Notes to our producers:

I don’t know if I am going to get through this show without crying. . . thinking about 9-11 and the ways people use words in our times of greatest calamity is so moving to me—how the human spirit rises to the occasion, how sorrow dignifies and defines and redeems us . . . how all that’s left in the wreckage, as poets poke about our smoking ruins, is hearts, calling for love.

THE EPIC QUOTIDIAN: NOTES OF 9-11—LOVE CALLING

“Honey. Something terrible is happening. I don’t think I’m going to make it. I love you. Take care of the children.”

“Hey, Jules. It’s Brian. I’m on the plane and it’s hijacked and it doesn’t look good. I just wanted to let you know that I love you, and I hope to see you again. If I don’t, please have fun in life, and live life the best you can. Know that I love you, and no matter what, I’ll see you again.”

“Mommy. The building is on fire. There’s smoke coming through the walls. I can’t breathe. I love you, Mommy. Good-bye.”

9-11 cell phone calls, recorded and made into song by Aaron Kula, and chanted by Rabbi Irwin Kula, who plays them every morning, a universal poem of all people everywhere. For the Poetry Slow Down, hello, you. I read those words–Honey, hi mommy, hey, Brian, those last words, quotidian words, words of dailiness, ordinariness, that achieve so much–with you, our listening community, feeling pride in humanity, of who we are, what we make of our lives after all, what we say when we call . . . We’re slowing down today, on a momentous day for people all over the world, what we call 9-11, a day of memory, of something that happened to each of us ten years ago, a day on which things changed forever—the way we see our daily lives, the way we see our communities, our country, our world—to ask, at a time of community sorrow and remembrance, how do words matter? Words, when they are spoken utterly, are not so much transformed into poetry, but revealed as poetry: the poetry essence we say to each other when we speak with love and care, when we speak urgently, as if it matters. The words that were recorded of people’s cell phone calls to their loved ones, as they were going down in a plane, or trapped in a burning tower, or on the ground, as the world collapses around them. The words you say, when you will not be there when they are heard or read . . . this is the moment, the momentum, the momentousness of poetry, the words wrought and frought with moment, words of order and beauty– in a time of fright, a time of blight, conscious that words have a life beyond one’s self, that they are something that comes out of us immortal—something in our spirit that is unkillable, that is remarkable, that sings and gives solace and courage and understanding long after the human brains that uttered them are with us: the mind alive, set free in words that live as long as eyes and ears. I am thinking of poems inspired by catastrophes that beset us: there is no scale to the mind’s experience of shock and sorrow . . . poems, of 490 BC, or 1593, or 1862, or 2000 or 2001, or 2011, responding to events of war or storm or disease or love or loss, express the effort of the human mind to . . . find a way to go on, to encourage both oneself and others . . . and to offer companionship on our life journey.

As I thought about our show today, Poetry Slow Down, we who journey together on air waves connecting us, we who worry this day, we who have suffered losses and feel dread of magnitude, and those of us in past days and weeks without power, drenched, and in drought, surrounded by fires, and flood, I think of words from a little lady you and I know, so removed from society’s disasters, what did she know of calamity, of disaster, of epic proportions? The Civil War was far away from the ringing church bells of Amherst and her second story perch on Main Street, down from Mount Pleasant Street. She was not in a neighborhood that was going to be torched; she was not surrounded by screams. But words of others in letters and the news, and home-sized tragedies, informed her sense of shock and loss. She was, as a poet, a citizen, reeling from the actualities of the news. To her the world was news: always on the alert, our Anderson Cooper 360, she felt : it’s news to me.” A war was on: death was in the air . . . We will hear “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,”

Then Space – began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,

And Being, but an Ear,

And I, and Silence, some strange Race

Wrecked, solitary, here –

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,

And I dropped down, and down –

And hit a World, at every plunge,

And Finished knowing – then –

And “After great pain.” As we think of how humanity registers what happened to people on 9-11, and Emily Dickinson’s prophetic poems, we hear poetry inspired by true events in which poets imaginatively engage with others’ tragic experience. In James Dickey’s “Falling” the consciousness of a flight attendant’s fall from a plane is recreated; the poem makes the lonely fall an experience in which she is not alone. Dickey makes all of us fall. We hear the story of the Sphinx, and the necessity of empathy to live in human community, an idea upheld by poet Einstein. We hear a poem on empathy by William Blake, and poems on resilience by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (“Ulysses”), Rumi, and Hafiz.

Poetry Slow Down community, each of you, the reality of you, the idea of you, is precious to me. We are all here: for some reason: to bear witness to each other’s stories. And in the quotidian realities of our every day lives, when we tell each other what we mean to each other, what we care for, each of our truths, it is so redemptive, it is so beautiful, it is what the doctor ordered. I am grateful for your taking poetry and me into your minds and hearts; thank you for being with me on this journey that poetry illuminates and cheers: let’s end with Mary Oliver’s “West Wind #2”, urging us to live in boisterous yes to our certain dooms. As I say goodbye for now, I am reflecting how Jacques Brel, the troubadour poet, sang, if we only have love then tomorrow will dawn, we’ll find our way out, . . . miracles of peace will be possible. . . well, it’s clear from 9-11, in the direst of circumstances, moments before fiery and unthinkable deaths, what people do have is love; love in spades, unquenchable love, there is love so deep and abiding nothing takes away, and there is poetry, deep and abiding, within us all,  as the walls come tumbling down. Poetry outs this capacity for noblest human empathy and compassion, and thinking of you today, caring about poetry, it “is not too late to seek a newer world,” and it seems a better world already.

c Barbara Mossberg 2011

Notes to our producers:

I don’t know if I am going to get through this show without crying. . . thinking about 9-11 and the ways people use words in our times of greatest calamity is so moving to me—how the human spirit rises to the occasion, how sorrow dignifies and defines and redeems us . . . how all that’s left in the wreckage, as poets poke about our smoking ruins, is hearts, calling for love.

