“It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.”–Gertrude Stein.
And so we’re going to take a lot of time, an hour today, for our Poetry Slow Down, considering how Paul Simon’s “59th Street Bridge Song”, Gertrude Stein, and Marcel Proust, are giving us a wake-up call about being in bed, on the sidelines, as the mind’s frontlines, taking our time, taking time out, making time count, recovering lost time, and the neuroscience of genius that poetry illuminates. And yes, it’s the Superbowl, speaking of time out and taking time out, we hear a Proustian analysis of football and Stein on football (and her reply to a snarky reporter, Snap!–she has her finger on the pulse), and poems on football by Lewis Jenkins, Billy Collins, A.E. Housman, Howard Nemerov, and poems about being in and watching the game (including Super Bowl) by Rumi and Whitman, and recovering wasted time through poetry by your host, me, Dr. B (transforming drudgery time into happiness, by slowing down and conceiving and writing the poem: “I am happy/I take my time”).

“The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”–Marcel Proust. We consider that if we stop time, we can look around and see what’s here and not be blinded by the blur, the cacophony, the chaos: we can see the detail, we can pay attention keenly, and wake up; we can discern beauty, and in this timeless state we can find happiness (from the word “hap,” as in happen), occurring when we slow down, do nothing, really nothing, genius time, says Stein, Ein-stein, Gertrude Stein. That’s our show theme, challenged to bring February’s birthday genius Gertrude Stein in alliance with Superbowl Sunday. And speaking of slowing down, stopping the clock:

I ran out of TIME! I thought I had more! So I took my time! and then ran out! I was going to end telling about a UC study of neuroscience claiming wisdom is the slowing down of the brain in old age! In a new study researchers found wisdom increases with age and carries on even after occurrence of brain damage like stroke. Well, poetry is difficult, as Dr. Williams says, because it is saying things in a different way that we are not in the habit of (as Gertrude Stein says in her analogy to football). But when we read it, even if struggling and wondering, as in a football game, all the things going on all at once, where to look–it’s a time out, it’s time lost, it’s making time, it’s making time up, and maybe it is written by geniuses, and certainly our authors would tell us that, not just Stein posing as her lover Alice B. Toklas (she also came out–Stein, I mean–and wrote, What Is Genius?, using herself as a model, natch), and read by the geniuses and the wise–You! Poetry Slow Down! So we’ll speak of this anon, but right now it’s time to stop the clock! Let’s enjoy the super Bowl, on the screen, and in the sky, and heat up with Rumi’s vision for next week’s show on love, live from the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., and love words from presidents and Whitman and Neruda, and speaking of love, I have loved being with you as we’ve loafed and invited our ease a la Whitman, a la Proust, a la Paul Simon, a la Gertrude Stein, as we swing in the hammock, and on the stars, do nothing really nothing–nourishing genius. Enjoy!–which as Proust said, is the whole point, in so many (more) words (and we need them all).
© Barbara Mossberg 2011

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NEED SCIENTISTS AND ENGINEERS?– CALLING FOR POETRY AND MUSIC EDUCATION, a mellifluous show that tells it like it is, at The Poetry Slow Down, think-for-yourself KRXA 540 AM on California’s Central Coast, and internationally at www.krxa540.com. Continuing the theme of the show’s series on poetry as the news we need, exploring the poetry solution to (and sometimes cause of) the headlines, we share with the nation’s leaders decrying America’s upcoming generations’ purported decline in science and engineering strength an old-school vision of what has worked for creativity, invention, innovation, and all around science superbity since time began: no suspense here . . . it’s poetry, it’s music, it’s arts, and it always has been. We’ll slow down to hear about music and poetry’s role in Einstein’s theory of relativity, Richard Feynmann’s physics insights, Murray Gell-Mann’s emergent science convictions, and astronaut technology poetic raptures of Story Musgrave (surely spirit brother of John Muir, and in future shows we’ll pause to hear about poetry and music in Thomas Berry’s analysis of earth’s eco dilemmas in Dream of the Earth and we’ll saunter with geologist and botanist John Muir to hear the Aeolian strains of wilderness reeds in a windstorm). We’ll hear Ralph Waldo Emerson calling, as a national security and prosperity issue, for The Poet. We’ll hear Walt Whitman’s take on science, and Emily Dickinson’s, and let’s not forget Gertrude Stein and William James and Plato and Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen and . . . We’ll consider the basis for the forms of the ode and sonnet and haiku and what they have to do with engineering (and for that matter, The Brooklyn Bridge). There are many studies of the brain on music, and if America wishes to launch a second Sputnik Moment, music, humanities, and arts education will be critical from pre-K on, and while we’re at it, let’s bring back Latin and Greek. It worked for Galileo and Jefferson and Thoreau and for that matter, most of the people whose inventions we live by today, I’m just sayin. Of course you’re just sayin, you say, you’re a poet, but I say, yes, and it IS rocket science. (By the way: Emily Dickinson said I died for beauty, and one who died for truth was in the next grave, and she concludes they are “one”–I’m  just sayin . . . .)

