A FRESH START IN THE NO-COUNT NEW YEAR, featuring Henry David Thoreau’s Chanticleer and the Morning Risers, a cast of thousands of epic minds from every culture and clime: who doesn’t write about morning? Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edward Hirsch, Billy Collins, Robert Bly, Charles Tripi, Emily Dickinson, Rumi, Barbara Mossberg, Mary Oliver, Thomas Merton, Robert Browning, Tennyson, Gary Snyder, with notes of Joyce Cary, Emerson, John Muir, John Milton, Wallace Stevens, e. e. cummings (“. . . are awake and . . .”), Karl Marx, Bill Stafford, Blake, and thoughts of so many great morning poems, and still to come, Jane Hirshfield, “Waking the Morning Dreamless After Long Sleep,” Jane Kenyon, “This Morning,” and Ruth Stone’s “Living Alone at Eighty-Three,” all night you waited for morning. So this is a beginning.

From our show’s theme song, Simon and Garfunkle’s Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge Song, slowing down to make the morning last, to cowboy country, and Midwest/southwest ranch culture, east to west, north to south, Homeric days to top hits today, morning is something poets sing about. As we begin a New Year, the morning of the year, full of resolution or at least reflection on how we spend our days and hours, we think about the meaning of morning from the point of view of poetry. We’re slowing down to wake up, to arise and go now, today in our hectic and rushing and whirled lives, to wonder, What is it about morning that would make Paul Simon and Art Garfunkle feel groovy and want to make it last? What is it about morning that made a politician a few years back win minds and hearts by saying it’s morning again in America? And I find myself as a mother and professor earnestly urging earnest souls to find their way to morning for a new life. But why? What say our poets, each poem a fresh start for the human mind to record consciousness, being alive on this earth? Let’s listen to our poets and what they have to say about morning. Then you decide: when, how, where, what and why is morning in your life?

Isn’t it interesting, we have Wallace Stevens’ Sunday Morning, but not Sunday Noon, or Sunday Afternoon, or Sunday evening? We have Emily Dickinson telling us how the sun rose, you know this one, Poetry Slow Down, a ribbon at a time. We have Mary Oliver, poems titled Morning, but not—interesting—afternoon or evening. We have Gerard Manley Hopkins, of course,

catching this morning’s morning’s minion, and his—well, we’ll hear his great morning poems, but we’ll start with the troubadour of morning, the poet laureate of morning, the ambassador of morning, Henry David Thoreau. Close your eyes and listen to his rapturous take on Aurora.

Part One. Auroral Delight.

Last week we heard about aurora borealis sung by John Muir in his Alaska travels, thoughts lighting his way as he drew last breaths from pneumonia Christmas Eve almost 100 years ago. (Poetry Slow Down, December 25, 2011). Aurora is the rosy-fingered dawn we hear sung in The Iliad and The Odyssey, and auroral delight is the grounding of Henry David Thoreau’s bookWalden, the account of two years spent at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, his philosophy of life, and it’s interesting, speaking of morning, that he begins the book with a cultural symbol of morning, of day break itself, the crowing rooster–Chanticleer. Thoreau in writing the book says HE is Chanticleer, the voice of morning, waking us up:

I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.

So his book is self-consciously the voice not only of a waker-upper, but an upper, an anti-ode to dejection and despair, a bold breaking voice in the day of our lives.

It’s a curious mix of an outsider voice to his culture, steeped in classical traditions, a philosophy of how to live, to rise to the occasion of earthly consciousness. And what he says is, we’ve got to get up in the morning. Close your eyes now, and listen to his reasons . . . . a great way to makethis morning last.

Part Two. Morning As Gift, “revelation to the beloved.”

We’re talking about an approach to the New Year, the morning of the year, getting up for it, waking to it, and resolving to get up early! We’re finding in poetry reasons for resolutions of seeing the dawn, being able to verify Emily Dickinson’s early-bird reportage, “this is the news that nature told,” “I’ll tell you how the sun rose, a ribbon at a time.” It seems that if morning rises a ribbon at a time, ribbons are what decorate a dress, for a party, something festive, or one’s hair, or . . .a gift . . .  as if earth’s lightening up is a gift, morning as a present, wrapped in ribbons of sunlight, streaming . . .

