The Role of Poetry in Living Deliberately—the art and science of going to the woods, so to speak.
And so we are! Speaking of the woods:: e.e. cummings’ sonnet of gratitude, amazement, for every thing, alive again today, ready to take in all that’s leaping greenly, true blue: that’s us today in our PoetrySlowDown with Professor Barbara Mossberg, me, your Dr. B, what the doctor ordered, and our Producer Zappa Johns, and consulting editor Nico Moss, on the art and science of slowing down, and we’re talking about joy and what living deliberately has to do with it, and going to the woods, and poetry, and for that matter (life and death), slowing down. Did you just hear joy? Yes, joy. With our headlines and cultural fault lines and your deadlines and face lines and check out lines and check in lines—joy? Is this a typo—isn’t it Bossy Barbara’s Guide to Job—the Boss—job—I get it! But this is a radio show for our actual lives, the news you need, the news you heed, the news “without which men die miserably every day,†a line from William Carlos Williams, so let’s frame it with him in a real-world way. First, I would like you to jot down one line for what you worry about, fear, a hopeless knotty problem that you face. This is just for you—and of course for the whole world when it’s posted, but that’s for another time. We are going to get to this in Part Three of our series on Bossy Barbara’s Guide to Joy. Okay, now that we are grounded in the real world you actually live in, we take up our PoetrySlowDown theme, for we can’t get very far in this life without poetry—and it has always been that way:
Â