William and Kim Stafford, Emily Dickinson, Derek Walcott, Jorie Graham, Leigh Hunt, Elizabeth Bishop, Luis Montero, David Wright, Gerald Stern, Judith Viorst, Philip Larkin, Seneca, Rumi, Hafiz, Stephen Grellett, C. K. Williams, Eleanor Lerman, Mark Doty, Hilarie Jones, Marilyn Nelson, Chuck Tripi, and more Continue reading →

Standard Podcast [ 52:38 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Just to be held by the ocean 
is the best luck we could have.
It is a total waking up.

Why should we grieve that we have been sleeping?
It does not matter how long we have been unconscious.

We are groggy, but let the guilt go.
Feel the motions of tenderness around you,
 the buoyancy.–Rumi

BUOYANCY PHYSICS

Lovers of splash and dash, panache and get-go! Poetry on pools and splash, swimming and mermaids, in support of the project to restore a lifesaving community swimming pool of yore, giving new life to civic optimism that what we once had is not lost: we can recover and restore beauty and use, what is vibrant poetry in our life. Poets dive in to this subject from Rumi, T.S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, to Leigh Hunt, Matthea, Robert Creeley, Charles Tripi, Tada Chimako, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, Kim Addonizio, Lord Byron, Mao Tse Tung, Yeats, Linda Gregg, Shakespeare, Robert Creeley, Robert Hicok, Robert Frost, Maxine Kumin, May Swenson, H.D., Swinburne, Mbali Vilakazi, Tennyson, Walter De La Mare, Mary Lee, Adam Lindsay Gordon, Gerald Stern, Billy Collins, and philosophy of Willard Spiegelman (quoting Tomlinson, Paul Valery, Annette Kellerman, John Nabor, Melchisedek Thevenot, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Oliver Sacks), and me, Barbara Mossberg. And that’s just wading in to the sea of poems and poets on the topic of water immersion. We consider a theory of J. Alfred Prufrock through the lens of mermaid and immersion metaphysics: his identity angst is the plight of the merman . . . . Jump in—it’s not cold but coooool— and we’ll see what all the splashing is about on think for yourself talk radio news, the news we need at the heart of the heart-breaking, earth-shaking, headline news, heartline news.

Swimming! Pools! Immersing ourselves in water! Our inner fish! Even mermaids! But—um– Dr. B, with all due respect, noted, thank you, you kind minds here in this community of ours, it is only March . . . why are we talking about pools and swimming! I’m still in my long underwear! Ah, well that you should ask! Well, second of all, we just heard the Academy Awards, the Oscar going to “Life of Pi,” based on Yann Martel’s lyric novel about a boy named for a swimming pool, one his father just loved, so he named his son Piscine which meant that the son was actually called by his school mates pissing, and he changed his name to Pi, as in the number–so that’s poetry in the news, but in the first place, in the evolved City of Pacific Grove, where I actually live in something called Poet’s Perch, a Victorian-era house, there is a movement by our city leaders to bring back to life a feature of this community that like all of ours around the country has seen better days. The hopes and dreams and visions and unbelievable work of our founders of our cities and towns: when they deteriorate over time, deep in our citizen morale is the wish to restore them. There was once a swimming pool right on the sand there, where children and everyone could swim. It was public. There was splash and shining water and that amazing experience of buoyancy, of our bodies like clouds in the sky, now, only silence, an abandoned empty hole in the earth. The pool, the heart of the matter where we re-enact our human evolution as we came from the seas. Should we just let it go, and despair? Or should we read poetry and inspire ourselves to dare, to dream, to believe in each other and our civic spirit, what is in us to rise again: come, my friends, tis not too late to seek a newer world, or in this case, an older world where there was time, to build lasting things of beauty and use, for the good of it . . . . So with volunteers and City Staff, Don Mothershead, who works on behalf of  children in sports, and all the facilities, has headed up this project of optimism, to restore the pool, Be A Lifesaver, Save Our Pool! Is the anthem, and bring back to the city life a way to come together at the water hole for exercise and fun, not a country club, but where everyone can come, a Walt Whitmany democratic idea and children can learn to swim, and it’s just such a good idea. But it needed money. Who has money in these days? Well, money has been raised so far, in this community, and now there is matching grant, so that the pool can actually be restored by this summer! So now it’s Spring, and our Poetry Slow Down will celebrate the poetry of pools and swimming and mermaids and buoyancy, OH BOY!. If you wish to take the plunge to find out more about it, see below. But meanwhile, this pool is filled already in our minds, so we can dive in, and we’ll hear what’s at stake in people’s access to being in water . . . We’ll get our feet wet, poetically speaking . . . . exploring just what it is about being in water, moving about in this way, that is as ancient as our species, and recreates our experience in the womb, yes, lolling about in the waters, our mothers’ bellies, our first pool.

