Live from Butterfly Town, USA. We’re talking about butterflies today, in honor of their incredible desire and ability to migrate thousands of miles—straight here. The haven Monarch butterflies come home to is Pacific Grove, where I’m Poet in Residence, and in this role I was asked this week to recite a poem and blessing at the annual event for the Monarch Sanctuary as the butterflies once again begin to return. Local citizens have roused to care for their habitat; with about fifty enthusiastic welcomers including Essalen Nation Tribal Chairwoman Louise Ramirez, and Cedar Street Times Editor and community arts leader Marge Ann Jameson greeting about three abashed (but glorious) butterflies, I confess to you that I titled my address, Glorious R Us.  Or: This is What Comes of Taking Care of the Trees, Please  Before I wrote my own words, I thought about what has been written about butterflies. I found myself involved in epigraphs. From “Sanctuary” by Jaci Velasquez, to Paul Erlich, Buckminster Fuller, Carl Sagan, John Muir (see Thecla Muirii), to every poet you ever heard of, we see the butterfly. I don’t know who loves butterflies more—scientists or poets. All the poets wanted to be part of the words for monarch’s return—they all made their case to be epigraphically chosen for this occasion—Emily Dickinson made the case that she has explicit and implicit poems on butterflies, and Walt Whitman interrupted– I’m sorry Walt, I don’t recall your writing about butterflies. But who wants Walt to be wrong, I don’t, and it turns out, his favorite photograph of himself is with a butterfly, of himself regarding, and being touched by, a butterfly, like the Sistine Chapel ceiling painting by Michelangelo of Adam and God, and he put this photo on the cover of his edition of Leaves of Grass. . . a story which we reveal hence. More about that anon. Some favorites writing on butterflies: Pablo Neruda, D.H. Lawrence, e.e. cummings, Ralph Waldo Emerson, W.S. Merwin, Robert Frost, Louise Gluck, and virtually a who’s who of world poetry. But I chose the man who wrote The Unsettling of America, of our efforts to preserve and respect and have reverence and awe for our local land and each other—Wendell Berry, and we’ll hear his philosophy of place and form that illuminates butterfly dynamics, and his poems “What We Need Is Here” and “The Peace of Wild Things.” We consider the concept of learning earth as home from poets and butterflies, and the relationship therein, of miracle and mystery of transformation, and I share my poem written for the occasion of the (hopefully) returning Monarchs to Pacific Grove, whose citizens certainly deserve this sacred trust. I wrote an epigraph of my own whose theme is Glorious has “us” in it.

To Pacific Grove,

Sanctuary of butterfly:

Who takes miracle seriously;

Whose law it is to honor our role as earth steward,

Whose policy it is to get ourselves back to the garden,

Whose civic culture is to make of earth Paradise.

Whose Welcome sign to town—welcome to Butterfly Town, USA—and whose welcome sign to the sanctuary—may have something to do with the butterfly’s sense of home . . . where they take their stand. I make the case for us cocooned hearts, why the butterflies might want to hang out with us. Imagine being a place trusted by butterfly! The poem ends,

Right around the corner of time, right inside of us,

Is another stage for us, on this homecoming,

In the world we tend of loam and breeze and fog and foam,

When we improbably become glorious.

And the butterflies know it, and come home.

You’re telling me not to give up.

Ever; who knows what we will become?

Yes, Who’s on First, teaching us,

What butterflies mean to the soul,

When they return to join us on our visitation:

Miracle, evidence pure and simple—as for the rest:

We make of life a sanctuary, and here, we are whole.

Living here, to bless, and be blessed.

