Gordon Lightfoot, Wherefore and Why: The Touch of the Poet as Poetry Engages the World and Makes a Life Out of It
The music for our show today probably says it all—Nat King Cole’s That Sunday, That Summer, Stylistics You Make Me Feel Brand New, Andy Williams’ or Mason Williams’ Moon River, and the Farini’s Pack Up Your Sorrows.
something inside of me told me that this would be my day: Special moments treasured forever, feeling alive and brimming with new life, our Huckleberry Friend, poetry touches us, offering comfort and joy. But what do we touch? What don’t we touch? Are we not inextricably inherent in this universe of ours? Our poetry today celebrates people’s late Spring efforts to engage the wild and wonderful journey of being conscious on earth, essential being. We’ll hear from the Spring Creek Project out of Oregon State University (its Wild Critters “Campus Wildâ€), the International Leadership Association’s Asilomar Conference on Possibility, the chapbook of your host, Professor Barbara Mossberg, Sometimes the Woman in the Mirror Is Not You, and other hopeful news postings, poems on running (Pre is on our minds), and philosophy about our mutual attraction with lover earth, including rain, even as flooding and drought occur: we’re singing in the rain, saying “hello sunshine,†clearly “touched.†What does it mean to be touched by rain, by weather, by the universe’s happenings, and what does it mean to touch this very universe? Is our love reciprocal? What does it mean to speak to sun? Do poets have the touch for what we need to know?
Stay tuned for our Poetry Slow Down, on radiomonterey.com, Sunday noon–1pm and podcast at BarbaraMossberg.com, produced by Zappa and the Good Vibrations crew, live from our Monterey Studios.
© Barbara Mossberg 2015
