FOR MOLES AND HEDGEHOGS AND BADGERS AND BALLOON MEN AND ALL EMERGENT IMPROBABLE WILD CHARACTERS IN OUR LIVES, our show today is about love, improbable love, and life improbably emergent in just Spring. It all begins in Brooklyn with Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman’s Everyman fluted mourning of lost gardens (are we going to get out of those woods—those winds?—not likely, not in the near future, and we’ll hear Edgar Arlington Robinson with Broken Flutes of Arcady), our oldest consciousness perhaps marrying grief over lost gardens and the wood-wind flute. 40,000 years ago flutes are made, from bones of bear and swan, vulture, mammoth and crane, found from Germany to China as humanity evolves from Neanderthals. We hear poets from every land and time on the topic of flutes: poetry and flutes are the original Mac and cheese, soup and sandwich combo. Aristotle and King Frederick of Prussia warn against both (mothers, don’t let your children grow up to be flute players and poets) and so does Lutheran Guide Garrison Keillor, but Goethe (not to mention Mozart) says get over it, people, the flute and poetry are here to stay. Hear, hear! says Kahlil Gibran, Genesis, and Rumi.
Our opening line-up, e.e. cummings’s “in just Spring,†and Nancy Willard’s “The Man in the Marmelade Hat,†and we celebrate the 40th anniversary of a certain couple, whose beginnings are the exchange of Kenneth Graham, Wind in the Willows and Knut Hamsun’s Pan, and results in a wedding in the woods and a dog named Moley. We’ll hear lots about Pan-playing flutes and flute-playing Pans, (and more on that subject and pots and pans to follow). Speaking of spring-cleaning and hearing Pan’s Piper of Dawn, we’ll hear some poems about that gloriously toiling mole and origin of a labour of moles, (stay tuned for the origin of Holey Moley in subsequent shows), notes of Judith Kitchen, “Catching the Moles,†Christina Rossetti, “A Handy Mole,†Mary Oliver, “The Moles,†and William Stafford’s “Starting With Little Things,†which we will return to in next week’s show from Oregon, and your host’s own “Next Stop: Klamath Falls,†and continuation of the theme of late winter, early spring, emergent love, and certain improbabilities. Let’s slow down as the ice begins to melt . . . do you hear some music? Or is that the wind . . . love and live to you, The Poetry Slow Down, KRXA 540AM
© Barbara Mossberg 2011
