The page is Emily Dickinson’s stage, backstage, theater open 24/7. Dickinson dresses up, dons costume, makes herself up, for the role as immortal poet. And so she sets the stage for the drama of her life: how to convert being a nobody to celebrity Nobody–suspense, acts, gestures, stage whispers, asides, climax. If it’s drama, it must mean she is the star, the lead, a hero! Well played, Emily. Lights! Mic! Mount the proscenium. Action! You bow? We bow to you, O Queen.

Imagine you and me, I do: and Emily Dickinson did:

Me–come! My dazzled face

In such a shining place!

Me–hear! My foreign Ear

The sounds of Welcome–there!
. . .

My holiday, shall be

That They remember me–

My Paradise–the fame

That They–pronounce my name—(Johnson, P. 431)

That’s the Turtles, imagining me and you, happy together, and that’s Emily Dickinson, imagining us: we’re a vision of hers—a shy “nobody” but imagining coming to us here, the sounds of welcome, as we remember her and pronounce her name on our show today. This is Professor Barbara Mossberg, imagining me and you at our shining place, The Poetry Slow Down, KRXA 540AM, and maybe we’re a vision of Paul Simon–slow down, you move too fast. We’re slowing down to celebrate lives, that’s the vision, and on the subject of birthdays and how we live, Emily Dickinson said, “lest any doubt that we are glad that they are born today.” This is the birthday week of Emily Dickinson, December 10, there’s no doubt about being glad she was born, so we’ll take this up in our third annual Dickinson celebration show, celebrating the phenomenon that someone so many years ago, alone in her room, unknown, unasked, unwanted, picked up a pen and wrote a poem, poem after poem, night after night, creating a scene over her identity, and in the captivating process, made an immortal life, and changed mine, and perhaps yours, because she lived and wrote. As we celebrate birthdays of “glorious luminaries” William Blake and Joyce Cary (and his invention Gulley Jimson), Walt Whitman claims his due on principle (celebrations and songs: count him in). Unrecognized fully (or at all) in their own lives in their time, they create their own immortal fates, by persisting in visions of what they are, their voices singing in our lives, and trusting us to hear. In their artful lives, we hear expressed the universal conviction in each person of something precious and vital to contribute to our world. Hear hear!

c Barbara Mossberg 2010

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Today we go backstage with your radio host to see behind the scenes of The Poetry Slow Down, the reading of the day’s mail with poems sent in by listeners, and how that in turns impacts—okay, deliciously detours– the plans for the week’s show! Our show became Slate Surprise: Dear De-tours de Force and Waylays and Other Adventures of Flight. Talk about a slow down! What happened was in the middle of deadlines I could not resist reading a listener’s poem right then and there, and two hours later was still noodling its intricacies: it was called Junco, and then I had to read all about Juncos and consider the language of bird studies, and my ignorance of birds beyond poems about birds, and thinking about those poems led to a joyous review of poems of birds, and birds’ meaning to us, all inspired by how one person’s 26-word poem makes us think about our world. Well then: one iconic poem after another (think: falcons, swans, blackbirds, albatross, eagles, kingfisher, heron, wren . . . Professor Mossberg, is there a quiz? Of course) and the show quickly has become a two-part series, because I couldn’t leave out this poem or that poem, and even so, these two shows are only a sampling of great poems on birds which you can only see and only hear if you  . . . slow down. Today’s show features Poe’s raven, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s skylark, William Carlos Williams’ chickens, Gertrude Stein’s pigeons, James Wright’s chickenhawk, Charles Wright’s bird hour, Robert Duncan’s falconress, Linda Hogan’s heron, Timothy Steele’s “In the Memphis Airport”-little warbler, Mary Oliver’s snowgeese, and my “Fat Lady Flying,” all invoked by Charles Tripi’s junco-just-now. So keep those poems and comments coming to bmossberg@csumb.edu. Music, Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on the Wire,” Mozart’s Magic Flute, Anne Murray’s “Snowbird,” Bob Marley’s “Don’t Worry,” Simon and Garfunkle’s “Bridge Over Troubled Waters.” This show is dedicated to my mother, at whose bedside it is broadcast.

Stay tuned: mystery poet to be announced in next show, November 21, 2010; word for Poetry Slow Down listening community (a “flight” of listeners; an “under-standing” of listeners—your ideas?); performances by Professor Mossberg on Emily Dickinson (Central Coast: December 9, Cherry Center for the Arts, December 10, Pacific Grove Library; Los Angeles, December 5, Fair Oaks Regency); poems by Coleridge, Keats, Hopkins, John Haines, Jennifer K. Sweeney, Kay Ryan, Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Linda Gregg, John Muir, your host Professor Mossberg, Mary Oliver, Edmund Waller, Blake, Shakespeare, Tennyson, and more!