In writing about butterflies, I am a dime a dozen. This is a garden variety poetic topic! We discuss transformation butterfly-style and human-style, the Sphinx’s riddle and Homer’s Odyssey, and then we discuss Emily Dickinson’s life and poetry through the lens of her understanding and value of the butterfly. This lens opens up her poems of interior chaos, silence, and secrecy. We hear Thoreau’s philosophy on happiness based on knowledge of butterflies, and Shakespeare’s concluding scene with King Lear and Cordelia. We touch on William Blake and Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, and others. We hear from Pablo Neruda, Garcia Lorca on Walt Whitman’s butterflies in his beard, and unfortunately skip over about 200 examples ranging from T.S. Eliot to e.e. cummings to Marianne Moore to George Carlin to W.B. Yeats, Rumi Robert Graves . . . . We hear two great poems by W.S. Merwin (“One Or Two Things”), butterfly poems by Charles Wright and James Wright, and Emerson and Thoreau’s journals on the butterfly. When Thoreau discusses the butterfly transformation in terms of pregnancy and nature’s laws, I reflect on this day of giving birth thirty-one years ago to my son Nico, and the transformation that occurs when we are visited by butterflies in our life, always transforming, and in the process, transforming us. I share the song I wrote the night he was born, a metaphoric exploration of all his forms that he would take, a song that has come true. And if there were time we would conclude with Emily Dickinson’s poem for Fall, and her blessing of the butterfly. But we will come back to this. Meanwhile, I will be speaking in a public lecture, so come, to the Pacific Grove Public Library Friday September 30, 7 pm, on YOUR INNER BUTTERFLY: THE POWER OF WORDS TO CHANGE YOUR WORLD. As we are dazzled and dazed by the mystery and miracle of those who come to us, each of us a sacred grove and sanctuary of spirit, I wish you a garden of poetry, which attracts butterflies, and all seeking a home. As the people who come to us make us feel grove sanctuary to butterfly, blessed in visits–each person, are we not the sanctuary, the home to whoever comes to us, in this life? Are we not the butterfly in all its stages, so difficult and fraught and often dark and still, and confined . . .  is it not struggle, and then glorious flight, and journey? But think of the joy and hope—such visitation of all of us here on earth bring . . .  to each other.  Thank you for joining me, and please write me a bmossberg@csumb.edu.

© Barbara Mossberg 2011

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Greetings, fellow harvesters of earth’s bounty in mental and literal fields, psychic soil which nourishes and sustains us. I am thrilled to return to you, at this time of traditional harvest celebration, following our recent full moon, the time of the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, celebrating the summer harvest and the myth of the moon and immortality (think: poetry!) goddess, with mooncakes. So we will have a version of mooncakes, and see what our garden has produced. Our line-up for harvest feast includes reprises from literary spring planting, adoration of weeds, salivating for fruits, dazzling array of vegetarian plenty, and thoughts concerning sustainability of harvest and field, the earth garden. Thank you for joining me, as we honor creation itself.

To the dulcet tones of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon,” renditions of “Try to Remember (the Warmth of September),” “Shine On Harvest Moon,” Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” (“We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden”), and Donovan’s Mellow Yellow,” we hear MELLOW YELLOW LATE SUMMER/ FALL GARDENS, HARVEST MOON/HARVEST MOOD: POETRY IN EARLY AUTUMN. Gary Snyder’s “For All” sets the warm tone in a medley of mellow yellow September poems, including John Updike’s “September,” Jane Kenyon’s “Coming Home at Twilight in Late Summer,” and the Academy of American Poet’s Poem of the Day Amy Lowell’s “Autumn.” Reading poetry brings my consciousness closer to the land, in a kind of save-the-earth way we have seen with such writers as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Gary Snyder, David Brower, and Wendell Berry, a way of seeing that ultimately transforms save-the-earth to save-our-earth. A different way of thinking, from The earth to Our earth. It changes everything. Poetry takes us closer and closer to earth itself– do you remember our shows about getting on our knees, getting down with the soil? Eyeing grass and grasshoppers eye to eye? Can we read Mary Oliver or Walt Whitman without getting grass stains and mud on our minds, when we speak, people saying where have you been? But we look so happy, and then, somehow, there are all these poems about the garden itself. I feel the garden is the ultimate topic: literature and perhaps religion and science and philosophy and culture—from cultivation—all we know– began with our consciousness of the garden, the place we engage with and become co-creators of earth; and the people who are writing about the garden so passionately are poets who are slowing down themselves, so to speak, and I mean in a good way, slowing down to let the brain do its work, the eyes see, the ears hear, the tongue taste, the nose smell, all the senses reporting live from the Earth making it Our Earth. We hear Keats and Blake and Mary Oliver, Mark Strand, Barbara Crooker, Phillip Lopate, Gerard Stern, Gerard Manly Hopkins, Roethke, Charles Wright, Mark Doty, J.D. Salinger, and our show’s third section feature, 100 year old Stanley Kunitz. So our show today is homage to a mellow yellow harvest mood, and I’ve been thinking of some way to acknowledge what people have gone through recently with flood and fire, wind and rain, drought and loss, and it seems that poetry about gardening in a time of slowing down and withering, a time that looks like it’s winding down, invokes a way to think hopefully about what is deep and eternal and immortal in us, and our engagement with this earth. The more we slow down, the more apparent and shining is our earth to the eye, and we give more and more of ourselves to earth. In the conversion of psychic soil, toiling and tilling the earth until it becomes rich loam for creation as our earth, we think of ourselves in this process of season somehow, now, late summer/early autumn. I share with you my journal from a few weeks ago, writing to you in my perch on earth, office of sky and bench on the subject of gardens and meditating on what is edible (including you and me, and I’m thinking this is a good thing, imagining being delicious and good health to earth—and all that makes it “our” earth—the secret of earth’s beauty and vitality?).

