“I’ve known rivers.” That’s Langston Hughes. Perhaps the human soul has known rivers forever. Certainly there are soulful songs about rivers in our lives today. There’s Paul Robeson’s Old Man River, and Moon River and Billy Joel’s River of Dreams, and Joni Mitchell’s “wish I were a river,” and the “by the waters of Babylon,” and “one more river to cross,” and rowing our boat gently down, floating our boats. If we “slow” down, we can get into the flow. You know how I like to say about our show, the news we need, the news we need to heed, the news in between the late-breaking, fast-breaking, heart-breaking news, the news that William Carlos Williams, the good doctor, says we need to find in difficult and despised poems, without which “men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there?” Well, soooooooo, in the news, is good news this week, how people like you decided to do something on behalf of earth flow: down by the river bank. How does it happen? In every state, communities are calling to citizenry for “vision” of transformation of our rivers from industrial catastrophes. They are calling for a vision of health and beauty. What does poetry have to do with it?

Now, I am partial to river bank, perhaps because of the immortal words of Wind in the Willows, its riverbank world of an alive universe from the perspective of deep earth-dwelling creatures who have earth mud in their nostrils and live in and by the river, and for that matter, partial to wind AND to willows, if not also Moles, do you remember our show about moles, I loved that, a labor of moles, a love labor, well perhaps because of those immortal words by Kenneth Graham, on my first date with my husband do you know what we did? Well first of all we exchanged books, of course, and I gave him Wind in the Willowsand he gave me Knut Hamsun’s Pan, isn’t that interesting, Pan is in both books, the mystical force of nature, I just realized that, well, we drove in the country roads on a cold winter day with pale light, and we sat on a muddy riverbank, do you remember that B? and looked at the river flowing by. Don’t you think this is one of our earliest human memories, watching a river flow by? The view from the riverbank. And the wind in the trees, in the willows, in the oaks, in the pines, in the cedars. .  .[at this point our radio host waves and waxes effusively and philosophically on the topic of Wind and the Human Psychomythic, Ecospiritual Imagination, History, and Experience, with illustrations from world literature and culture].

It’s all flow . . . Well sooooooooo, anyhousals, as I was reading the newspaper, The San Francisco Chronicle, front page news, people are ingeniously figuring out ways to keep California state parks open, redefining what we mean by “public” and the polis, for our access to rivers and watershed and forests and nature’s beauty and peace, and in the process, our favorite water birds, and salmon, and all the life that free rivers represent.

These are restoration efforts, reclamation efforts, resurrection efforts, new life efforts, efforts that give hope to us, in these our darkest days of the year. This is news we need: news of people not taking bad news lying down, news of illness and injury to earth; we are not helpless—that is the story! Yes, tell us, O news bearers, stories that encourage us, give us courage and hope and belief in what is possible to do good and make right! In this case, the river is the Napa River, river nourishing vineyards, and cranes and frogs and salmon: it is one of our country’s most significant riparian revitalization projects, green and alive and flowing, so we’re flowing down, I mean slowing down, I do mean, flowing down.

We’ll hear poetry from the Mountains-River tradition of ancient Chinese poetry, the great Li Po, drinking alone beneath the moon in his own mental river dance,

I’ve found a joy that must infuse spring:

I sing, and moon rocks back and forth;

I dance, and shadow tumbles into pieces.

Sober, we’re together and happy. Drunk,

we scatter away into our own directions:

intimates forever, we’ll wander carefree

and meet again in Milky Way distances

I like that Mr. Li Po.

There were some poems I wanted to include and promised to mention here: Gary Snyder’s “For All,” Bin Ramke’s “Into Bad Weather Bounding,” “Balance,” by Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavangh, “Becoming Weather, 21,” by Chris Martin, poetry by Tu Fu, “Flood,” by Miyazawa Kenji, translated by Hiroaki Sato.

We also hear a shout out for the River of Words poetry contest sponsored by the Library of Congress, and the literary venture,Teaching the Poetry of Rivers, an online resource integrating poetry, water resource science, and the humanities for teachers who promote literacy and environmental education. There is a great website coordinated by the Colorado Center for the Book through the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities, provided for free by the Colorado Foundation for Water Education.

We hear Teresa Cader reflect on both wind and river flows, and “Flood,” by Eliza Griswold.

This engagement of our brains with atmosphere and finding in what is out there, outside of us, inside our  minds, a mood, a wondering, a wondering, a flow of thought: Henry Taylor finds much to think about in the flow of “A Crosstown Breeze,” Victor Hernandez Cruz finds comedy in “Hurricane,” “An Octave Above Thunder,” by Carol Muske-Dukes (for which we then read from Milton’s “When I consider how my light is spent” and Wordsworth’s “The world is too much with us) imagines her teacher confronting a storm by reciting poetry, two poems are twisting and turning, her mind is all shook up in its own weather turbulence, and in the process, she sees them coming all together or splitting apart   . . . .

The news, Poetry Slow Down, is that a river is coming back to life: 15 miles of river and 135 acres of floodplains: California’s largest floodplain and wildlife habitat restoration project. The Environmental Protection Agency contributed to the project, which, and I’m quoting, “would never have gotten off the ground without the cooperation of 43 landowners who agreed to take vineyard property out of production so that the river could be widened to create floodplains and riverside habitat.” The Water Resources Control Board and Napa County have contributed. The whole project is a tribute to government and citizens working together—and we see that the Rutherford Dust Society, an association of nearly 100 growers and wineries, say, “We hope we can repeat this on every river, in every state and every community in the world, but we’re starting here.” So Poetry Slow Down, I am so inspired by this news! Good news is contagious. Napa River once had as many as 8000 migrating steelhead and Chinook salmon . . . which nearly all disappeared . . . there was the danger of catastrophic floods. People came together and are supported with state and federal grants. “Everyone should know about this,” a visiting official said.

So Poetry Slow Down, now we have slowed down and now we know about it, and the question is, what is it that prompts citizen action, to take on a hopeful, helpful, grand project of trying to right a wrong, do things better, wiser, on behalf of earth and each other? Well, and this may not surprise you, I believe that poetry gives us a way of thinking that awakens our wise conscience.

Thus, for example, W.S. Merwin, who just finished his term as Poet Laureate of the United States, of Library of Congress has gotten involved in efforts to restore tropical rain forest in Hawaii. “Hear” he is, and as we hear his words, we realize that he was talking about the Wao Kele o Puna which was threatened by geothermic drilling. It is as a poet that he is addressing the California Academy of Sciences. We hear his case for the fusion of literary arts and scientific knowledge, and a way of seeing our earth that poets can contribute to science. We note that he addresses the Academy of Science in 1992 about this issue on behalf of the Wal Kele o Puna, and by 2006 it was purchased by the Trust for Public Land.

