For Scientist Jim Sedell

CALLED, CREEKSIDE

ANY TIME MORNING, ANY PLACE WALDEN, ANY MOMENT ALIVE, AWAKE: GOING TO THE WOODS TO LIVE DELIBERATELY . . . . WITH MOM’S PIE BERRY PIE AND PBR–THE HORSE LEAVES THE BARN, THE TRILLIUM TRUMPS CLEARCUT HILL, AND POETRY THEREOF INCLUDING THE LIKES AND LOVES OF ROBERT FROST, MARY OLIVER, E.E. CUMMINGS, WENDELL BERRY, JESSICA GREENBAUM, RUMI, WILLIAM STAFFORD, GALWAY KINNELL, WILLIAM BLAKE, RAYMOND CARVER, DONALD HALL, DONALD RAVELL, SHAKESPEARE, 23 PSALM, OH AND YES, THOREAU, AHEM! AND YOUR RADIO HOST’S ENGAGING

ADVENTURES WITH WOODS AS AGENCY OF MORNING FOR OSU’S SPRING CREEK/TRILLIUM PROJECT (E.G., “WHAT I ATE AND WHAT I LIVED FOR”)

What is it about morning, the best time of the day, coming out of darkness, this miracle of resurrection, “I who have died am alive again today,” that line from e.e. Cummings in us, morning our time and earth’s time of turning, returning to our star of which we are made, rising, to more and more light, shining world in rain or sun, what was dark dazzling and glistening, what was silent now bird song, rooster crow, we’re slow, we’re been asleep, half unconscious . . .but now awake—as in e.e. cummings of this same sonnet which sings “i thank You God for most this amazing,” “i who have died am alive again today,” ending his morning prayer of gratitude, “now the eyes of my eyes are open and/now the ears of my ears are awake”– a fresh start, for all that is possible in our day and life. This is how Mary Oliver captures morning essence, “I happened to be standing,” from A Thousand Mornings. Let’s begin! There is more day to dawn! The sun is a morning star! This show was a joy to do and I send you morning energy from immersion in these poets and scientists whose reverence for woods and words inspires conviction of resurrection. Know you are earth’s beloved. (Write me at bmossberg@csumb.edu)

© Barbara Mossberg 2013

OF COURSE WE’RE HEARING POETRY ABOUT MOTHERS! I WON’T LIE TO YOU, THERE IS NOT A WHOLE LOT IN OUR HUMAN HISTORY OF POETRY ABOUT MOTHERS. YOU WOULD THINK, AS A TERRAN ARCHEOLOGIST FROM THE SIRENS OF TITAN THAT IN FACT WE ARE BY AND LARGE A MOTHERLESS RACE, ATHENAS POPPED OUT OF ZEUS’ HEAD, BASED ON THE ABSENCE OF POETRY ABOUT MOTHERS (AND IT USED TO BE, BY MOTHERS) AND EVEN DENIAL OF MOTHERS (“I NEVER HAD A MOTHER . . .”—E. DICKINSON). WE CAN DO WAR AND PEACE AND LIFE AND DEATH AND DADS AND INFINITE AND THE MOST SUBTLE AND BRING TO SIGNIFICANCE THE SEEMINGLY INSUBSTANTIAL, BUT MOTHERS . . . THE PEN QUAILS. THE QUILL QUIVERS. HOWEVER POETRY SLOW DOWN, YES, THERE ARE GREAT POEMS BY GREAT POETS ON MOTHERS HERE AND THERE—REALLY GREAT POEMS–, SO WE ARE IN LUCK, AND WE’LL HEAR POEMS ABOUT MOTHERS, BY MOTHERS, FOR MOTHERS, AND I’LL CONFESS MY OWN SNARKY TOTALLY OBLIVIOUS WITHOUT A CLUE WORK AS A SCHOLAR AND POET ON MOTHERS PRE-MOTHERHOOD AND THEN DURING HUMBLED MOTHERHOOD, AND SO WE GO ON THIS LABOR OF LOVE! WHICH IS, IN HUMAN EVOLUTION, EMBRYONIC, IN ITS INFANCY OF JUSTICE WE DO TO CREATION, CONCEPTION, LABOR, DELIVERY, AND THE WHOLE SHEBANG OF CONNECTION AND RESONSIBILITY FOR ANOTHER’S BEING, HOPE AND WORRY AND FEAR AND COURAGE AND BRAVERY AND SORROW. LET US GO THEN YOU AND I ON THE SUBJECT OF MOTHERS AND POETRY. A DYNAMIC “YOU AND I” OF MIND, BODY, AND SPIRIT. LISTEN FOR EMILY DICKINSON, WALT WHITMAN, CHRISTINA ROSETTI, ALICIA OSTRIKER, ALLEN GINSBERG, SANDRA GILBERT, MAY SARTON, PABLO NERUDA, TONY HOAGLAND, DAWN LUNDY MARTIN, ROBERT DUNCAN, RUDYARD KIPLING, ANNE TYLER, ANNE BRADSTREET, MARK STRAND, YEATS, R.L. STEVENSON, POE, NAOMI SHIHAB NYE, AND OTHERS INCLUDING TRULY YOURS,

Professor Barbara Mossberg, The Poetry Slow Down, KRXA 540AM, SUNDAYS NOON-1 PM PST

Thank you for joining me! Please write me at bmossberg@csumb.edu and slow down–you know you move too fast! Next week, going to the woods to live deliberately, in search of morning, round the clock . . . and more on the NASA Mars haiku send-off.