As we explore our human desire to recreate our fish experience, we have always had a fellow feeling somehow about the denizens of water, where perhaps we did once live and breathe, when we were fish, speaking evolutionarily, here is a poem by Leigh Hunt, pal to Byron and Keats, engaging the human-fish reality of our being . . .

I enjoyed researching this show tremendously. My script was over 100 pages and just scratched the surface. There is more to say . . . but this gets our feet wet, and we hear a little about what’s at stake, what’s possible, when people have the chance to be immersed in water . . . .

Thank you for joining me. Please write me atbmossberg@csumb.edu, and check out the Pacific Grove pool project. Stay tuned for poems written by people who are once again swimming . . . .

© Barbara Mossberg 2013

Standard Podcast [ 52:37 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

All hands on deck! Ahoy! Avast ye, mates! This is your captain Professor Barbara Mossberg of our Poetry Slow Down, a radio show for when nights are long and you’re lying awake, pondering your fate. Fate. How we meet our fate. How we know our fate. How we create or co-create our fate. We will look at this question through the eyes of the poets, who think about these things. We’re all thinking about our fates these days, yours and mine. I suppose that this is what defines a poet. The moment we start thinking about things, not stopping the flow, but slowing down in a sense, heating up our neural duodulas, and wondering. Us being human, at our most human. Poetry captures this. So we will begin with one of the greatest poet minds of the United States, who wrote a book we all know but few have read, even those who were assigned it as students, you know what I’m talking about, Moby Dick, busted! And one of our most distinguished literary critics, award-winning Dr. Susan Gubar, whose books you have read and know, including Memoir of a Debulked Woman(W.W. Norton).

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What would John Muir think of the current Executive Director of the Sierra Club affixing himself to a White House gate and being arrested? He would stand and cheer, along with the trees, as Henry David Thoreau’s model inspires civil disobedience art and science, practice and theory. We’ll think about Thoreau’s spirit in Muir’s activism, how David Brower carries the baton (his lyric “Credo” and his famous activism expressing Muir’s legacy), and Michael Brune’s leadership and what poetry has to do with it, and voices I love, on love for a place, who could take that love to the bank, the river bank, and keep it wild . . . we’ll slow it down, our hurtling meteoric days, and listen to the river’s voice, listen to each other listening to the river’s voice . . . . And we will remember: “The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaning, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.”–John Muir, who also said about the lives we love on this earth: “No right way is easy in this rough world. Continue reading →

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Welcome to our Poetry Slow Down, KRXA 540AM, from the Think for Yourself Radio Team, Hal Ginsberg and Producer Sara Hughes, I’m your host Professor Barbara Mossberg, and I love our radio community as we listen on air to poetry, brain waves! slowing down in our hurtling and stressed lives for a way of thinking and speaking about our lives from time immemorial, the news we need, Dr. William Carlos Williams says, difficult and despised though poetry may be, without which men die miserably every day . . . on this topic of love, it’s almost Valentine’s Day, and this is a time traditionally in which we let the people we love know how much we love them, in poetry. We consider poetry etched in clay from a twig from thousands of years ago, a Sanskrit love poem from 2025 BC. This word love, a way of connecting so powerfully something beyond ourselves, that says someone is part of us, inextricably part of our essence, who we are. . .  love makes you something larger and more complex and vulnerable. I thought about life’s plan for us—so tricky and ingenious: for example, if we have a baby, then, because we love this baby and want everything for this baby, and now this baby’s out in the world–now we have to care about and be responsible for this whole world where our baby is going to have to live—for its health and endurance . . . how smart of the universe . . . to get us to care about IT–the whole shebang and shenanigans—air, water, ground—lion and fly–so today, we’re going to explore what we humans love, and how it is expressed in poetry . . . all love poems!

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Standard Podcast [ 52:37 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download