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When the President of the United States responds to a public massacre, an attack on America’s elected leaders and processes, calling for us to enlarge our moral imagination–question! What is moral imagination? Question! What is being called for, and how we are called upon? Question! Can we change the news of sorrow and disgrace? Question! Can a way of thinking and being change the heartbreak of the headline news? Question! Isn’t this something that the Sphinx was calling for—isn’t this what Einstein . . . what Shakespeare . . . what Gandhi . . . what King . . .  Ah . . . At our Poetry Slow Down at KRXA 540AM “(think for yourself”), we listen to poetry (which Dr. Williams claims may be despised and difficult but without which we will die miserably—and he was a doctor dealing with life and death every day so he should know) for insight into the moral imagination. Our music selections for our show give a clue to the genius and miracle of transformation, the power of the poetic mind to change our world: I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day . . . if somehow you could pack up your sorrows and give them all to me, you would lose them, I know how to use them, give them all to me . . . when you’re weary . . . when tears are in your eyes, I will dry them all, I’m on your side . . . like a bridge over troubled waters . . . you’ve got to give a little, you’ve got to live a little, that’s the story of, that’s the glory of love.” Who’s talking here? The poet, whose thinking can turn it all around. How so? “I turn to you,” O poet. So, we are going to talk about what kinds of thinking change our world, that we call genius. We frame our show with Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream,” an expression of moral imagination that is celebrated with a national holiday, and the role of poetry in King’s vision (we will hear Henry David Thoreau’s influence on the poetry of King’s mind and of the Civil Rights Movement). We begin with Poet Albert Einstein, and Poet Richard Feynmann, and other physicist poets, whose imagination of transformation calls for a moral sensibility at our most genius selves. We’ll talk about the Sphinx and the life and death stakes for community in having a moral imagination. We’ll talk about the relationship between genius and poetry, metaphor and moral imagination, and how it is that we have a President of the United States who is calling for this civic common genius. What is the role of poetry in President Obama’s vision of us and what is possible in our civic culture? We’ll hear from another President, as we think of upcoming Presidents’ Day, the role of poetry for President Abraham Lincoln, and for Barack Obama . . . we’ll hear some prophetic poetry by our president (pinch me!) on the moral imagination, the genius of empathy, of compassion, and a vision of how poetic thinking is what human wisdom, expressed in the Sphinx, called for so long ago, the essential knowledge we need to live in community, how we belong to each other and our earth. He’s a poet. I’m just sayin. This is Professor Barbara Mossberg, for the news we need. Write me your poetic thinking at bmossberg@csumb.edu, and stay tuned for the good-news-making high school sonnet project, “I’m Nobody: Turning It Around, the Genius in I, and You, and Us,” feeling Grovy, right here on The Poetry Slow Down.

© Barbara Mossberg 2011

this is not a dark show, but a show filled with imagination’s colors and invoking of lifesaving creativity at a time of darkness

If I keep a green bough in my heart a singing bird will come. Chinese proverb

Give me a rose in the winter time, when it’s hard to find, give me a rose in the winter time, I’ve got roses on my mind, for a rose is sweet most any time and yet, give me a rose in the wintertime, how easy to forget—that’s a Girl Scout song, and If I keep a green bough in my heart a singing bird will come, is a Chinese proverb, both about a way to live through winter blues and