In fact, there are community efforts calling for “vision” in which poets and poetry play a role, for city and rural projects revitalizing riparian habitat. We hear about the Animas River Corridor project: The purpose of this project is to create a community vision to guide clean up, revitalization and reuse of a two-mile section of the Animas River Corridor that incorporates Silverton’s mining history, recognizes our mountain community spirit, and respects the natural beauty of the Animas River. The project has three phases: (I) create a community vision for a Revitalization Plan, (II) conduct a Remediation and Restoration Activity Assessment, and (III) research Funding Opportunities to support the Revitalization Plan.

During the past decade, the Los Angeles River has become a subject of intense re-examination, a major topic of policy debate, and a new kind of environmental icon. “It increasingly symbolizes the quest to transform the built and natural urbanenvironment from a place seen as representing violence and hostility for communities and for Nature, to one of rebirth and opportunity.”

Dear Friends:

CITY HALL LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90012

The development of the Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan can be traced to a bold neighborhood vision in the early 1990s to convert an old rail yard, known as Taylor Yard, to benefit the community. In this neglected riverfront, just north of downtown, residents saw more than just a 200+ acre industrial lot. They saw parks. They saw natural habitat. They saw neighborhood revitalization.

The result: Today the City and California State Parks are transforming Taylor Yard into a 40-acre state park, a key link in the River revitalization. Parks cleanse the air, create a sense of community and provide a source of relief in some of the City’s most densely populated neighborhoods.

But just as important, the intensive community process, which allowed residents to create a vision for Taylor Yard in the early 1990s, became the template used a decade later to renew more than 32 miles of the Los Angeles River.

With this in mind, in June 2002, the Los Angeles City Council established the Ad Hoc Committee on the Los Angeles River to work with stakeholders on major revitalization efforts such as recreation, neighborhood identity, wildlife habitat, water replenishment, jobs, tourism and civic pride.

In October 2005, we launched a series of public workshops that have drawn thousands of people – from Canoga Park to Boyle Heights – of diverse ages, ethnicities and economic backgrounds, to weigh in on the River renewal. Their vision is captured in this master plan, one of the greatest opportunities to change the face of L.A. Even beyond City boundaries, it is a 25-year blueprint that weaves in environmental enhancement, green space and economic development that impacts the region.

The master plan is the result of tireless efforts by residents, community leaders, environmentalists and others who never stopped believing that the River, a trench entombed in cement, could be renewed, brought back to life.

Our communities want parks. They want wildlife habitat. They want neighborhood revitalization for our families and children. No one deserves it more than them.

After all, it is their vision. Sincerely,

ED P. REYES

Chair, Ad Hoc Committee on the Los Angeles River

The Re-Envisioning series was also a multi-disciplinary, community-oriented undertaking, with 56 co-sponsors as well as the host Urban and Environmental Policy Institute (UEPI) and its co-host, the Friends of the L.A. River (FoLAR). Through the Re-Envisioning program with its more than forty lectures, forums, art installations, poetry readings and other events, the historical, cultural, political, community, environmental, and engineering perspectives about the evolution of the L.A. River were explored. Many of the co-sponsors played a lead role in hosting one or more of the events (for example, the Arroyo Arts Collective sponsored a weekend-long art installation along a two-mile stretch of the River).

 

We are seeing examples of citizen projects all over the country to restore rivers! And the role of poetry in awakening our love of rivers and habitat and our senses of hope in what can be done. Thus there is an inextricable connection between the capacity of citizens to envision riparian repair and the poetry of rivers. We hear W. S. Merwin’s poems about rivers, “The River of Bees” and “The Way to River,” and Mark Jarman’s “Spell” for the Encanto Creek, the “Riparian series, and the poem “Beautiful Ohio” by James Wright.

Beautiful Ohio

Those old Winnebago men knew what they were singing All summer long and all alone, I had found a way to sit on a railway tie above the sewer main. It spilled a shining waterfall out of a pipe somebody had gouged through the slanted earth. Sixteen thousand five hundred more or less people In Martins Ferry, my home, my native country, quickened the river with the speed of light. And the light caught there the solid speed of their lives in the instant of that waterfall. I know what we call it most of the time. But I have my own song for it and sometimes, even today, I call it beauty.

James Wright’s poem illustrates the transformational vision at the heart of riparian reform and awakening on the part of all of us. Like Elizabeth Bishop who sees “rainbow!” in a dock spill, Wright sees “beauty” in a sewer pipe entering a river. Like the spoiled Prince in Beauty and the Beast, the river needs to be seen and loved for itself; then it can recover from the spell put upon it and once again be restored to its true (beautiful) nature. It is the poet’s redemptive vision that can save the day (and the river).

In “To a skylark,” Shelley finds in Nature the voice of the poet embodied in a bird, “Teach me half the gladness That thy brain must know, Such harmonious madness From my lips would flow The world should listen then – as I am listening now.”

FLOW! And there is a wonderful study,

FINDING THE RIVERS: POETRY IN ECOLOGICAL EDUCATION

A Study of The Rhode Island River of Words Project

by Colin Walker Plumb Cheney when he was a student at Brown University. We cite Cheney’s quoting Wendell Berry:

We are in trouble just now because we don’t have a good story. We are between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story.

The poets provide such a “new” story. On this theme, another Poet Laureate of the U.S., Library of Congress, Robert Haas, who has been in the news—our show featured him recently as he was injured at Berkeley when he was checking on his students during Occupy Berkeley–shows the rivers in his mind as intrinsic to every part of our lives in “Spring Rain.”

The belief is that our sense of beauty that poets inspire can lead to a love that unleashes our human courage and conscience and creativity.

We conclude with a medley of words on river knowledge from the poets: T.S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Edward Abbey.

And here are words I love, taking us back to the riverbank: it was on the riverbank that Lewis Carroll imagined Alice in Wonderland, and that Kenneth Graham set Wind in the Willows, and Abbey visualizes as he writes,

Joy, shipmates, joy.
Edward Abbey, The Hidden Canyon — A River Journey, and Benedicto: 
”May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing.
May your rivers flow without end, 
meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets’ 
towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl. . . .”

We conclude with Wendell Berry’s The Peace of Wild Things.


I thank you for joining me on this current of air, this river of thought, as we contemplate good news of rivers being saved by the likes of you, by the love of you, all who love and live poetry: a message of hope in these days, for what words and thoughts can do, and next week, on that note, we will celebrate a man whose poetic words literally helped save earth, John Muir, who died, writing “behold!”, pages strewn around him on his hospital bed, almost 100 years ago this coming Saturday, in Los Angeles, we will have a program broadcast from there, a program on hope and rejoicing and joy and beholding, a program about light, and love, until then, Ralph Waldo Emerson bids us on our flowy, slowy, way, of Poetry Slow Down, waves, waving to you,

in the flow of things, the belief is that our sense of beauty that poets inspire can lead to a love that unleashes our human courage and conscience and creativity for sustaining life itself.

© Barbara Mossberg 2011.

