Music:
Annie Get Your Gun, I’ve got the sun in the morning and the moon at night
Beatles, Hard Day’s Night
Machine Gun Kelly, Invincible
Man of La Mancha, The Impossible Dream (lyrics, Joe Darion)

Dedicated to Nelson Mandela

*SPLENDOR IN THE CHAOS; LOVE, LOSS, AND WHAT I WORE; HOW AND WHY POETRY
MATTERS*, PART TWO:

THE PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS AND THEATER OF BOUNCE, OR HOW TIGGER GOT HIS
POUNCE BACK WHEN LIFE IS A BEAR BEAST CHORE HEADACHE HORROR SHOW KILLER
STICKY WICKET AND MORE, AND WHAT WE CAN LEARN ON HOW AND WHY TO BE CALM AND
CARRY ON
Mary Oliver on worry; Shakespeare on fear of aging; Tennyson on what to do
when you’re all washed up; Dickinson on being a nobody; Yeats on being
slowed down, Dr. B on Helpful Banana Bread, and more . . . .

THERE’s splendid chaos! Picnic! But we’re slowing down for a sighting or
rather a *hearing* worth pondering, on our hectic hurtling stirred AND
shaken journey today, for the news we need “without which men die miserably
every day”—thank you Dr. William Carlos Williams. Yes we want to live
happily every day, to have life be a picnic, but this does not mean there
is not sorrow and stress. What about when life is NOT a picnic, defined by
the dictionary as:

easy street <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/easy+street>, fun
and games <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fun+and+games>, hog
heaven <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hog+heaven>, beer and
skittles <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/beer+and+skittles> [and
cakes and ale?], primrose
path<http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/primrose+path>;
heaven <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/heaven>,
paradise<http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/paradise>,
utopia <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/utopia>; American
dream<http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/american+dream>,
good life <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/good+life>;
ease<http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ease>,
relaxation <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/relaxation>,
rest<http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rest>

The antonyms for picnic what’s at stake when life is not so picnicy:

*bear <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bear>,
beast<http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/beast>,
chore <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chore>,
headache<http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/headache>,
horror show <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/horror+show>,
killer<http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/killer>,
labor <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/labor>,
murder<http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/murder>,
pain <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pain>, sticky
wicket<http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sticky+wicket>,
stinker <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stinker> [slang]*

*agony <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/agony>,
hell<http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hell>,
horror <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/horror>,
misery<http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/misery>,
murder <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/murder>,
nightmare<http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nightmare>,
torment <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/torment>,
torture<http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/torture>
*

On the theory that life can be a *bear, beast, chore, headache, horror
show, killer, labor, murder, pain, sticky wicket, stinker* . . chaotic and
hard and difficult and lonely, not to mention agony, misery, torment, and
sad, what do we humans have in our toolkit or picnic basket?

In honor of Nelson Mandela and his life struggles and endurances and
inspiring prevailings, our show today will consider Gertrude Stein-like how
poetry serves us four ways in three parts: how ancient wisdom prescribes
poetry as Rx for our survival; how poetry has played a role in resilience
for people we never imagined needed any such help—great leaders who have
gotten us, WE THE PEOPLE, through cataclysmic wars and depressions and
crises; poetry that helps us through hard days and hard days’ nights . . .
and poetry on how writing poetry can change and even save the day . . .
deus ex machina . . . . as we think of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Nelson
Mandela today, how leaders across time are served by poetry —including not
only Mandela but Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Gandhi, Martin Luther
King, President Obama, and Theodore Roosevelt.

The first thing to remember when things go wrong is the instructions at the
bottom of the box of a compass our family once bought that needed to be put
together. When we went back to the box after it didn’t work, we found a
Notice: “If all else fails read the directions.” Aha! Instructions! Well,
in cases of chaos, go back to the directions, and those directions are . .
. the reading and writing and interpretation of poetry! I’m being literal.

   1. YOU WON’T REMEMBER THIS UNTIL YOU ARE WAY IN OVER YOUR HEAD: DON’T
   SAY WE DIDN’T WARN YOU: ANCIENT KNOWLEDGE ON POETRY AND LEADERSHIP.