For more poems about mothers and motherhood, consider the following:

Sandra Gilbert’s book on motherhood poetry and her poems “After Thanksgiving” and “Belongings”

“Sonnet to My Mother” by George Barker

“Wedding Cake,” Naomi Shihab Nye

“My Mother Would Be a Falconress” by Robert Duncan

“Kaddish” by Allen Ginsberg
”Portrait” by Louise Glück

“Clearances” by Seamus Heaney

“A Poem for My Mother,” Pablo Neruda

“Kaddish” by David Ignatow

“In Memory of My Mother” by Patrick Kavanagh

“Mother ‘o Mine” by Rudyard Kipling

“Mother, Summer, I” by Phillip Larkin

“The 90th Year” by Denise Levertov

“Parents” by William Meredith

“Medusa” by Sylvia Plath

“To My Mother” by Edgar Allan Poe

“From Childhood” by Rainer Maria Rilke

“To My Mother” by Christina Rossetti
”[Sonnets are full of love, and this my tome]” by Christina Rossetti

“For My Mother” by May Sarton

“To My Mother” by Robert Louis Stevenson

“You Just Go On and Wave That Dishrag, Honey,” Barbara Mossberg

“My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer” by Mark Strand

“Mother Doesn’t Want a Dog” by Judith Viorst

“Mama, Come Back” by Nellie Wong

A JUICY SHOW: POETS DEFINE AND PRACTICE THE JUICE, PROVIDING ANSWERS FOR WHEN WE EACH ARE POSED THIS QUESTION IN THE HEADLINE NEWS—ASKED OF OUR PRESIDENT, NO LESS, DO YOU HAVE THE JUICE? Just what is meant by this metaphor? We’re going to hear how poets define the juice from Gerald Manley Hopkins to Shakespeare to Pablo Neruda to Gerald Stern to Winston Churchill, with mojo moxie displayed in poems from Emily Dickinson, Grace Paley, Walt Whitman, Robert Herrick, defiance energy from William Ernest Henley, Whitman, Albert Goldfarth, C.K. Williams, Timothy Seibles, the sense of fighting exuberant spirit of Rumi, Hafitz, Kabir, our most senior poets weighing in and showing us juice by the quart, Ruth Stone, Stanley Kunitz, Wendell Berry, Thomas Merton, W. B. Yeats; we’ll hear Mark Strand’s juice unnerving a librarian; we’ll see besieged and beleaguered leaders showing ways of juice including M. L. King, Jr., and we’ll hear Nikki Giovanni—the ultimate juice machine—and Thoreau message of the juice that may always be there no matter how dried up it looks, and even your own Professor B, showing some juice chops as gravity weighs her down. How indeed do we reply when we are asked, do you have the juice? Our show will show just what the juice is about and how poets are the Go To consultants when reporters come to our press conference. Continue reading →

Finding Eden (snake, weeds, and all) in Our Own Back Yards: The Poetry of Community Garden: Earth Day, John Muir’s Birth Day, lots of robust Muir poetry with notes of Milton, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, William Cullen Bryant, Gilgamesh, and our contemporary earth justice and love kin to Muir, Denise Levertov and Gary Snyder, and Mary Oliver’s Sunflowers, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, Theodore Roethke, and –is there a better testimony for love of earth—Stanley Kunitz. Oh! And on this note—perhaps the wisest of all, A.A. Milne, on the power of humility in engaging earth, weeds as flowers we don’t know yet

. . .

Continue reading →

Welcome to our Poetry Slow Down, KRXA 504AM, Think for Yourself Radio, produced by Sara Hughes, I’m your host Professor Barbara Mossberg, all because of the life of Senator William Fulbright: How is it that in going away, from all we know, we learn what we really do know; how experiencing ourselves as strange and foreign, learning that we who are know it alls–that’s why we got to go, after all–, don’t know it all, at all, and become both worldly in our newfound humbling experience of awkwardness, of being alive, and new to ourselves, in Tennyson’s words, open to the world as a bringer of new things? The Fulbright program’s purpose is to give scholars and leaders the opportunity to go to another country and be ourselves there; in the process, of sharing our being, what we know and do, we change, we transform, or rather, perhaps, we become our truer selves, in Eliot’s words, returning home to know the place for the first time. When the familiar suddenly is unfamiliar, that is when we see what It is the transforming magic of going away, of being fish out of water—they say if you want to know about water don’t ask a fish, yet who better to ask—than the creature who lives its life, feeds and needs and breeds in water—but the fish doesn’t even know water exists, waterty, waterness, until we take it out of water, THEN, then, it can tell us all about water and what it means to be a fish, so we, in going away, experiencing ourselves as other, learning about one’s strange and perhaps more interesting self, humbler certainly, unsettled, out of water, our

Continue reading →

Ears of our ears are opened! Thank you mr. e. e. cummings, you ARE indeed alive again today and so are we,—slowing down for our Poetry Slow Down, I am your host Professor Barbara Mossberg, alive again today, on the theme of resurrection—life rising again—when it was thought it was over—done with—gone for good—or bad—hopeless—and up springs against all the odds and expectations, life! The title of our show today Practicing Resurrection is from a line by a farmer poet, Wendell Berry, in his Manifesto: Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front poem, where he gives us advice, concluding with, “practice resurrection.” I’ve been writing at my parents’ 100 year old house with pond and trees and bushes and flowers that our son is trying to honor by keeping them alive, and what we thought truly was nevermore, I mean, that we were sure was really really dead, no signs of life at all, pathetic dried twigs, brown drowned leaves, are furled bright green leaves and fruit and blossom and lily pads, no, you were done for, how, how now? How has this miracle happened, what is the meaning for us in these ways of resurrection? Continue reading →