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Bring Forth the Nobody and Send In the Clowns:

The Wild Spirit of Emily Dickinson’s Creativity and Freedom We Celebrate on Her Birthday “lest any doubt that we are glad that they are born today”

YOU ARE INVITED TO A BIRTHDAY PARTY

FOR WHOM?

“NOBODY!”

WHERE?

Where you are.

TIME? It’s happening now

IT SOUNDS LIKE A PLAN! COUNT ME IN!

I’m counting you in, welcoming you to our show today, all of us listening right now, assembled for the world’s most famous nobody, we’re perturbing the airwaves, disturbing the peace, disrupting the public space, occupying Prose, with . . . Nobody:

I’m Nobody! Who are You?
Are you–Nobody–too?
Then there’s a Pair of us?
Don’t tell–they’d advertise –you know!
How dreary to be Somebody!
How public–like a frog–
To tell one’s name the Livelong June
To an admiring–Bog!

That’s Emily Dickinson, and she was right, they WILL advertise, and what’s more, become a mob, a Flash Mob, to an admiring bog, that’s us! We’re celebrating a so-called “nobody” who became a big celebrity from tapping into everybody’s inner nobody. We’re disturbing the peace with words of poetry honoring the woman who lived her life unknown as a poet, “shut up” and “shut out” of public life . . . . The legend goes, even her friends did not see her face, but only heard her voice through a door that was ajar: isn’t that a radio-esque way that she communicated? Only her voice? Without any other distractions? It puts the focus on voice.

So I’ll tell you first what happened with a real Flash Mob, bringing Emily Dickinson not only outside, but to the streets!WHAT? Yes, we brought Emily Dickinson to the streets for her birthday yesterday. Have you been in a Flash Mob, sort of like a flash flood of culture, an Instant Scene? You were minding your business, going about your day, your, as Proust scholar Alain de Botton would say, quotidian realities, or actually, you were NOT “Mind”-ing your business, we were just crossing the plaza, waiting in line, on our way to somewhere, a no man’s zone of purpose, nothing planned, no destination, off site, off line, time out, time off, as we scurry and hurry and are OFF to someplace, and suddenly, someone comes ON, someone who seemed at that point ordinary and beneath notice, that is, invisible, and insignificant, and unimportant, and anonymous, right next to you, starts spouting lines from Romeo and Juliet, and up on the escalator, someone answers back in iambic pentameter. All of a sudden, we find ourselves in the middle of Romeo and Juliet, or a dance troupe kicking it up to a Scott Joplin rag or George Gershwin or jitterbugging, and the scene—yeah, it IS a scene, now, literally, is transformed, the nowhere we are, the waiting area, the space we are moving through and waiting in, is a somewhere, it’s a stage, and we’re on the stage, you and I, this is a happening . . . and you know, Poetry Slow Down, I see this phenomena AS a “poetry slow down:” here you are, driving in your car, sixty miles an hour down the highway, or along a business route, strip mall, or on your way to your grandchildren, or you’re at your office computer, paying bills, or at the kitchen table, where I love to think of you, chopping onions, or mixing cookie dough (stay tuned for our show, kitchen poetry), and then, poetry enters the air! And YOU, you good ones, YOU say, bring it on! And I say, let’s—let’s get poetry into our everyday life, it’s good for us, it’s good for us physically, cognitively, spiritually, for our whole brain, whole selves, whole lives! And let’s keep poetry in our civic life, as we travel on buses and trains, walk on stone and take ecalators up granite walls, from Freedom Plaza to Dupont Metro Station in Washington, D.C. Let’s keep it in government: the English-major poetry-quoting San Fransisco Supervisor John Avalos came in second in the Mayor’s race in a field of over 16 candidates, losing only to the incumbent; his reading of poetry gave him an epiphany of kindness of government. Let’s keep it in the White House, at Stanford in the Occu-poem. Coast to coast, board room to civic chambers to walls and sidewalks, poetry is vital for humanity.

And so meanwhile, back at the Flash Mob, our moment has been transformed, and if you have seen some of these Flash Mobs on video, on You Tube, you can see Flash Mobs at Denver Airport where people leave their luggage and join the dancing, enter the frolicsome fray, and there they are, dancing away . . .

So the element of surprise is key, right, and so organizing a Flash Mob for Emily Dickinson was logistically challenging. The invitation was a little tricky: Here is what went out, so weirdly:

Where? We can’t tell you where because a Flash Mob breaks us out of ordinary public rhythms, surprising everyone, revealing space we take for granted as a stage, how we actually do live on a stage or page, but we’ll give you some clues.

YES, Gingerbread will be served!

YES, Poetry will be recited!

This Flash Mob (shhhhh) is brought to you by Team Poetry’s Poet in Residence of Pacific Grove, Barbara Mossberg (“Dr. B), and students of California State University Monterey Bay and Pacific Grove High School, under the direction of Mr. Larry Haggquist and the champion Poetry Out Loud program.

COME ONE COME ALL! COME ON, and bring your favorite “NOBODY!”

I confess Poetry Slow Down I dreamed this up in thinking of a way to ring in Emily Dickinson’s birthday and put it “out there.” And so on the eve of her birthday about fifty high school students and college students wearing purple and white—I’ll tell you about that in a sec–joined me in this tomfoolery truly breaking the public peace.

We did it at an iconic literary site, on Cannery Row, next to where John Steinbeck, who won the Nobel Prize for literature, wrote Cannery Row, with his buddy Ed Rickets, a marine biologist who loved Shakespeare, and Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist (Hero With A Thousand Faces) who loved literature and science, and Steinbeck loved marine biology, so they all hung out right here where the seals bark, and so here we were, and first, I meekly accosted a couple crossing the plaza, saying, I’m Nobody, who are you? They sort of stopped, sort of alarmed, sort of annoyed, on the alert, but polite: at “are you nobody too?” they started to say their names, who they were, and the poem continued, and they stopped walking to listen, realizing, oh, this is something, something happening, looking at each other—I will let you know the link for the video:—and then, a young woman seated on a bench nearby leaped up and announced, I’m Nobody! Who are you! –the whole poem, and then a woman across the plaza leaped up on a bench, and declaimed the poem, and then, two and three people on a balcony held forth, and then people came out of stores, saying I’m Nobody, and then there were twenty people, chanting, I’m Nobody, and suddenly it seemed that EVERYONE was Nobody, and then across the street more, and more of Nobody-ness, emerging from stores and doorways and from all directions, until finally about fifty people were filling the air with chanting, I’m Nobody, who are you, are you nobody too?