The poem I mention in this meditation is “Coho”: I wrote it after a visit to the supermarket and saw wrapped in plastic lying on ice a Coho salmon, eyes fixed, who knows what seeing, saw, so shortly ago in some shining stream or some water with green gleam. And I knew I was going to eat this salmon—I wrote this in my car in the parking lot—

Coho, it isn’t just you.

It’s me, too.

Once you are strength moving through water, silver flow,

Gleaming in sunshine, shining scales, on your way,

And now, I’m eating you, you’re bagged, my afternoon treat,

And while I think of your life, how it ended this way,

I realize that someday

That’s me, too, not eaten perhaps in just this

Way but wouldn’t that be nice, if I were so nutritious,

Of such worth,

If eating me would make some creature lustrous and glow,

If I were good to its health?

Though perhaps in whatever form I become as part of earth

I will feed the waving trees and worm who is feast to some bird,

And when we think of what the river would need

It would be nice to think in such poem this prayer is heard.

We consider Ambrose Bierce’s “The Devil’s Dictionary” definition of “edible,” and as we explore the view of “our” earth, and autumn, we think of the senses that open us to life’s meaning, with Diane Ackerman. We conclude with a short discussion of Stanley Kunitz’s The Wild Braid (which I always think of as “Wild Brain”) on poetry and gardening as inextricable practice and devotion, for life and immortality. And so for now, in these days of late summer, early Fall, be mellow, like earth, find solace in poems, with water and warmth in them, and good nurture, there’s shade and things grow, there’s a pumpkin growing somewhere, and if you take the flowers and sauté them, they make a great pasta sauce, and I’m thinking we’ll have a show on the poetry of autumn feasts including wine, old vine Zin, and the poetry of wine labels, and I’ll share with you some pumpkin recipes that I have dreamed, for edible poems. And meanwhile: if you are on the Central Coast of California, Pacific Grove, the evolved City aka Butterfly Town USA, where I am Poet in Residence, is planning Chautauqua Days, September 30, and I’m contributing a lecture called “Your Inner Butterly: The Power of Words to Change Our World,” at Pacific Grove Library, and I’ll tell you more about it, anon. Soon cafes will be serving pumpkin lattes and on that note, let’s end with a poem of the sweetness of late summer, coming to you wherever you are right now: it’s William Blake, notes of Keats, “To Autumn.” To be continued. Always. The message of Autumn, from our poets. Yours truly, Professor Barbara Mossberg. Please write me at bmossberg@csumb.edu.