darks, strategies of the imagination, images, memories of what we love drawn from our hearts and minds, and that’s what I’m talkin’ about, this is Professor Barbara Mossberg, with the Poetry Slow Down, how our imaginations are vital, the gift that keeps on giving, keep us going, give us a sense of hope we need to live, to draw from in our winters. Here in California where I’m broadcasting there are actual, not just remembered, roses in the wintertime, oranges hang from green boughs outside the window, with bright green leaves, and still some orange fish in my father’s dark green pond, although we lost the orange-turned-luminous pink goldfish this morning, or we discovered its loss this morning, in our ritual checking the pond to begin the day with a celebration, to marvel at the triumph of orange in dark water and dark night, orange surviving cats and cold and raccoons, and now, staring and staring, filling in the pond with the pink fish in our minds . . . But the question is a metaphor: How do we access the rose in our wintertime? The luminous pink fish in our life’s pond? Poets, what say you? It seems that every poet weighs in on the rose, the spirit of the green bough. We’ll read some, Shakespeare, Mark Doty, Gary Snyder, William Carlos Williams, Kermit the Frog, David Grossman, Ezra Pound, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman . . .  John Updike, Robert Frost, Thomas Campion, Amy Gerstler, Dorothy Parker, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Neruda, and others, life’s singing birds; the rapture of a rose in our sights, its complicated constructed beauty that we never take for granted—that this troubled abused earth in spite of all we do to it, yet produces this rose, that we distracted and stressed humans grow such beauty; give me a rose in the winter time, goes the song, and to whom is it addressed? The poet, the maker, the imagination of our humanity: and our poets answer: they give us the rose in the winter-time. So from ancient Chinese to Girl Scout wisdom, we will hear what makes for green boughs in the heart, the mind’s roses in the wintertime, poems that like marmelade preserve the orange and sweetness when the authors are toast, long after the oranges are gone and before they appear again, and stories about how the imagination can save our lives and preserve our spirit of fortitude: I will begin with two stories for us, about what is at stake in being able to conjure a rose in the wintertime, a green bough in the heart for us, one from the book I was telling you about a while back, David Grossman, an Israeli newsman turned novelist whose latest book has been translated into English by Jessica Cohen, To the End of the Land, and one is a story from my own life these days, from the ongoing drama at my late mother’s and father’s house, and they both have to do with life and death. And we see an unexpected happy ending, deux ex machina! While we are still outside of the box, ashes container or coffin, let’s use our creativity, our imagination, our poetry, to conjure the green bough in our hearts, the rose in our wintertime! Examples from the real world: my avocado tree, which grew resurrected in green out of a dried out withered stalk, and my pink fish, photos are here!

© Barbara Mossberg 2011

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News We Need in the Darkest Time of Year: “The Search is on for rare Sierra red fox” (San Francisco Chronicle, Monday, December 13, 2010) and other Good News About the Earth as poets are brought into play for the question of what this news means to us.