First you are thinking, a community, a mob chanting in unison “I’m Nobody!” Um, Dr. B, What is wrong with this picture? Is this not a complete contradiction of the very spirit of Emily Dickinson? Singular, isolate, and alone, removed by choice from the public fray? Ah, Poetry Slow Down, you’re right, Emily Dickinson famously lived her life in seclusion, if not also exile. She wrote, explaining why she would not accept an invitation even by a famous editor of The Atlantic Monthly to visit, “. . . I do not cross my father’s ground to any House or town.” She did not engage the world—in person. She lived a quiet, invisible life. In her lifetime she was virtually unknown as a poet. She knew she was considered a “nobody but she defiantly takes that identity and shakes it, shakes it up, with pride and panache! Like the person you didn’t even notice at first in the Flash Mob, suddenly bursting into performance, her Nobody is not to be underestimated: “How dreary to be Somebody.” “Public” is literally a dirty word here—a bog. As in, mire, stench, quagmire, swamp, as in, getting swamped, getting BOGGED down, as in, the definition for quagmire, difficult situation.

That’s the “public” realm. Rivet. Yet she yearned to be famous, to be immortal, to matter utterly to us, to be “great, Someday,” that is, to be a poet—which would do all of the above, bring her fame, bring her immortality, bring her as a household word to us, to transform our quotidian world like a flash mob, into something momentous, lighting up the insides of our lives with insights into the momentous, precious, significant, comic, tragic, enormously meaningful truths of the dignity and epic struggle of each of our being, alive on this earth, and conscious. That’s her life To Do list, I think. Her poetry chronicles her struggle for an identity of distinction.

Emily Dickinson created an identity and poetry of such distinction and singularity that it took about a hundred years for it to come to us whole and not “fixed up” or “foxed.” She has become known as one of the greatest poets in the English language, beloved around the world, a “somebody.”Nobody: a person of no importance, no consequence, somebody unimportant,   “not one person.” So, perhaps, all persons? My freshman students at California State University Monterey Bay have exciting responses to these issues that illuminate Dickinson’s relevance to our world.

And how delicious to celebrate her celebrity, her fame, her public stature, with a mob, disturbing the peace or at least the business as usual! To an “admiring bog!” And to have a crew of Nobodies saying some of her most beloved and famous words. She is no longer “shut up,” “shut out.” She is part of the fabric of our daily lives, her words the spiritual soundtrack to how we live and think about life most profoundly.  Her joys and sorrows and insights into the largeness of life expressed on the sidewalk, declaimed in the plaza, pronounced on the street, shouted on a public bench. Yes–in public!

This seems right.

It seems that everywhere in the world I have gone, Dickinson is famous for writing “I’m nobody.” She is a cognoscente of defiant consciousness, speaking for people of every culture.It seems like a paradox, Dickinson as a famous Nobody. And yet I suspect that her fame as a nobody illuminates a truth about all of us—everyone. We each may harbor a conviction that we are a nobody, insignificant, invisible, in terms of our true worth. No one knows us for our true selves, our greatness, our genius. We each yearn to matter utterly.

In our world today, Emily Dickinson’s experience as a defiant nobody who created her own destiny is universally relevant. Her poetry takes us on a journey of self-discovery in which the Nobody within is a cocoon that will transform into a butterfly. I’m Nobody resonates with the secret sharer-self in which everyone, I suspect, considers oneself a “nobody” and yet yearns to matter utterly to our world. In my work as a teacher and lecturer, I ask people to engage with the structure of this poem to open up their own sense of longing to belong and to be known in significant ways to our world. And she recognizes us: are you nobody too? She makes a community of us, fellow nobodies, a mob of us.

Today we’ll hear a companion poem to I’m Nobody, A little madness in the spring, and some of my favorite poems of her wild spirit expressed as Nobody and the Clown, on sunrise and letters and wind and rain and pain and of course wild nights and love and poetry and joy, how to see the world s.c., spiritually correct, why we need her in our mind’s ecopsyche, in our busy days, why she is good on our minds.

The miracle for me, of Dickinson’s life achievement of her poetry, is that despite her own lack of a public opportunity to express her voice, her power, and her genius (a topic that gnawed at her), and despite her loneliness, and ill health, she expressed a brave and indomitable vision both tragic and comic that inspires people of all ages, everywhere. On the one hand, she describes herself oppressed, with a feeling of helpless insignificance; and she describes herself assuppressed, repressed, her voice not wanted, literally, shut up, and shut out. she describes herself left out of life’s bounty, what’s given out for public nurture, like the Little Match Girl starving outside the windows of an oblivious society, unaware of her hunger. We see that she feels she gets life’s crumbs, leftovers, she’s so unimportant and left out and ill-considered. So that’s her pity party, and she really works the violins in our sympathy and compassion for her plight. On the other hand, she is feisty.

I am writing a book called The Power of Nobody to Change the World, on the unlikely role of arts and humanities for public policy and legislation for war and peace, environment, and civil and human rights! I see the impact of Dickinson on my students’ sense of possibility and mandate to speak their truths. Engaging with Emily Dickinson’s astonishing and disarming “I’m Nobody,” my students conceive their own lives as heroic struggles for identity of visibility and significance to our society, their creative response to anything that would discourage their sense of freedom and possibility.

So this short poem “I’m Nobody” is emblematic of a life, confined, compressed, a “calm bomb,” explosive in our minds, illuminating what is there in the darkness of our doubts and convictions of not mattering. The irony of Dickinson’s struggle with her identity as “Nobody” and her transformation of herself into this person invokes a poignant and moving truth about our deepest humanity and needs and longings.

So there we have it, Poetry Slow Down, a life lived in obscurity–no one knew she has this gift, this power of language and expression and thought, no one was receiving her missives, her emails, her texts and twitters and tweets and telegrams and hourly blogs, and yet, she persisted, in her own words, the spider sewing at night, in it for the long-range, long-term, for us, Poetry Slow Down, the hands she could not see, for the news she brought us on the fronts of war and peace, suffering and joy, the weather outside, and inside, frightful and delightful,  and her own How to See Appropriately to honor this gift of consciousness, of being alive on earth today.

Emily Dickinson, showing us her poetic moxie, her confidence and authority and. . . joy .  .  . in being our Anderson Cooper, our news correspondent.

I reflect on the influence of Dickinson on the way I think about the world and the actual language with which my brain conceives thoughts and perceptions about my day and life. I wake up and see the sky and think “a ribbon at a time.” Or on a day like today, seeing “a certain slant of light.” Reading her poetry I consciously have changed the language in which I write and speak about “our” world and “our” earth.

A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown –
Who ponders this tremendous scene –
This whole Experiment of Green –
As if it were his own!

The Clown may not legally own it: the King does. But—the way HE sees it,  earth and he are inextricably related, relations, out of the same cloth, as our own relations, people we came from and who come from us. What if we felt that each other and earth were indeed “our own?” How differently would we behold each other and treat ourcommon shared habitat? (And on that note, stay tuned for our show Dec 25 for John Muir, who made this his strategy for saving the wild outside and in us, honoring him, I’ll be doing the show where he died on Christmas Eve, writing, as he took his last breaths, on beholding the glorious lights of aurora borealis).