© Barbara Mossberg 2011

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Notes to our producers:

I don’t know if I am going to get through this show without crying. . . thinking about 9-11 and the ways people use words in our times of greatest calamity is so moving to me—how the human spirit rises to the occasion, how sorrow dignifies and defines and redeems us . . . how all that’s left in the wreckage, as poets poke about our smoking ruins, is hearts, calling for love.

THE EPIC QUOTIDIAN: NOTES OF 9-11—LOVE CALLING

“Honey. Something terrible is happening. I don’t think I’m going to make it. I love you. Take care of the children.”

“Hey, Jules. It’s Brian. I’m on the plane and it’s hijacked and it doesn’t look good. I just wanted to let you know that I love you, and I hope to see you again. If I don’t, please have fun in life, and live life the best you can. Know that I love you, and no matter what, I’ll see you again.”

“Mommy. The building is on fire. There’s smoke coming through the walls. I can’t breathe. I love you, Mommy. Good-bye.”

9-11 cell phone calls, recorded and made into song by Aaron Kula, and chanted by Rabbi Irwin Kula, who plays them every morning, a universal poem of all people everywhere. For the Poetry Slow Down, hello, you. I read those words–Honey, hi mommy, hey, Brian, those last words, quotidian words, words of dailiness, ordinariness, that achieve so much–with you, our listening community, feeling pride in humanity, of who we are, what we make of our lives after all, what we say when we call . . . We’re slowing down today, on a momentous day for people all over the world, what we call 9-11, a day of memory, of something that happened to each of us ten years ago, a day on which things changed forever—the way we see our daily lives, the way we see our communities, our country, our world—to ask, at a time of community sorrow and remembrance, how do words matter? Words, when they are spoken utterly, are not so much transformed into poetry, but revealed as poetry: the poetry essence we say to each other when we speak with love and care, when we speak urgently, as if it matters. The words that were recorded of people’s cell phone calls to their loved ones, as they were going down in a plane, or trapped in a burning tower, or on the ground, as the world collapses around them. The words you say, when you will not be there when they are heard or read . . . this is the moment, the momentum, the momentousness of poetry, the words wrought and frought with moment, words of order and beauty– in a time of fright, a time of blight, conscious that words have a life beyond one’s self, that they are something that comes out of us immortal—something in our spirit that is unkillable, that is remarkable, that sings and gives solace and courage and understanding long after the human brains that uttered them are with us: the mind alive, set free in words that live as long as eyes and ears. I am thinking of poems inspired by catastrophes that beset us: there is no scale to the mind’s experience of shock and sorrow . . . poems, of 490 BC, or 1593, or 1862, or 2000 or 2001, or 2011, responding to events of war or storm or disease or love or loss, express the effort of the human mind to . . . find a way to go on, to encourage both oneself and others . . . and to offer companionship on our life journey.

As I thought about our show today, Poetry Slow Down, we who journey together on air waves connecting us, we who worry this day, we who have suffered losses and feel dread of magnitude, and those of us in past days and weeks without power, drenched, and in drought, surrounded by fires, and flood, I think of words from a little lady you and I know, so removed from society’s disasters, what did she know of calamity, of disaster, of epic proportions? The Civil War was far away from the ringing church bells of Amherst and her second story perch on Main Street, down from Mount Pleasant Street. She was not in a neighborhood that was going to be torched; she was not surrounded by screams. But words of others in letters and the news, and home-sized tragedies, informed her sense of shock and loss. She was, as a poet, a citizen, reeling from the actualities of the news. To her the world was news: always on the alert, our Anderson Cooper 360, she felt : it’s news to me.” A war was on: death was in the air . . . We will hear “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,”

Then Space – began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,

And Being, but an Ear,

And I, and Silence, some strange Race

Wrecked, solitary, here –

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,

And I dropped down, and down –

And hit a World, at every plunge,

And Finished knowing – then –

And “After great pain.” As we think of how humanity registers what happened to people on 9-11, and Emily Dickinson’s prophetic poems, we hear poetry inspired by true events in which poets imaginatively engage with others’ tragic experience. In James Dickey’s “Falling” the consciousness of a flight attendant’s fall from a plane is recreated; the poem makes the lonely fall an experience in which she is not alone. Dickey makes all of us fall. We hear the story of the Sphinx, and the necessity of empathy to live in human community, an idea upheld by poet Einstein. We hear a poem on empathy by William Blake, and poems on resilience by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (“Ulysses”), Rumi, and Hafiz.