Why get up in the morning?  A Q and A with Ralph Waldo Emerson (“In the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs”) and Gary Snyder’s “For All,” and several poems. I find myself writing about morning, and share with you two poems I wrote. I reassure anyone seeing my anguish at leaving earth when I love it so in “On Looking at the Sky on an October Morning”: “How good this life was to me—/. . . those tears,/What life deserves./. . . To do justice to consciousness on earth,/. . . breaking of the heart/And fierce resistance/ Are correct./ . . . Life deserves this refusal to exit, this awkward leaving/ Without Grace./No grace. It is the least we can do.”

I have several on this theme—I find myself wanting to share this experience of morning happiness, that is so private, so invisible, perhaps, because we may seem a hot mess, so to speak. And perhaps you can hear the way sound structurally connects the poem’s flow from “alarming” at the outset to “disarming” at the conclusion, and the interior rhymes connecting “Yes,” “no/Progress,” “Happiness,” “Largess,” as the “messiness” of morning light balances headache and all we assume that dulls our day: 

Just So You Know

Sometimes I feel so good it is alarming.
Yes the headache but I’m making green tea,
Morning has spilled sun all over this cottage, it is messy with light.
For some reason, for no good reason, I am feeling too good,
Improbably brimming.
It feels slightly dangerous to feel so well.
I had not planned to do anything special with this day,
I am in red lifeguard shorts and T-shirt,
Writing, and making no
Progress.

(It is going slow and not well.)

I get up to make more tea and it should not feel this good
To be alive, this powerful, to breathe, I am not Paul Bunyan enough
To feel this planetary heave within me, interior lakes where my boots fall—nor
Monet enough to paint the day with the colors of vibrating lilies in my core,
Nor William O. Douglas enough to do justice
To this spacey conviction of sky and tree—
The pine and leaves outside the window in the wind,
How it is, just now–how it is to be me;
And yet I stand Bunyan, my breath is Monet’s brush, I am of Douglas’ opinion:

Let the trees decide.
Maybe not feeling so well because there is the headache
And backache so maybe it is actually
Happiness.
This whatever it is. And I’m holding it like fresh cut flowers,
Handed me.
You have it give it to somebody, you have to make an occasion.
You have to think of someone to appreciate, some cause to celebrate,
So I’m here beholding and maybe feeling good or not
And wondering if I am up to this size of being,
A little intimidated at the
Largess
Of epic life, and I go back to my chair and write these lines,
Not epic, but some internal Iliad is about to happen, some myth breaking free
Of tragedy right in me, and I hear wings beating, my heart pounds, already more than mortal
When gods consort with us—a glimpse of pine against September sky is all it takes—
Disarming. Joy. In. Being.

© Barbara Mossberg 2011

Part Three. Is Stanley Kunitz’ “The Round” the Perfect Poet Morning Poem?

In which we continue our exploration of why to wake early, what’s in it for us, UP in the morning, for our minds and spirits, as we begin the day, and who knows, a new life–on that note, we think of our guy who lived to 101 and for whom morning is experienced with gratitude—I think there’s a connection. (Assignment, everyone: re-read “The Round.” We’ll do a show in the next weeks on the neuroscience of happiness from UC Berkeley’s Center for The Greater Good.) Kunitz’s attitude honors life and makes each day a beginning, a new year. We hear from Mary Oliver “Why I Wake Early,” and Edward Hirsch, Robert Bly (especially “The Hermit at Dawn,”), Billy Collins, Rumi, and our own Chuck Tripi, all of whom are converging thinking “in ways you’ve never thought before:

If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message larger than anything you’ve ever heard, vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats. Think that someone may bring a bear to our door, maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose has risen out of the lake, and he’s carrying on his antlers a child of your own whom you’ve never seen. When someone knocks on the door, think that he’s about . . .”– well, I’m leaving you with this Rumi –like threshold morning poem, “The Taste of Morning” and Thomas Merton’s “A Morning Prayer.” And John Muir and Edward Hirsch. And Billy Collins tells us about the way he writes poetry, as a way to be in the day. Collins is “reader conscious”: “I have one reader in mind, someone who is in the room with me, and who I’m talking to, and I want to make sure I don’t talk too fast, or too glibly. Usually I try to create a hospitable tone at the beginning of a poem. Stepping from the title to the first lines is like stepping into a canoe. A lot of things can go wrong.” “I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and right there are an amazing set of distractions that we usually can’t afford to follow. But the poet is willing to stop anywhere.”

