Our Dr. B is still in Italy, disclaiming and holding forth on the impact of poetic language in civil and human rights, war and peace, and saving our earth (that’s all), and you know just what she’s talking about: William Carlos Williams. e.e. cummings, Thoreau, Mary Oliver, Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, Rumi, Tennyson, Derek Walcott, for starters. Then she’s disputing on Victor Hugo, Cervantes, Homer, Harriet Beecher Stowe (“so this is the little lady who wrote the little book that started our great war”–President Lincoln), and reading from the two books she takes to represent American culture, ideas about redemption, resilience, hope, forgiveness, and a vision for moving on, after registering just how much we hurt, and hurt each other, and want to do good, as authors of our society, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, both about invisibility and the hunger to matter utterly to one’s society. Then, of course, you know she’s talking about Beauty and the Beast,  and the role of story, of literacy, in transforming the beast in us to love, empathy, and compassion. We hear she is also talking about the new film Patterson, which features William Carlos Williams. And T.S. Eliot. Next week our show will be about the power of words to save the world, slowing down to not discover at the end of our lives we have not lived at all. Listen now to our show about April, Spring, and what springs and leaps up that we need more than ever, to live our one wild and precious life. Go, PoetrySlowDown! Hear hear all about it! You know you move too fast!