Poetry Slow Down community, each of you, the reality of you, the idea of you, is precious to me. We are all here: for some reason: to bear witness to each other’s stories. And in the quotidian realities of our every day lives, when we tell each other what we mean to each other, what we care for, each of our truths, it is so redemptive, it is so beautiful, it is what the doctor ordered. I am grateful for your taking poetry and me into your minds and hearts; thank you for being with me on this journey that poetry illuminates and cheers: let’s end with Mary Oliver’s “West Wind #2”, urging us to live in boisterous yes to our certain dooms. As I say goodbye for now, I am reflecting how Jacques Brel, the troubadour poet, sang, if we only have love then tomorrow will dawn, we’ll find our way out, . . . miracles of peace will be possible. . . well, it’s clear from 9-11, in the direst of circumstances, moments before fiery and unthinkable deaths, what people do have is love; love in spades, unquenchable love, there is love so deep and abiding nothing takes away, and there is poetry, deep and abiding, within us all,  as the walls come tumbling down. Poetry outs this capacity for noblest human empathy and compassion, and thinking of you today, caring about poetry, it “is not too late to seek a newer world,” and it seems a better world already.

c Barbara Mossberg 2011

Notes to our producers:

I don’t know if I am going to get through this show without crying. . . thinking about 9-11 and the ways people use words in our times of greatest calamity is so moving to me—how the human spirit rises to the occasion, how sorrow dignifies and defines and redeems us . . . how all that’s left in the wreckage, as poets poke about our smoking ruins, is hearts, calling for love.

THE EPIC QUOTIDIAN: NOTES OF 9-11—LOVE CALLING

“Honey. Something terrible is happening. I don’t think I’m going to make it. I love you. Take care of the children.”

“Hey, Jules. It’s Brian. I’m on the plane and it’s hijacked and it doesn’t look good. I just wanted to let you know that I love you, and I hope to see you again. If I don’t, please have fun in life, and live life the best you can. Know that I love you, and no matter what, I’ll see you again.”

“Mommy. The building is on fire. There’s smoke coming through the walls. I can’t breathe. I love you, Mommy. Good-bye.”

9-11 cell phone calls, recorded and made into song by Aaron Kula, and chanted by Rabbi Irwin Kula, who plays them every morning, a universal poem of all people everywhere. For the Poetry Slow Down, hello, you. I read those words–Honey, hi mommy, hey, Brian, those last words, quotidian words, words of dailiness, ordinariness, that achieve so much–with you, our listening community, feeling pride in humanity, of who we are, what we make of our lives after all, what we say when we call . . . We’re slowing down today, on a momentous day for people all over the world, what we call 9-11, a day of memory, of something that happened to each of us ten years ago, a day on which things changed forever—the way we see our daily lives, the way we see our communities, our country, our world—to ask, at a time of community sorrow and remembrance, how do words matter? Words, when they are spoken utterly, are not so much transformed into poetry, but revealed as poetry: the poetry essence we say to each other when we speak with love and care, when we speak urgently, as if it matters. The words that were recorded of people’s cell phone calls to their loved ones, as they were going down in a plane, or trapped in a burning tower, or on the ground, as the world collapses around them. The words you say, when you will not be there when they are heard or read . . . this is the moment, the momentum, the momentousness of poetry, the words wrought and frought with moment, words of order and beauty– in a time of fright, a time of blight, conscious that words have a life beyond one’s self, that they are something that comes out of us immortal—something in our spirit that is unkillable, that is remarkable, that sings and gives solace and courage and understanding long after the human brains that uttered them are with us: the mind alive, set free in words that live as long as eyes and ears. I am thinking of poems inspired by catastrophes that beset us: there is no scale to the mind’s experience of shock and sorrow . . . poems, of 490 BC, or 1593, or 1862, or 2000 or 2001, or 2011, responding to events of war or storm or disease or love or loss, express the effort of the human mind to . . . find a way to go on, to encourage both oneself and others . . . and to offer companionship on our life journey.