I like this image. We can imagine poetry as a way to step into the day’s canoe, carefully, slowly, balanced, moving forward, a meditative way, and there is the quiet but also the loon, perhaps . . . the quickness of the heron, all of a sudden . . . . Poetry is a kind of morning light that makes known to us what there is to see and feel, what can happen in our day, what is happening, now. And a way perhaps to bring on a state of mind of morning, of fresh start, of new year, a kind of dawn of it. It wakes us up, and is an up! So, what do you say, Poetry Slow Down, you evolved minds of listeners to poetry on this first day of the year, slowing it down, to give respite and renewal to your spirit, if we hear, on this day of day, from e.e. cummings, a poem I personally like to begin my days with, every day of the year, a poem calling for us to be awake, so that every day, and really every moment is a new day, a morning, a new life? “i thank You God for most this amazing”—cummings’ sonnet which is a prayer and invocation to each of our own mornings.

So we come upon a New Year, and make resolutions, for new beginnings, and our challenge, it seems to me, from our poets, is to realize a new beginning each day, a fresh start. The sun could say been there, done that, but it arrives for our senses every morning without fail, and I like to think that it is welcomed on behalf of humanity by our ambassadors the poets, who represent humanity, and say thank you, morning, aurora, and wax eloquently and discourse philosophically on morning, the fresh start which happens every day. And let’s sing out again for Jim Harrison’s “Rooster,” since we begin with Thoreau’s Chanticleer. I don’t include it on our show today but here it is, as I plan for our show around The Greater Good center at Berkeley, linking happiness with compassion and kindness. We want to hear Thoreau as Chanticleer, and before we kill the old red rooster, we can be heartened by day’s greeter in this poem:

Rooster

from Vol. 11 No. 4

to Pat Ryan

I have to kill the rooster tomorrow. He’s being an asshole,

having seriously wounded one of our two hens with his insistent banging.

You walk into the barn to feed the horses and pick up an egg

or two for breakfast and he jumps her proclaiming she’s mine she’s mine.

Her wing is torn and the primary feathers won’t grow back.

Chickens have largely been denatured, you know. He has no part

in those delicious fresh eggs. He crows on in a vacuum. He is

utterly pointless. He’s as dumb as a tapeworm and no one cares

if he lives or dies. There. I can kill him

with an easy mind. But I’m still not up to it. Maybe I can hire

a weasel or a barn rat to do the job, or throw him to Justine,

the dog, who would be glad to rend him except the neighbors

have chickens too, she’d get the habit and we would have a beloved shot

dog to bury. So he deserves to die, having no purpose. We’ll

have stewed barnyard chicken, closer to eating a gamebird than

that tasteless supermarket chicken born and bred in a caged

darkness. Everything we eat is dead except an occasional oyster

or clam. Should I hire the neighbor boy to kill him? Will the

hens stop laying out of grief. Isn’t his long wavering crow

magnificent? Isn’t the worthless rooster the poet’s bird brother?

No. He’s just a rooster and the world has no place for him.

Should I wait for a full wintry moon, take him to the top of the

hill after dropping three hits of mescaline and strangle him?

Should I set him free for a fox meal? They’re coming back now

after the mange nearly wiped them out. He’s like a leaking roof

with drops falling on my chest. He’s the Chinese torture in the barn.

He’s lust mad. His crow penetrates walls. His head bobs in lunar

jerks. The hens shudder but are bored with the pain of eggs.

What can I do with him? Nothing isn’t enough. In the morning

we will sit down together and talk it out. I will tell him he

doesn’t matter and he will wag his head, strut, perhaps crow.

But let us hear Thoreau, who after all, compared his identity and purpose as a poet to a rooster, awakening us: he ends his book, and his sojourn, with these words, there is more day to dawn, the sun is but a morning star. Our poet Thoreau has awakened us, with his thoughts on how to live more consciously, to make every day a morning. “To be awake is to be alive.” “We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.” We learn this way of expectation and thus are open to dawn as it unfolds infinitely, as e.e. cummings says, “everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes.”

On the note of Yes, I greet you on this New Year, as we make the morning last, and learn the poets’ reasons, the poets’ seasons, for slowing down and living it up. And speaking of morning gratitude, thank you for listening, thank you for joining me in this journey as we make poetry part of our living day, part of our civic life and consciousness.

© Barbara Mossberg 2011/The Poetry Slow Down, KRXA 540AM.