Top of the morning to you! We’re weathering together this late January day. We’re celebrating in this time that ancient civilizations didn’t even consider real time—it was just a no count time of no time they waited out til spring! But we’re going for every moment, slowing down to experience what’s going on all around us in earth’s news and how to make our time here on earth together something meaningful, something precious. Every day the sun doesn’t give up on us—earth keeps turning resolutely, sun rises, and we have a new chance, as the poet Henry David Thoreau says, the sun is but a morning star. Last week we were talking about the Inauguration of President Obama, his being sworn in on the bibles of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, the Oscar-nominated film “Lincoln” celebrating civil rights legislation, and a national holiday for Martin Luther King, realizing the role of poetry in the moral leadership and moxie of Lincoln, King, and Obama, as readers and writers of poetry, and today, we’ll explore how the poets who gave them resolve, inspired them, kept them wise and resilient, getting up to keep trying every day—themselves dying supposedly as failures in their own lifetimes—writers who are the bedrock of conscience and courage, and by coincidence, this weekend the whole world is celebrating the birthday—the life– of Bobby Burns, and it’s a whole ceremony and ritual, and I know Poetry Slow Down you are UP for slowing down for this, so I’m going to walk or talk us through it, it’s a whole shenanigan, I won’t lie to you, and it’s so serious Poetry Slow Down that there is this ad on a website for what is called Burns Night:

Burns Night Toasts

Instant Toasts in 60 seconds 100% Refund if not satisfied

www.Speech-Writers.com/Burns_Night So this is serious

business! And we’re going to be prepared to do one of these toasts! So a how-to celebrate Bobby Burns is on our menu today, but first, why? So that gets us back to Lincoln and the role of poets in his own life and hope and resilience as a leader—and what Burns has to do with it—and his influence on not only Lincoln but John Muir and Bob Dylan, and people everywhere—look up in your community, there’s a Burns community, there’s even cities east to west named for Burns, in New York and Oregon, and a statue of him in Central Park, along with Shakespeare . . . Continue reading →

Standard Podcast [ 52:41 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

RAVENS, SKYLARKS, AND A LEADERSHIP CURRICULUM: LEADERS’ POETRY, THE NEWS WE NEED, A TWO PART SHOW CELEBRATING PRESIDENT OBAMA’S INAUGURATION, MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY, THE FILM “LINCOLN,” BARACK OBAMA, ABRAHAM LINCOLN, MARTIN LUTHER KING–THE POETS THEY READ, THE POEMS THEY WRITE, THE WORLD POETRY CHANGES . . . INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO SHELLEY’S “A DEFENSE OF POETRY,” EDGAR ALLAN POE (GO RAVENS!), THOREAU, EMERSON, DR. SEUSS’ YERTLE THE TURTLE, AND POEMS OF EARNEST CONSCIENCE AND BEHOLDING BEAUTY THAT GET PEOPLE THROUGH THE DAYS AND NIGHTS IN WAR AND OTHER HEADLINE NEWS. . .

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Standard Podcast [ 52:39 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

“Sometimes I lie awake at night at and ask, Where have I gone wrong? Then a voice says to me, this is going to take more than one night.”—Charles Schulz, Peanuts.

Do you remember Peanuts’ “I love mankind—it’s people I can’t stand?” On March 18, 1958, Thomas Merton, former bad boy, play boy, earnest urban dude, despair of his guardian, and now Trappist monk, finds himself in a shopping center:

“I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race . . .there is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.” Way! The poets have their ways of telling people precisely this. Merton called his realization an epiphany:

“I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts . . .the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could se each other that way all of the time.”’ If only . . . Leave it to the poet, holding a magic mirror that lets us see ourselves as we really are. Now you’re saying, oh no! Busted! Not my true self, please! But in the poet’s eyes, you are revealed as shining. “If they could all see themselves as they really are . . . “ Well: we can. Today we will hear how poets illuminate our lives, with this art of seeing our world with wonder, a redeeming gaze, a practice that invokes epiphany, the shining world within visible to the poet mind. This is how Emily Dickinson describes the poet in “This was a poet,” distilling “amazing sense/From ordinary Meanings.” The poet has slowed down to “arrest” the scene, paying attention to essence, an immensity of magnitude . . .

We are paying attention to epiphany today in honor of the historic time in which this date was the last of the feast days of Epiphany, and in celebration of Thomas Merton’s epiphany which is being advertised by the Thomas Merton Institute with an invitation to you to share your own personal epiphany stories. Go to their website and contact Vanessa, or write me at bmossberg@csumb.edu, and I will forward it on behalf of our radio show, The Poetry Slow Down.

We will hear examples of poetry’s news of transformation, from T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets, which posits the epiphany of home as framework for a discussion of our attitudes towards home as strangers in a strange land, from Homer to E.T., Anne Tyler to baseball, McDonald’s and franchise culture to grocery products and marketing. We hear poems on shining reality and epiphany by James Wright, William Carlos Williams, Dana Levin, Zachary Schomburg, Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman, Robinson Jeffers; we hear thoughts about how we recognize home and the journey to belonging in our world by Anna Quindlen, J. R. R. Tolkien (happy birthday!), Ernest Hemingway, Bob Marley, Rilke, Billy Joel, Fazim Ali. We hear poetry by Liz Waldner and me on angels and other agencies of epiphany (in my case it was a mosquito and night train), Sara Miller, Henri Cole, Eliza Griswald . . . more thoughts by Carolyn Forche and G.C. Waldrep. We hear a set of poems by our own Charles Tripi (see his new Carlo and Sophia poems). We hear my chemistry poet colleague Joanie Mackowski’s “Epiphany,” Robert Frost, Rumi, Wendell Berry, each telling us that we are already here, where and who we need to be . . . . to speak our truth and be agencies to epiphany . . . and Emily Dickinson’s conception of the paradox posed by Eliot, how we can experience but not know the meaning, or the value. Dickinson contrasts the King, a legal owner to the land, who gets a little kick out of something like resurrection, and a Clown, who “ponders” the “tremendous scene,” “as if it were his own.” We discuss the poet’s perspective of claiming each other and our earth as our own, seeing ourselves at home, and what’s at stake for seeing our world in its shining realities. To our radio listening community—you—it’s not epiphany: I’ve known it all along, you are a shining element in my life, and I thank you for joining me on this journey of the poet’s news of our world, “without which men die miserably every day.” Not so you, faithful listener who slows down to ponder “this tremendous scene” and never take it for granted.

© Barbara Mossberg 2013

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This is the story of how we begin to remember . . . These are the days of miracle and wonder (Paul Simon):

MAKE IT NEW (Ezra Pound): Do we make endings only to have beginnings? Are we like a poem, earth with a new morning every day? Is the New Year a first line of our lives’ next stanza?

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