Slow Down, Slow Down! That’s what I say—what say you? Welcome to our Poetry Slow Down, KRXA 540AM Think for yourself radio, what a trust in who your self is, what the doctor ordered for our society! I’m Professor Barbara Mossberg, your host here, I’m being broadcast to you live from Yosemite National Park, Continue reading
Thank you for joining us for today’s show, Buddha and Benches; and This Just In: The News—gossip was the original news, which became poetry, the way we “knew†the “newsâ€â€”gathered to hear it as we do right now, and we’re going to talk about news –news we need and heed, and overlook, news as in, that’s news to me, as in, we didn’t know, and news that’s telling us what we knew–from the Internet—computers and phones and Blackberries—how the news of poetry reaches us in our modern days and ways:
On TV—we’ll talk about Friday Night Lights’s poetry . . .  in the newspaper—the story of a guy who uses poetry to save his life . . . books—Breakfast with Buddha . . . benches . . . on your walk–
Candy wrappers—think chocolate . . . Supermarkets . . . Safeway’s tribute . . . the internet . . . news from you, what you send in, listener pilot philosopher Mr. Tripi today. And we’ll hear news music and update you on the news of trees in Central Park, a continuing story on the Poetry Slow Down.
I I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash’d babe, and am
not contain’d between my hat and boots,
Aand peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good,
Tthe earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.
–Walt Whitman, from “Song of Myselfâ€
This show is dedicated to Thing Two. Or Thing One. Who can tell? Who can
say?
Who is precious and necessary to my heart, sweet mayhem of a late April
birthday.
 e.e. cummings says it all in his invocation “i thank You God for most this amazing,†the gratitude expressed in robust humility and grand spirit for every thing that is “natural,†“infinite, “yesâ€. Spirits of trees are leaping greenly. He who has died is “alive again today,†the earth is “happening illimitably,†the eyes of his eyes awake and the ears of his ears are open. So let us celebrate Earth Day, and a birthday of John Muir (coincidence? I think not) who is alive again today in all our minds, as we think about our gratitude for consciousness of this earth of ours.Our show today is a feisty but awed reading of John Muir’s reading of earth, his self-style role as earth’s PR guy, go to guy for advocacy of trees, interpreter of winds and clouds and rocks and trees, squirrels and ouzels, waterfalls and stars, sunshine and flowers, lobbyist for Forest and Valley, our heartbroken champion of the drowned Hetch Hetchy Valley (go to restorehetchhetchy.org), and our story is that he a celebrity today, sure he is, with a trail, flower, glacier, star, hospital, motel, high school named after him, just to name a few, and even our currency has his image, California’s quarter . . . not because he was a scientist respected in geology and botany and ecology, nor because he hobnobbed with presidents, nor because he was a tree-mendous climber of both mountains and trees (but never call him a hiker), nor because he was a tour guide to the rich and famous (but never say the view is pretty or nice or some other “cheap†adjetive), nor because he instigated for preservation of wilderness, and became godfather to the national parks, nor because he helped found and was president of the Sierra Club . . . he is a celebrity, in fact, a rock star, as a poet, for the way he wrote about stars, yes, and rocks, actually. You know I would say this, Poetry Slow Down, but it’s true. He was trained as a poet, in his fractured formal and home-schooled informal schooling, and he read poetry, and wrote with the lyrical grace and metaphoric oomph of an iambic-footed purple forest dweller.   Continue reading
(Poetry of Emily Dickinson, e.e. cummings, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Theodore Roethke, Stanley Kunitz, Barbara Mossberg aka Fat Lady Flying)
THAT APRIL! This April. This here April. –-No locked doors here, April’s welcome on our Poetry Slow Down, as we note Emily Dickinson’s issue with her bad boy April taking his own sweet time to arrive, and we’re reflecting on a time of recognizing and pondering earth‘s poem i thank You God for most this amazing, with its lines, “i who have died am alive again todayâ€resilience and resurrection in Spring. We and eddieandbill and bettyandisabel are skipping past what e.e. cummings calls “in just spring†barely barely barely newness or re-newness when the world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful, and what Gerard Manley Hopkins and Theodore Roethke call the juiciness of deep down freshness, when against seemingly all odds of darkness and oppression and silence and death, up comes a green radiance, a color of purple, white petals, out of a frozen, crusted, ravaged earth, in a process T.S. Eliot calls cruel: April is the cruelest month, he says, a statement so surprising that in his honor we dedicate this month as National Poetry Month, and the reason he says this is because April is so mud-slushous. Through all time, poets have put their mental shoulders to the wheel of this time of year, this concept of new life out of what seems like death. And so today, we will celebrate what I call, Life and Death and Life Again, poems of spring as renewal, centered on e.e. cummings’