I am Reynard,

I am Zorro,

I am Kitsunami, I am the red fox. Wise men respect my council. 
You, too, can learn from my kin. That’s Brian “Fox” Ellis, “Song of the Red Fox,” and this is Professor Barbara Mossberg, on The Poetry Slow Down, with Producer Sara Hughes at our KRXA 540AM Studios. So what is the red fox doing on our poetry hour where we slow down to get the news we need? It’s the darkest time of year, cold, wet, slushy, at least for most of us here in our listening community; the headlines are harsh on our spirits! Wars, corruption at home and abroad, violence, negligence about our babies, our rivers and bays. Poisoning ourself. That news. And do you remember Woody Allen’s joke in “Annie Hall” where his aunts are complaining about a restaurant? The food is so terrible, one says, and the other says, yes, and the portions are so small! That’s the “news,” both terrible and abbreviated these days to sound bites, literally being downsized. Yet our perception of the “news” shapes our connection to our world, our sense of what needs to be done, what can be done; if the news is never new, always a tedious and demoralizing succession of bad news, disappointments in humanity, we can feel apathetic. So the other morning, beginning the darkest time of the year with news old-school, I open the old-school newspaper, The San Fransisco Chronicle, and the front page story, above the fold, the right hand column, is “Search is on for rare Sierra red fox, with the subheading, 2 more sightings prompt scientists to look for clan.” The story is by Kelly Zito. “Federal scientists [by the way, thank you John Muir for piloting the role of scientist in federal policy, thank you Wordsworth and Milton and Shakespeare and Homer, forgive me listeners, but I’m just sayin] . . . federal scientists revealed this month that they detected two more of the foxes in September in the same region, the only known specimens outside of a tiny clan in the Mount Lassen area. . . there’s a fairly robust population. . . . that’s what got us hugely excited when we got these results.” Really? A red fox sighted earlier this summer now has a few companions. Front page! Federal scientists hugely excited! The story goes on, “the fox, once plentiful across California’s snow-capped mountains, hasn’t been seen in the southern Sierra Nevada in decades. . . decimated by hunting in the early part of the last century. . . . among the most elusive and least understood mammals in the United States, biologists say.” Well, and so: front page news, and back page, a headline clear across the whole paper, five columns, half inch font: Search is on for clan of rare foxes after 2 more seen.” OK, so this does seem to be “news,” unlike so much of what else we read (“Taliban bomb, mideast storms, tax cuts, tough loss, serial killer”). But what does this news mean to us? Why should we care that a few red foxes, so ancient, appear to have survived the equally ancient desire of human beings to . . . catch them—do you remember the nursery rhyme game, a hunting we will go, a hunting we will go, we’ll catch a fox and put ‘im in a box, and never let him go. I just remembered that. Fox in our human imagination, our racial memory. What is a fox doing in the front page news of our times? Think of the expression, to be foxy . . .hmm, and, to be called a foxy lady, I’d like that, wouldn’t you? If you were a plump middle aged woman, I mean . . . to be foxy is to be –let’s look it up . . . a burrowing canine mammal . . .long pointed muzzle and long bushy tail, noted for its cunning. The fur of the fox. Other definitions, 3. A sly, crafty person. 1. To trick, outwit, to make drunk, intoxicate. To stain, as in timber, with a reddish color. To make sour, as in beer, fermenting. To repair or mend, as shoes, with new uppers. To become drunk, to become sour, to become reddish in color. Foxy, of or like a fox, crafty. Defective, impaired, improperly fermented. Denoting a wild flavor found in wine made from some American grapes. Hmm, first, these seem contradictory definitions–repair, defective, ferment, positive, sour, not– we seem to be all sixes and sevens about this fox, and besides, this is not what I imagined went into being called foxy on my better days. All these definitions are pretty interesting, an archeology of attitudes and experiences about the fox that make their way into our language and way of understanding. So, the fox is categorized by federal biologists as the “most elusive and least understood” of mammals . . . and yet our definitions of fox, foxed, foxy, imply a vital knowledge of the fox, of its intelligence, yes, its ability to figure things out, almost like Ullyses I’m thinking, wily, resourceful, tricky, clever, “crafty,” sly, discovering the un-obvious solution or path—goal-oriented—if you ever said to my mom, I’ll try, she’d say, don’t try, succeed! The fox would succeed! How otherwise did it get this rep to have the word mean this essential creative ability? And this kind of distrust . . . grudging respect? I also thought it was interesting that it is a word we use for transformation, both in catalytic processes such as making wine, one of our most ancient human occupations, but when things go downhill in the process, and for repair on the other hand, making things better . . . we could have used other words, we could say, it’s elephanted, it’s spidered, it’s salmoned, it’s turkeyed, yet we say it’s foxed; we have direct and immediate and graphic knowledge of this creature, somehow; foxiness is in our human imaginations . . . I began to think about what the poets—you knew—YOU knew—where we were going on this—what the poets have had to say about foxes, in figuring out this mystery for us today, Poetry Slow Down, the front-page news of possibility that the red fox, once so prevalent, may not be extinct, may be making a comeback so that two or three are front page news . . . so they must be valued as important to us, even as they are considered to be so elusive, not understood. It appears foxes have been long on our minds. Let’s see what the poets say, and what we may learn, how to interpret this kind of news, that they may yet be alive and well and living perhaps not in Paris but on some snow-capped peak . . . is this the news we need, in today’s times? What is at stake in the sighting of a red fox? What does a red fox mean to us? Poets, what speak you? Well, I began to summon in my mind a list and you are doing the same right now, let’s see, there’s, well of course Jemima Puddleduck and Aesop’s The Fox and the Grapes and —and then the poets start to weigh in, whoa, Poetry Slow Down, we’re in luck, great poets—winners of prizes and city, state, and national laureates, beloved authors, have their say, their poetic way with the fox, urban African American Lucille Clifton, city-girl Marianne Moore, eco-Buddhist Gary Snyder, grounded Wendell Berry, translator, editor, teacher, poet Robert Bly, iconic nineteenth century poets John Greenleaf Whittier, Rudyard Kipling, Emily Dickinson—what? Yes; Carl Sandburg, a city guy, Chicago, civic culture, right out there with a poem called “Wilderness” that fathers Bly and Synder, and there’s grandfather Henry David Thoreau, and elegiac native voices, voices close to the fox, journalists, and W.B. Yeats, Antoine St. Exupery’s The Little Prince, for our pilot listeners, Al Addig Al-Raddi from Khartoum, Isaiah Berlin, Socrates, Margaret Atwood, Robert Haas, Barbara Kingsolver, joyous manifestos, and I contribute a poem I wrote—who knew how or why?—on the red fox, too . . . . Dr. B., you forgot Blake! I know, I know, as it turns out, the elusive and not understood red fox has on our minds long as the red fox tail—and so has its hunt. Across age and gender, race and time, cultural experience, are there common truths and understandings in this “news” of poetry to provide a lens into the meaning of the headline news for us in these darkest days of the year? Hark! Thank you for joining “the hunt,” and write me at bmossberg@csumb.edu.

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