind of, like, smiling at the mic, not sure what to do, and I was like, what's going on?

Marco: Well, there you go. A little poetry can really affect emotions. Let me continue the poem and Finish it off.

Amanda: I apologize to you and to Irving.

Marco: Whatever else, poetry is freedom. I shall not make it pretty with comely nouns, nor sweeten it. Please.

Amanda: What's going on?

Marco: Okay, I think I'll just skip this part here.

Amanda: Okay. All right.

Marco: I think I'll just stop.

Amanda: We see why you like Irvin.

Marco: Yeah, so I see.

Amanda: Not fit for sleep.

Marco: Yeah. So, anyways, yeah. Speaking of spring poetry and Easter eggs, our peonies, I saw.

Amanda: Wait, what?

Marco: Yes. They're really. Yes, they're popping out and ready to.

Amanda: Those poor peonies.

Marco: They've been through so much.

Amanda: Every year they get moved. And the one thing you know about peonies is they hate to be moved.

Marco: And it's not, and trust me, we are not moving those peonies. The city has dug up our front area, our front yard, if you will, a couple of times last year, and moving our peonies. And I was not pleased, to say the least, with regards to that, Amanda. So hopefully our peonies, who are popping up right now, will delight us with flowers. You know, peonies is one of my favorite flowers, as are the crocuses that came up this spring. I love to see crocuses. And they were. They were popping their heads and they came in little waves, which I like. The yellow ones came first, then purple.

Amanda: Yellow first, then purple. Now we're into the white.

Marco: Yeah, I wasn't expecting that. Usually they. In the past, they've come out at the same time.

Amanda: It's weird. Yeah. It's really been color based, and I don't know why that is, but it has exactly been that. Yeah. I don't know why I thought the white. When the yellow came up, I thought, oh, no, white. There's a yellow and a bit of purple and then a lot of purple. And I just thought, oh, we used to have white. I wonder what happened to them. And then up they came.

Marco: Yes, they did.

Amanda: Do crocuses come in other colors other than those?

Marco: No, not. Well, I mean, I think there's like, some mottled or, like, some crocuses that might have a little bit of pink tinge to them. But I do know the crocus is what provides you with saffron.

Amanda: Right.

Marco: The saffron crocus. So.

Amanda: And then in between the crocuses and the peonies, we must mention that the tulips are coming up.

Marco: Have you seen tulips come up?

Amanda: Well, there's the leaves for the tulips.

Marco: Oh, that's great.

Amanda: And then there's daffodils. And there is a daffodil that's going to emerge there. Every year we get one. We get the leaves of a bunch, the promise of a lot of daffodils, but usually only one kind of pokes its head through. But my mom had a good point. She was talking about my dad's gardening that he does and container gardening. And she said, you know, if you really want, because I give him seeds all the time, of different fruits and veg to grow in his little container garden that he has. And she said to him, you know, if you want these tomatoes and beans, whatever, if you want them to grow, you really have to invest in better soil.

Marco: Yes.

Amanda: Because he hasn't been. And so now, apparently my dad is buying, like, the Cadillac of soils. And she's like, okay, you need to calm down with the soil, because that's all he's doing because he's seeing the results. But I would say the same to you and I about that little patch out there. Like, I don't think we use the best soil.

Marco: I'm going to buy. You know, that's a really great point, Amanda. I'm going to buy soil this year and add some nice soil to that front mix or to that front.

Amanda: Because, honestly, it gets dug up by the city. I mean, it's right on a sidewalk.

Marco: So it's also city soil. When they were digging it up, they were like, this is so hard. This is like. Yeah, really? It took. It took them three times to dig where they needed to dig.

Amanda: It's amazing. Anything grows, to be honest, from there. So, yeah, they could probably use a little tlc. And then, of course, the lilacs. The lilacs will come next month.

Marco: My nephew was really interested because his mom pointed out the buds on our tree. And so that's going to be a lot of fun.

Amanda: We do have a beautiful lilac tree. Thank you to Margaret, who planted it for this house. This was her house. She was the only other person who lived here, right?

Marco: No, there was, I think, one gentleman who lived here before that.

Amanda: Oh, really?

Marco: I found his bank card in the wall one time. Yeah. So there you go.

Amanda: In the wall. Do you think you put it there?

Marco: No, it was in the cupboard in kind of when I was resurfacing the cupboard or something. It must have fallen out of where he must have. In there or something. And.

Amanda: But I mean, it was from a time when we had bank card. So he. Yeah, that's interesting.

Marco: It did look like an old rudimentary bank card.

Amanda: The first generation.

Marco: Do you remember his Name Li or something like that. That E, L. And then lie. L, A, I. I think it was something like. Something like that is what I recall. But not. I will say this, Amanda, you mentioned your poem about wild geese. Or not your poem. A poem you like?

Amanda: Yeah, I did not write it, but yeah.

Marco: And for those who don't live in North America, in particular our part of North America, you might not see this, but the Canadian geese are coming home. And when they fly above, because they come home for spring and summer, they form a V pattern, and you'll hear them honking in the distance.

Amanda: It's quite a thing. Wild geese flying is quite a thing, honestly. There you hear them honking in the distance, and you just watch them as they come overhead. And this is when they fly, you know, now they're flying back in to our country, but also in the fall when they fly south, and then you stand underneath them and you just hear this incredible flapping of their wings. I love that sound. Just the flap, flap, flap of their wings. I don't know how to even. It's just the sound. It's a really gentle sound, so you have to. So flap. Doesn't quite encapsulated, but it's just the sound of, like, the wings pushing the air. And you can almost like a. I don't know. How would you describe it?

Marco: A ripple in the air? I don't know.

Amanda: Yeah, it's almost like a mechanical. I don't know how to describe it. Yeah, the sound of geese flapping their wings. But it's a really cool sound. It's like a rush of air above you. I guess that's the best way I can put it.

Marco: The sound of the equinox, if you will.

Amanda: Yeah, I will.

Marco: All right. Well, on that note, I hope you will tell people about. About this podcast, let them know that we're here for them. The more listeners we have, the more we can produce. And that's Amanda yawning. So I think it's time we say good night. We hope you have a lovely rest of your day, evening or afternoon. And until next time, we hope you were able to listen and sleep.