I have come to feel that Emily Dickinson’s Nobody andClown are Dickinson’s poetic self, her inner heroes fighting what—speaking of heroes—my hero Sir Peter Shaffer has his immortal Lettice Douffet in Lettice and Lovage call “the mere, ” an ordinary somebody. Lettice is like Dickinson’s clown, perceiving the tremendous: she wants to enlarge, enlighten, enliven, the three E’s she learned from her mother who takes Shakespeare to the French provinces, occupying barns and fields, her own flash mobbery. She defies and defines a way of living and seeing life that is mere—defined as “that and nothing more”. The small, the least. The nobody-ness. There is something in Dickinson’s clown, her defiant re-definition of nobody, that calls to us, something wild and yearning to belong and to be free. To see the world this way is a creative response that is beyond convention, beyond the usual way a somebody or king would look at life. Dickinson’s poems in my brain, as I hurry about my days (“. . . mov[ing] too fast”), busy and distracted, are flash mobs,slow downs, of pondering, wild thought, transforming the moment into a greater consciousness. Her poems are “pop ups” in my mind. As she says of the Poet (in “This was a poet”), they “arrest” us: they stop us, and make us wonder and think and feel, and we go on, as we do after a flash mob, changed and, in computer language, truly re-freshed as we go about our business. That’s what The Poetry Slow Down is all about.

My gratitude for her life is profound. Her words have shaped my life as significantly as a glacier shapes landscape, powerfully deepening my capacity to experience and know what it is that there is to see, to feel. My adult life has been shaped by a woman who stayed in her room and picked up a pen: “I took my power in my hand and went against the world.” And at the end of the day, was she glad that she had committed her life energies to this devotion? “I had the glory–that will do.”

So Emily Dickinson, honoring our inner nobody, our inner clown, I think the Flash Mob is just right for celebrating you. We’re taking you out. Didn’t you say:

Me — come!  My dazzled face
In such a shining place!
Me — hear! My foreign Ear
The sounds of Welcome — there!

The Saints forget
Our bashful feet —
My Holiday, shall be
That They — remember me —
My Paradise — the fame
That They — pronounce my name —

We do pronounce your name, and I think, Emily Dickinson, that your news to us, helps MAKE this a shining place, that is your gift to us, lighting and making luminous our world . . . your poetry is the gift that keeps giving. My early morning thoughts–as the sun rises “a ribbon at a time.”

NEXT WEEK: DECEMBER 18, 2011

I’ll be back next week, with rip roaring riparian river

restoration news, poetry of meandering and cascading and light and good news for all of us, here on our earth, this whole experiment in green, it’s still happening, it isn’t done, it’s alive, as Emily Dickinson is, with our reading and hearing her, immortal.

Poetry Slow Down, you are indeed Sweet Countrymen. Thank you for listening and sharing these moments, this flash mob in our day.

Check out Huffington Post and Facebook for images of Flash Mob and my Emily Dickinson play at the Cherry Center for the Arts in Carmel. She was right: they’ll advertise—you know!

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In Memory of Ruth Stone, b. 1915, d. Nov 19, 2011

And honoring Robert Hass, former poet laureate, Library of Congress

“Gratitude is the moral memory of mankind.” Georg Simmel

Thanksgiving, Football, Pumpkins, Shopping, a Little Time Out! It is not so much being thankful for what makes us happy; being thankful is the root of happiness. Being thankful comes first, if we listen to our poets, and we should! Listen! W.S. Merwin’s “Thanks”, Marvin Bell, e.e. cummings, Rachel Hurt, Walt Whitman. . .

We’re ready for a Time Out, aren’t we, just finishing Thanksgiving, and I’m pondering how poetry is like a holiday, it’s a different pace and kind of activity, it slows us down from the ordinary pulse of life, when we read or write it, it stops the action, like the slo mo or freeze frame of a football play (I’ve been watching a lot of football lately), it puts the present moment into focus, it intensifies it, so that we focus on this one train of thought, this one consideration, this one kind of happening thought, like a mind event, and perhaps like a Yoga pose, it strengthens us, as we are holding the position, perhaps it’s a lot like strength training, a core workout, for the mind and spirit. And at the same time we travel during it, it moves us, not just emotionally, but takes us on a journey, begins us with a line, and our eyes and ears enter this experience; so that it happens to us, we are not just spectators. It becomes part of our way of thinking, the tradition of our being.

POETRY IS MIND WORK, TIME OUT, PAUSE

I was at a conference on the neuroscience of learning, brain-based learning, with about 700 educators from disciplines ranging from physics and math and computers to theater and psychology and history and sociology, the Lilly Conference on teaching and learning, as its Poet in Residence, and it struck me not only how many poems are actually about learning, and cause learning—and I read you some last week, including my poem on Zumba class, I’m shaking it I’m making it but the woman in the mirror doesn’t move at all, how hard we can be working, but it isn’t always apparent what’s going on inside, momentous effort . . . —

But also how poems are good for our minds. They work our left and right brains, firing up our centers for rhythm and computation and visual thinking and auditory and words, and most of all, they Occupy our minds fully, with sound and meaning. So in a way they are a time out, in a way they are the pause to ponder the movement that goes by so fast in a blur, and like football, if you’re like me you don’t even know where to look, to know what’s happening, you have to go back and see it over and over, from every angle, and you can look at the image, and it reveals what is too hurried to see in real time—how leaping bodies even for this one moment fly—

And when we have a national holiday, it makes us slow down as a whole people. In the past days I have been reflecting on poetry in our civic life, walking around Washington, D.C., how poets and poetry are at the heart of action, when we see our national life on pause: seeing it literally in the heart of movements such as the Occupy Movement, poems recited, poems in the library tent with its own section at Occupy Washington, poems engraved in the pavement at Freedom Square, on Pennsylvania Avenue, right across from the Willard Hotel where Emily Dickinson stayed when she visited her Congressman father, and just down the street, at the White House, poetry written and read. Poetry has nourished and sustained us with words that matter. It has changed the world. It is at the heart of the nation’s pulse. I have received word that colleague Robert Hass, UC Berkeley professor of poetry and former poet laureate of Library of Congress, alongside his wife, who was knocked down, and fellow poets roughed up, was beaten on the steps of Sproul Hall, UC Berkeley, where he and his wife had gone to see if they could help protect students:

One of my colleagues, also a poet, Geoffrey O’Brien, had a broken rib. Another colleague, Celeste Langan, a Wordsworth scholar, got dragged across the grass by her hair when she presented herself for arrest. . .

The next night the students put the tents back up. Students filled the plaza again with a festive atmosphere. And lots of signs. (The one from the English Department contingent read “Beat Poets, not beat poets.”) . . . On Thursday afternoon when I returned toward sundown to the steps to see how the students had responded, the air was full of balloons, helium balloons to which tents had been attached, and attached to the tents was kite string. And they hovered over the plaza, large and awkward, almost lyrical, occupying the air. [You can actually see these images, Poetry Slow Down, an imaginative action, flying and floating tents, making sky a habitat of hope for national conversation, and The New York Timesarticle concludes, Robert Hass is a professor of poetry and poetics at the University of California, Berkeley, and former poet laureate of the United States.