As I thought about our show today, Poetry Slow Down, we who journey together on air waves connecting us, we who worry this day, we who have suffered losses and feel dread of magnitude, and those of us in past days and weeks without power, drenched, and in drought, surrounded by fires, and flood, I think of words from a little lady you and I know, so removed from society’s disasters, what did she know of calamity, of disaster, of epic proportions? The Civil War was far away from the ringing church bells of Amherst and her second story perch on Main Street, down from Mount Pleasant Street. She was not in a neighborhood that was going to be torched; she was not surrounded by screams. But words of others in letters and the news, and home-sized tragedies, informed her sense of shock and loss. She was, as a poet, a citizen, reeling from the actualities of the news. To her the world was news: always on the alert, our Anderson Cooper 360, she felt : it’s news to me.” A war was on: death was in the air . . . We will hear “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,”

Then Space – began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,

And Being, but an Ear,

And I, and Silence, some strange Race

Wrecked, solitary, here –

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,

And I dropped down, and down –

And hit a World, at every plunge,

And Finished knowing – then –

And “After great pain.” As we think of how humanity registers what happened to people on 9-11, and Emily Dickinson’s prophetic poems, we hear poetry inspired by true events in which poets imaginatively engage with others’ tragic experience. In James Dickey’s “Falling” the consciousness of a flight attendant’s fall from a plane is recreated; the poem makes the lonely fall an experience in which she is not alone. Dickey makes all of us fall. We hear the story of the Sphinx, and the necessity of empathy to live in human community, an idea upheld by poet Einstein. We hear a poem on empathy by William Blake, and poems on resilience by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (“Ulysses”), Rumi, and Hafiz.

Poetry Slow Down community, each of you, the reality of you, the idea of you, is precious to me. We are all here: for some reason: to bear witness to each other’s stories. And in the quotidian realities of our every day lives, when we tell each other what we mean to each other, what we care for, each of our truths, it is so redemptive, it is so beautiful, it is what the doctor ordered. I am grateful for your taking poetry and me into your minds and hearts; thank you for being with me on this journey that poetry illuminates and cheers: let’s end with Mary Oliver’s “West Wind #2”, urging us to live in boisterous yes to our certain dooms. As I say goodbye for now, I am reflecting how Jacques Brel, the troubadour poet, sang, if we only have love then tomorrow will dawn, we’ll find our way out, . . . miracles of peace will be possible. . . well, it’s clear from 9-11, in the direst of circumstances, moments before fiery and unthinkable deaths, what people do have is love; love in spades, unquenchable love, there is love so deep and abiding nothing takes away, and there is poetry, deep and abiding, within us all,  as the walls come tumbling down. Poetry outs this capacity for noblest human empathy and compassion, and thinking of you today, caring about poetry, it “is not too late to seek a newer world,” and it seems a better world already.

© Barbara Mossberg 2011

Standard Podcast [ 52:51 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Whoa! What’s happened to your knees? You are dripping with mud! There’s grass all over you! 

Well, yeah, I was listening to The Poetry Slow Down, 

a program discussing amazing poetry of what we see when we get down with

the grass! When we see close-up, and behold our earth . . . 

Gentle listeners, this too can be you. Listen on! 

And . . . enjoy.

Stay tuned for the special 9-11 show September 11, 2011: the role of poets

in helping us understand and come to terms with what Emily Dickinson calls

“Great Pain.” We’ll have poems about the kind of courage to hurl oneself into

a burning tower, rage against loss, appeals to love each other–and some of these

poems date back, oh, 3000 and more years . . . . Can we live without poetry?

We seem never to have been without it, as long as we have walked on earth.

And it is more important than ever to be inspired to look at this earth–and each

other–up close. Our lives depend on it. More anon, Dr. B

Standard Podcast [ 43:58 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download