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 →

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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

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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

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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 →

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We will begin with news on the topic of wisdom and the struggle to make a life of meaning and purpose and solace AND cheer—enduring —which will take us to some great poems on what and how to make of our moments, so let’s slow down, get our cheery game faces on for . . .

“Continual cheerfulness is a sign of wisdom.”

© Dr. Barbara Mossberg

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