In an earlier poem he had written that he is amazed he has lived to a venerable old age, with miraculous escapes, for which he has gratitude to God . . . .

So today, let’s think of this saying, how gratitude does not come from being happy, but being happy comes from being grateful. Let’s explore the connection between gratitude and happiness through poetry. So we’re going for a mind workout, holding a Yogic pose of attention, into slow mo, the mind in flight, catching the image, holding onto it, with all these forces trying to wrest it from the conscious mind– and then what to do with the image, take it farther, farther down the field, and score, get us somewhere to cheer about . . .

And Ruth Stone—we honor her today—she was born in 1915, and just died at age 96 in Vermont—I knew her as a poet at Indiana University in the early 1970s. The Ruth Stone Poetry Prize was won last year by  Rochelle Hurt, “Third Surgery,” with all the pain and worry and fear invoking a spirit, perhaps a helpless spirit, perhaps a fierce, fiercely held spirit, of gratitude.

C. K. Chesterson said, I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.  ~ So let’s slow down, for poetry of gratitude, for wherever you are,you’re there—and that makes it human and heart and mind in flow. Thinking of Robert Hass and poets everywhere, of all time—it sounds as if it were written this week, but Merwin wrote this decades ago: “Thanks.”

W.S. Merwin, “Thanks”

So here is a question. Merwin is piling on images of things we think, of course, we are thankful for: but he’s also including hospitals and funerals, all the things you and I are worried about, and feel sorrow about, personal and national and global, immediate and historical wrongs and injustice and tragedies, to earth and each other. In his poem animals are dying, the forests are disappearing, there are beatings, there is the 1 percent who he says will never change, and nobody is listening, and yet, he includes us in this, we are saying thank you, as dark is coming down, we are saying thank you and waving dark though it is. So the question is what being thankful means, when, where, what, why, how, at what point we say thank you, given our suffering, our awareness of suffering—do we have to have blinders to say thank you, to have gratitude, do we turn a blind eye to wrong and sorrow? What quality of mind and of thinking go into gratitude?Listen, he says: asking us to open to what he has to say. Listen, with the night falling we are saying thank you, well, listen up, this is remarkable! So he describes us in mid-stream of our lives, maybe Dante’s dark wood in midlife, building up a sense of momentum of all of this, piled, layered in consciousness, for thanks for every darn thing. Thankyouthankyouthankyou. Does this make us idiots? Gratitude for dummies?

This accumulation by Merwin, of wounds to earth and humanity, things we endure that make for unhappiness, makes it moving and shocking then to hear, in spite of all this going wrong, “We go on saying thank you thank you. . . we are saying thank you. . . .faster and faster with nobody listening we are saying thank you we are saying thank you and waving dark though it is.” We say it even though it is Simon and  Garfunkle’s “people talking without listening,” and yet, we, WE, listen to the poet, who years after he wrote this was named Poet Laureate of the U.S. Library of Congress, formed out of Thomas Jefferson’s library, to advise Congress and our whole country. To say thank you, to express gratitude: this is an act of magnitude, of complexity, perhaps simplicity, of power of mind, of submission of mind, what is required to go on, or, a signal grace? And what does it mean that in our civic culture, a national holiday is given over to thanks. Yet thanksgiving goes on year round in poetry, this holiday of the mind, this bringing to our consciousness something intrinsic about our day, inextricable from our being. What is the connection between poetry, the taking time to write a poem and reflect on something about living, and thanks-giving?  Nietzsche says the essence of all art, all beauty, is gratitude.

More on the philosophy of poetry, football, and thanksgiving: Anne Porter, A List of Praises,

So in this case, we make a list of those things that come into consciousness. What if we each made such a list Poetry Slow Down, of the things for which we are grateful, if we take it down to the nano level, the smallest things . . .

Nothing is too small to notice and be grateful for (See “Dusting” by Marilyn Nelson, “Wild Gratitude” by Edward Hirsch.) We hear Rumi’s “What Was Told, That,” and Eleanor Lerman’s “Starfish.” We hear Charles Bernstein, Thank you for saying thank you and excerpts from Naomi Shihab Nye. We hear Hilarie Jones‘s “The Teacher,” and then poems of gratitude wisdom by poets in old age, Stanley Kunitz and Walt Whitman.

This hour, this moment: we don’t put it off any longer, we pay attention now; we say thanks; we have gratitude; it is all consciousness! And so, speaking of gratitude and saying thanks as a way of being, we discuss Mary Oliver’s way of gratitude through her poetry, telling us the questions that will open us to gratitude, and about her work as a “Messenger:” “My work is loving the world.”  I know that I read it to you often, but check out Gerald Stern’s “Grapefruit.” It is a great gratitude poem.

So we start with football as a way of being present in the moment, in slo mo, the pause, the freeze frame, a way of holiday, of taking time OUT, making time be known and lived; of paying attention; and gratitude, thanks-giving . . . and the poems expressing thanks, are a way of happiness. A poem is this moment, making the morning last, as our poet Paul Simon says. It seems, from e.e. cummings’ poem, beginning with i thank You God for most this amazing [day], and ending with, and now the ears of my ears are awake AND NOW the eyes of my eyes are open—or the other way, I always mix it up, my eyes of my eyes are awake and my ears of my ears are open—it is that giving thanks, thanks-giving, BEGINS the process, readying us, preparing us to receive the benefits of the day, by being awake and open, to what there is to see and hear, from inside out: because if it is the ears of our ears and the eyes of our eyes, it is the interior capacity we have to process our world, to take it in, to make of it something, as the poet, which means “maker” in Greek, the origin of the word, makes the poem: the poem, like the football game on a holiday weekend, devoted to slowing down, to give thanks, to enjoy our time and be conscious of it, of all that nourishes us, of all that we can find good. To say thanks in this way expresses the spirit and begins what I believe is our human duty of gratitude, of living purposely with joy and reverence and awe for the gift of consciousness of being alive on this earth, now, in this form.

