BOOK ME: HOW A PASSION FOR PLACE IS INVOKED BY POETRY AND CAN GET YOU INTO INTERESTING TROUBLE WITH THE LAW BUT IN A CIVIC HERO KIND OF WAY; POETRY AND THE CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE OF HELPING SAVE OUR EARTH AND ITS LINGS (and possibly our souls); AND A CELEBRATION OF WRITERS OF THE CARMEL WATERSHED IN PASSION FOR PLACE

What would John Muir think of the current Executive Director of the Sierra Club affixing himself to a White House gate and being arrested? He would stand and cheer, along with the trees, as Henry David Thoreau’s model inspires civil disobedience art and science, practice and theory. We’ll think about Thoreau’s spirit in Muir’s activism, how David Brower carries the baton (his lyric “Credo” and his famous activism expressing Muir’s legacy), and Michael Brune’s leadership and what poetry has to do with it, and voices I love, on love for a place, who could take that love to the bank, the river bank, and keep it wild . . . we’ll slow it down, our hurtling meteoric days, and listen to the river’s voice, listen to each other listening to the river’s voice . . . . And we will remember: “The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaning, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.”–John Muir, who also said about the lives we love on this earth: “No right way is easy in this rough world. We must risk our lives to save them.” But he had total faith in the people doing the right thing once we know, once we care. How we see our earth, the language we use to experience it, is a matter of life and death to all its creatures and features. Poetry to the rescue~ as one community’s awareness of its watershed is a fractal of a national and global movement founded on poetry.

For a full transcript please write bmossberg@csumb.edu.

© Barbara Mossberg 2013

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