Hear how form holds rhyme’s sweeping cape in “The Raven,” how Timothy Steele’s rhymes rock you; how our task is to “to love what is lovely, and will not last” (Oliver); how birds are seen thirteen, twenty, many ways that express the most ancient elements of the human journey, beginning with The Sphinx.

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Robert Frost, in his poem October, beginning the hours of this day slowly, making the morning last, as Poet Paul Simon says on our show’s signature song, to Frost’s “make the day to us less brief,” his slow! Slow! savoring this October morning—it’s still mild October morning in Hawaii, on the Maui gardens where W.S. Merwin is restoring rare and endangered palms of the original rainforest, and so we are thinking of Merwin, preparing to leave for Washington, D.C. for his inaugural reading tomorrow as Poet Laureate of the Library of Congress, and I’ll be there for us to cheer wildly and greenly mildly and s-l-o-w-l-y and will give your greetings from the Poetry Slow Down, we hear you Mr. Frost, I’m Professor Barbara Mossberg, for KRXA 540AM, and you, you are this remarkable national poetry community, this gathering of Yes, of Up-ness, of conscience and civility and passion, I love your emails to me at bmossberg@csumb.edu, and you can still write me greetings to Mr. Merwin to deliver tomorrow, and I’m going to deliver an invitation for him to speak to Restore Hetch Hetchy, since he’s going inch by inch, row by grow, making his garden grow, restoring earth, resurrection work, what I call redemption engineering, and you can hear about poetry and gardens and Mr. Merwin in our past shows on our podcast, by Sara Hughes, just go to BarbaraMossberg.com. And here we go . . . 

When I consider how my light is spent, John Milton, On His Blindness—probably dictated, and possibly to Andrew Marvell, whose rejoinder, Had we but world enough, and time, ends, though we cannot make our sun 
Stand still, yet we will make him run. Then another fan of Milton, who wrote in London, 1802, Milton, get your sorry self back here, England needs your spirit! From Wordsworth’s sonnet, The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

Epigraphs from John Milton and Andrew Marvell and William Wordsworth, for a Poetry Slow Down series in which we consider lifesaving, life-thriving poetic philosophies of life, considering how our time is spent, and the question of how to be: poets weighing in on essential stance and perspectives forming an honor company of companions—an honor poetry guard– to W.S. Merwin our new Poet Laureate–think Thoreau (he invented attitude), Emerson (he grandfathered it), Joseph Conrad, Shakespeare, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, Nikki Giovanni, Horace, Wallace Stegner, Mark Twain, J.D. Salinger, Ric Masten, Dylan Thomas. For genius of how to live, we will consider the narrative perspectives of a dog (Garth Stein’s The Art of Racing in the Rain), a Yogi Bear, a spider (E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web), a pest (four-year old Beverly Cleary’s Ramona) channeled through the poet; and how the birds and bees do it, the flowers and trees, in the metaphor of life as a garden (and the role of weeds and wilderness), with Gerard Manley Hopkins, Theodore Roethke, Stanley Kunitz, T.S. Eliot, Wordsworth, and more, on The Poetry Slow Down, with me, Professor Barbara Mossberg, for KRXA 540AM, and our production team, Hal Ginsberg, and Sara Hughes, who also brings you our podcast and website, at BarbaraMossberg.com. Listen to the poets: you know you move too fast; consider how our time is spent! And on this theme of spending wisely, how do we spend not only our time but our monies? So we begin the series today, honoring the inaugural reading tomorrow of our newest Poet Laureate at the Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C., at the Thomas Jefferson Building—because it was Jefferson who began it all, donating his own library to Congress as the foundation for our nation’s library, because how can we be a smart, good, surviving country without books?—and because in two days we go to the polls, and in my new hometown, Pacific Grove, with its Poet in Residence in The Poet’s Perch of 1892, a city that puts poetry in its civic mission, the day after the Poet Laureate Inaugural Reading, there’s a vote on a tax to keep our library going—Measure Q—a yes vote keeps it going–so my inaugural lecture as Poet in Residence last week was for the library, at the library, about what’s at stake in keeping a library open. Therefore on this Frostian mild October day I will reprise with you some of this talk, called, “The Power of the Butterfly: How Books Can Change the World One Nobody At A Time,” and Poetry Slow Down, I won’t lie to you, the hero of this story is poetry. And my mother right here, she nods. So it’s dedicated to you, mommy—who brought me up in the library and made of our home a library—she nods. So on the nod of yes, here’s how the talk started, and she won’t be surprised, and neither will you . . . (think, “yes”)

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