POETRY AS FOOTBALL AND VICE VERSA, A PHILOSOPHY OF INTERPRETING

To say thanks is to bring our moment to NOW, and like the football game, which is one extended metaphor, we stop and watch; and like a poem, it is organized into a beginning, middle, and end, divided up, like a sonnet, into quatrains, with a march and velocity and rhthym, and ebb and flow, tides of passion and striving and earnest effort. And I thought of a way that football and our thanksgiving holiday slow down poetry all go together in one metaphorical gaphlomb! We are thankful for the people who catch our passes even when our throw is not that accurate, the people who pass to us even if we don’t always catch it, the people who get it to us and let us run for the glory, the people who make that run for us, the people who have our back, and protect and block for us, and tackle and bring down obstacles in our path, and the people who give us advice, and cheer us on, and challenge us, and the people who teach us and ready us for the strength and endurance and resilience we need to be on this field, playing with all our hearts, the people who say to us, as Coach Eric Taylor says in Friday Night Lights which for me will never end, play always with the philosophy of clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose. Buddha says we become what we think. Just thinking with gratitude—this consciousness–opens us to the poem that can be made of our lives, and the way it slows us down to see what is happening, what is there, to think metaphorically. Einstein is anticipated by Ralph Waldo Emerson, our own national philosopher of everyday genius, who says wisdom is expressing gratitude for the ordinary as extraordinary; so it is a feat of imagination, of artistry really, being grateful as creative thinking, expressing it as the heart of creativity which has become religion and philosophy and culture. We can read these poems as a way to open us, as e.e. cummings would say, to the gratitude of our gratitude. Dr. Masuru Emoto’s work with water crystals—did you see What the Bleep Do We Know? –He put the words love and thanks for us to see as we gaze on water and photograph the effects of these words. There is science on the power of words to affect our minds, on the power of words in how we see and think . . .

FLASH MOB SCENE

And as we begin a season of festivals of light and birth of civic and community cultures around the world, with thanksgiving, I am thinking of a phenomenon which is so wonderful in transforming what we might think of as our everyday quotidian lives . . . the Flash Mob, in which, we might be standing in line at the bank, or pulling our roll-ey at the airport, or crossing a city plaza, and so we’re not thinking of anything, just stressed, pressed for time, in a hurry, not happy, on your way to, not “there” yet, wherever you are, and something hap-pens: the person next to you bursts into song, or a dance step, or a line, and then someone else, who was acting and looking quite ordinary, invisible, you didn’t even notice, suddenly in this public space of no man’s land, is Shakespeare, Gershwin, Michael Jackson on the public mind, and the next thing you know, it’s a scene, literally, it’s a stage, and you’re on the stage, you’re part of it, it’s all around you, song and dance and poetry, and it’s contagious, people are putting down their suitcases and stopping, and watching, and then  joining in, and it’s a community celebration of the human imagination and capacity for joy, for rhythm and making something beautiful in the day, in our life . . . like how I think of our Poetry Slow Down, how you, in your busy day today, in the middle of everything, literally stop, make time for, slowing down, to listen to poetry. And like the Flash Mob, so exhilarating, transforming the moment into something so special and extraordinary, with expressive arts, we realize that this capacity in us to enjoy, to behold, to gaze and ponder and wonder and simply be happy, is there all the time.

BE ON THE LOOKOUT FOR FLASH MOB IN A NEIGHBORHOOD NEAR YOU DECEMBER 9, 2011

(Details to be provided as clues)

And I saw the film Elf last night as part of network tv movie offering for the holiday, and it ends with someone singing a song in Central Park and people everywhere, in the park and watching the tv news, start joining in, making the moment last. So I am going to be bringing some Flash Mob action to the Central Coast of California, KRXA 540AM terrain, in the coming weeks, so be on the lookout for ordinary people quoting poetry in public places, I’ll be giving you some clues next week and on my website atBarbaraMossberg.com, and on Facebook, and on our show . . .

CELEBRATE EMILY DICKINSON’S BIRTHDAY DECEMBER 10, CHERRY CENTER, CARMEL, CA

and I want to invite you also, if you are on this Coast, to come to my annual reading of Emily Dickinson’s poetry in celebration of her birthday, December 10, at the Cherry Center, Carmel’s theater since 1948, and I will be baking gingerbread from her recipe and using 19^th century baking technology, and we’ll sing, and I’ll tell you more about it next week on our show as well, and I love doing this show, I started doing in wherever I was in the world, in 1976, 35 years ago! And it came from waking up on the day of her birthday, many years ago, and feeling this sense of such gratitude for her poetry. I would get up early and I would think about her poetry and the immensity of my gratitude for this in my life, her words, giving profound beauty and wisdom to how I see the world and my life. So on this day of concluding our show on thanksgiving, and concluding this civic holiday, I would like to end with lines from a poem for which I give thanks, and in so doing, open myself for happiness: I’ll tell you how the sun rose, a ribbon at a time.  These late November mornings have orange and pink ribbons in them: what a way to begin the day, with thanks for words that point our attention to the day’s promise, a gift-wrapped, ribbon festooned gift, and opening it, opening ourselves to it, is cause for happiness. Poetry Slow Down, thank you for your ears, joining me on this journey, thank you Producer Sara Hughes and KRXA 540AM, I am Professor Barbara Mossberg, and I have enjoyed slowing down with you. Thank you!

© Barbara Mossberg 2011

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From my journal:

I read the paper, The San Francisco Chronicle, that Christer puts for me in the back room to savor and drink my first cup of coffee before the morning email. This day’s first page deals with a woman who hurtles through flames to drag a man to safety when his truck turned over on 101 in SF, and the story is not clear at all on what actually happened and what she actually did, but its point is that someone slowed down: literally stopped, at 5 am, in freeway speeds of 65 mph, that someone noticed something in their rearview mirror, with a one year old child in the backseat, saw a truck tip and topple, stopped, and tried to help. And no one else stopped. A 22 year old who works at a senior center. That is an inspiring story. What makes us slow down and disrupt our routine for others, in heroic ways, lifesaving ways, or not . . . as we hurry along on our paths. I need to talk to The Poetry Slow Down. Is writing a poem, or reading a poem, this kind of slow down, this kind of interruption, that can save each others’ lives. And I have been thinking of what my students did with Marcel Proust, as I assigned them de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life. Through the lens of their voices and visions, Proust’s ideas for how to live are so wise, the importance of taking time to appreciate things, how if you hurry through things you make them smaller and less momentous, when they could be so precious, and how to make the everyday revealed as extraordinary by making the moment last—and last—real—momentous (“you’ve got to make the morning last”). I want to talk about this. And what slowing down with poetry has to do with it.

I read about the crisis of drop outs in community colleges. To me, we all know what works. It takes time and individual attention and belief in each student, in their whole self. It cannot be a mass factory wholesale hurried -approach. Whole self, not wholesale. It must be education for the whole self, the Hokey Pokey—slow poke-pokey–approach, throw your whole self in, and shake it all about. That’s what it’s all about. Mix with Homer, Proust, Cyrano de Bergerac, Shakespeare, epic wisdom from the ages, myth, stories. In this lens is revelation. One’s own life becomes a story, a heroic, epic struggle, that has meaning, and hope. We find out who we are, what is at stake in our learning, through the writings of others. A magic mirror. What was Luis Rodriguez’s new book—you are the other me. We need to let our students discover their illimitable, indefatigable (they love this word), hungry for learning selves! Through literature and art—through “despised” and “difficult” poems!