So, there once was a Sphinx, the story goes, and it’s a chimerical beast,
part human, part bird, part mammal--eagle, lion, and woman: a message
crafted by ancient minds for us to understand the art and science of
being—an invocation to interpret our world. Skip forward a few thousand
years from the Egyptian sands, and now it’s 411 B.C. and Sophocles is
entering his play

Oedipus the King in the city’s drama festival. The story goes that Oedipus
is taunted on the playground as children sometimes bully each other. He
goes crying to the local oracle holed-up in the cave office—more astrologer
than therapist--and the voice tells him instead of yes, no, up, down,
you’re going to marry your mother and kill your father. Oedipus wants none
o’ this and he high tails it out of Dodge. He takes to the open road and
heads towards Thebes. He encounters along the way a party coming the other
way. One thing leads to another and he kills them all. He arrives at the
city of Thebes, which meanwhile is being plagued with the Sphinx who plays
the role of a kind of gate keeper. In order to enter the city you have to
answer the riddle of the Sphinx, which is a poem, a metaphor: what walks on
four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the
afternoon. The Sphinx question is kind of like a SAT test or LSAT or MCAT,
and you have to pass. But this so-called monstrous creature is a strict
grader. You can’t fail and just re-take the test another time or take a
Kaplan course or get credit for trying. No, you are throttled—which is what
the name The Sphinx means—strangled, that is, and hurtled down the cliff.
And so far in the story, no one has been able to answer the riddle, so
bodies are piling up at the bottom of the cliff and no one is getting into
Thebes. So Oedipus shows us, and Oedipus answers the riddle! It is “man,”
the human experience of being an infant crawling on all fours at the
beginning of our day—the metaphor is that our life is a day, marked by the
passage of the sun; we are walking astride on two legs albeit with Advil in
the noon, the peak of our lives, and in the afternoon of our lives, we are
on three legs, supported by a cane. You would think that the human
experience which we ALL experience would be recognized through the riddle
by all the people wanting to get into Thebes. Perhaps the message is that
poetry is not easy.

But if you don’t read and understand a poetic way of thinking and speaking,
you not only are not fit to live WITH others, in the community of Thebes;
you are not fit to live at all. So not knowing poetry is a fatal ignorance.
Such is the literacy requirement of the ancient mind.

Isn’t it interesting that this story of 411 BC makes poetic interpretation
of our world essential for living—and leadership. Thebes is so happy that
Oedipus has saved them by figuring out the metaphor riddle, causing the
Sphinx like Dorothy’s witch in *Wizard of O*z to shrink, *I’m melting*,
that they say to him, we happen to have an opening for king, our king has
gone missing, and a queen comes with this position, so there you are. All
goes downhill for him after that, but isn’t it interesting that poetry is
considered the currency of knowledge—this way of seeing metaphorically, of
understanding our world and ourselves.

When we are in a sticky wicket, when life is not a picnic, when we are
challenged, poetry contains a wisdom about our world and our own humanity.
Abraham Lincoln, who suffered greatly as our president during the Civil
War, was immensely helped by poetry. He memorized Edgar Allen Poe’s *The
Raven*, and William Cullen Bryant’s *Thanatopsis*, and  *A Forest Hymn*,
“the groves were God’s first temples” (it isn’t a coincidence, methinks,
that Lincoln signed The Yosemite Grant in 1864). We’ll hear about the ways
Lincoln, Churchill, Teddy Roosevelt, and others were helped by reading and
writing poetry. We will hear a theory about the way the Sphinx, the Raven,
the poem are guides on our life journeys.

Then we hear poems of solace and encouragement for life’s sticky wickets,
the Bard on being washed out and Yeats’ café revelation and The Fly
Whisperer and Oliver on worry and the great Tennyson cover of The Odyssey
when being washed up is not an option, and my own Helpful Banana Bread
“when all hell is breaking loose,” and it’s bounce back time, slowing down
for our Poetry Slow Down, the spirit that brings picnic splendor in the
grass when rain and wasps are in the picture.

© Barbara Mossberg 2013

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