I also read about a man who had a private preserve of wild animals and in a fit of revenge against his community, set them loose, and killed himself. The animals, released from their cages and fences, were shot on sight, almost every one, except a few tigers, a grizzly bear, and two monkeys. All else killed, as a director of the Columbus Zoo said, a reverse Noah’s Ark, Noah’s Ark wrecked. This disaster. 18 rare Bengal tigers. Just saying tiger, I think of Blake, of what he would make of this. How do we honor the momentousness of this tragedy, of Blake’s vision? Once we read The Tyger, we are committed for the rest of our lives to that fearful symmetry. I want to include that too, in the show. And in each case, poetry on this topic, but also, poetry as a story in itself, how it matters, as a principle of slowing down, and appreciating life.

So Poetry Slow Down, you good ones, you are on my mind . . . And somehow, Marcel Proust got into the mix, with his advice, channeled through Alain de Botton, a philosopher, on the relation between the newspaper news and what the poet makes of it. So we’re going to hear marvelous poets and writers as we consider what the topic became:

The Beasts of Poetry: The Poetry of the Morning Report. This title is a little bit of an allusion to—speaking of wild things, lions and tigers and bears oh no—the clever and enduring Lion King, and The Morning Report!

First, saving lives! There are poems that actually save lives, famous ones like Invictus by William Ernest Henley, which saved Nelson Mandela, and possibly South Africa, and certainly Henley himself, and Ulysses by Tennyson, which Tennyson wrote to save himself from despair when his college friend died, and poems that may have saved YOU, Poetry Slow Down, and there are whole books of poems on this topic. One is called Saving Lives, by Albert Goldbarth. We’ll hear, in the next weeks, James Laughlin, W.S. Merwin, Marianne Moore, Theodore Roethke, Zbigniew Herbert, Edward Sanders, Galway Kinnell, Ted Hughes, Kenneth Rexroth, Delmore Schwarz, Timothy Liu, George Oppen, James Dickey, Elizabety Bishop, William Blake, Wallace Stevens, Sandra McPherson, Joan Houlihan, Edward Hirsch, Carl Sandburg, and me, and others, on poetry of slow down and saving the day, on lions and tigers and bears and the wild, in our world, in us, in poetry, in the poet in your neighborhood, in you. Our poems gather us in tribute and requiem and reflection: Cherish the wildness in you, the news of your heroic spirit invoked by Poetry, and slowing down!

Thank you, and write me at bmossberg@csumb.edu

© Barbara Mossberg 2011

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My heart rouses to bring you news that concerns you and concerns many men. It is difficult to get the news from despised poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. You know who that is, Poetry Slow Down, That’s William Carlos Williams, Dr. Williams, your corner OB-GYN delivering babies by day and writing by night, and you know who this is, I’m Professor Barbara Mossberg, here at KRXA 540AM, with Producer Sara Hughes, at Think For Yourself Radio. Now Dr. Williams is making pretty large claims, isn’t he, for poetry—life and death? And not just death but miserable death? What is this news? And: what if we could not get this Rx? Those are the questions that my heart rouses to bring you news of today, that concerns you and concerns many men, so to speak, the issue of banned literature– including poetry. We just finished celebrating a week of Banned Books nationwide, with such groups as the American Library Association, are we a great country or what, we celebrate everything, like Walt Whitman, ourselves—we mark events we need to remember! I haven’t seen a Hallmark Card yet, but we could . . . Thinking of you during banned books week . . . My love for you is so intense it would be banned in Boston! If I told you how much I love you, there would be a federal case! I’d go to jail to tell you of my love. In fact, words of love did end up banned in Boston, in federal jurisdiction, and cause for jail. What? Yes, even the poets you love; yes, even the poets you were taught

in school; yes, even the poetry you taught; and yes, even the poetry you read to your children! I’m not kidding. Wait until you hear the list. We are going to have such a good time, because the topic of banned poetry is a platform, I admit it at the outset, of discussing just what it is about a work that makes it so powerful –the news that concerns us–that someone want to get it off our screens. So many works have been banned or challenged or panned or slammed that are considered great: We are talking about the guts of greatness. Of course, I think, Banned Books Week is precisely meant to have us ponder the magnitude of loss when a book is taken from us, when we no longer have access to these words. What would our world be

without them? That’s what I’m thinking about: the Banned Books week stirred and in some ways shook me — I discussed it with the great students at the Osher Institute of Lifelong Learning, aka OLLI,—it turned out to be so big we just grazed the topic, with six hours. What’s at stake, in our daily mind and grind, a kind of FlashMob in our quotidian day, and daze, we think it’s an ordinary moment and out pops Walt! You know he would—transforming our ordinary moment into something extraordinary, and bringing us into it . . . Of course, Walt was banned—banned early, banned often, banned late. So let’s get a move on, Poetry Slow down, what do you say? You are saying, Poetry Slow Down, banned? The Good Grey Poet, as he was called, O Captain, My Captain! When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed? The Walt Whitman whose words are inscribed in stone on Freedom Plaza—one of the places where Occupy Washington are taking place—and on the walls of the Metro Station at Dupont Circle—and a bridge on a turnpike—and the high school where our son went—isn’t he sort of patriotic? The list of banned books could be

confused with the curriculum of any middle or high school or college English class for required reading! There’s poetry banned by governments, poetry banned by school boards, poetry banned by cities, poetry banned by religions, poetry banned by parent groups. Poetry is taken out of libraries. It’s taken off school shelves. It’s not taught. It’s not bought or sold. Well, for example, what? We’ll hear an amazing list of works whose existence is anathema to various organizations and entities that want to silence their voices. (You can find some of these in the nursery and at your book club.) What it is about literature and poetry that gets itself in trouble and people want to disappear it? How dangerous is it, if people want to silence it? That’s the point, I think: it’s so powerful. Hearing or seeing words

moves and maybe moves around and jostles and ignites the way we think and feel—words can change our minds. They can change the day—we have FACTS about that—they can move mountains, or maybe save them. They can inspire courage, and conscience, and consciousness . . . . We’ll hear about John Avalos being inspired by (banned) Tolstoy, James Wright (“I have wasted my life”) on (banned) Mark Twain. So in this two-part series, we’ll hear about banned poems of empathy, compassion, peace, love, kindness, and joyousness, and examples of what would be lost to us if we did not have these poems, including a reading of epic responses to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s injunction to speak one’s genius, (banned-in-Boston) Walt Whitman, (banned) Nikki Giovanni, (banned) Allen Ginsberg, and also some of the good behavior of wild things (children and their parents) in the banned Shel Silverstein and Maurice Sendak, Paul Simon’s “Sounds of Silence,” E. Dickinson’s “They shut me up in Prose” excerpt—and a sweet love poem of (banned) Sappho. Next up: Shelley’s Defense of Poets, Milton, Yeats, and more: “the sounds of silence” unfurled. Thank you for joining me, and for your support of our program to have poetry in our civic life, our quotidian days and daze.

© Dr. Barbara Mossberg

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