THE EPIC QUOTIDIAN: NOTES OF 9-11—LOVE CALLING

“Honey. Something terrible is happening. I don’t think I’m going to make it. I love you. Take care of the children.”

“Hey, Jules. It’s Brian. I’m on the plane and it’s hijacked and it doesn’t look good. I just wanted to let you know that I love you, and I hope to see you again. If I don’t, please have fun in life, and live life the best you can. Know that I love you, and no matter what, I’ll see you again.”

“Mommy. The building is on fire. There’s smoke coming through the walls. I can’t breathe. I love you, Mommy. Good-bye.”

9-11 cell phone calls, recorded and made into song by Aaron Kula, and chanted by Rabbi Irwin Kula, who plays them every morning, a universal poem of all people everywhere. For the Poetry Slow Down, hello, you. I read those words–Honey, hi mommy, hey, Brian, those last words, quotidian words, words of dailiness, ordinariness, that achieve so much–with you, our listening community, feeling pride in humanity, of who we are, what we make of our lives after all, what we say when we call . . . We’re slowing down today, on a momentous day for people all over the world, what we call 9-11, a day of memory, of something that happened to each of us ten years ago, a day on which things changed forever—the way we see our daily lives, the way we see our communities, our country, our world—to ask, at a time of community sorrow and remembrance, how do words matter? Words, when they are spoken utterly, are not so much transformed into poetry, but revealed as poetry: the poetry essence we say to each other when we speak with love and care, when we speak urgently, as if it matters. The words that were recorded of people’s cell phone calls to their loved ones, as they were going down in a plane, or trapped in a burning tower, or on the ground, as the world collapses around them. The words you say, when you will not be there when they are heard or read . . . this is the moment, the momentum, the momentousness of poetry, the words wrought and frought with moment, words of order and beauty– in a time of fright, a time of blight, conscious that words have a life beyond one’s self, that they are something that comes out of us immortal—something in our spirit that is unkillable, that is remarkable, that sings and gives solace and courage and understanding long after the human brains that uttered them are with us: the mind alive, set free in words that live as long as eyes and ears. I am thinking of poems inspired by catastrophes that beset us: there is no scale to the mind’s experience of shock and sorrow . . . poems, of 490 BC, or 1593, or 1862, or 2000 or 2001, or 2011, responding to events of war or storm or disease or love or loss, express the effort of the human mind to . . . find a way to go on, to encourage both oneself and others . . . and to offer companionship on our life journey.

As I thought about our show today, Poetry Slow Down, we who journey together on air waves connecting us, we who worry this day, we who have suffered losses and feel dread of magnitude, and those of us in past days and weeks without power, drenched, and in drought, surrounded by fires, and flood, I think of words from a little lady you and I know, so removed from society’s disasters, what did she know of calamity, of disaster, of epic proportions? The Civil War was far away from the ringing church bells of Amherst and her second story perch on Main Street, down from Mount Pleasant Street. She was not in a neighborhood that was going to be torched; she was not surrounded by screams. But words of others in letters and the news, and home-sized tragedies, informed her sense of shock and loss. She was, as a poet, a citizen, reeling from the actualities of the news. To her the world was news: always on the alert, our Anderson Cooper 360, she felt : it’s news to me.” A war was on: death was in the air . . . We will hear “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,”

Then Space – began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,

And Being, but an Ear,

And I, and Silence, some strange Race

Wrecked, solitary, here –

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,

And I dropped down, and down –

And hit a World, at every plunge,

And Finished knowing – then –

And “After great pain.” As we think of how humanity registers what happened to people on 9-11, and Emily Dickinson’s prophetic poems, we hear poetry inspired by true events in which poets imaginatively engage with others’ tragic experience. In James Dickey’s “Falling” the consciousness of a flight attendant’s fall from a plane is recreated; the poem makes the lonely fall an experience in which she is not alone. Dickey makes all of us fall. We hear the story of the Sphinx, and the necessity of empathy to live in human community, an idea upheld by poet Einstein. We hear a poem on empathy by William Blake, and poems on resilience by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (“Ulysses”), Rumi, and Hafiz.

Poetry Slow Down community, each of you, the reality of you, the idea of you, is precious to me. We are all here: for some reason: to bear witness to each other’s stories. And in the quotidian realities of our every day lives, when we tell each other what we mean to each other, what we care for, each of our truths, it is so redemptive, it is so beautiful, it is what the doctor ordered. I am grateful for your taking poetry and me into your minds and hearts; thank you for being with me on this journey that poetry illuminates and cheers: let’s end with Mary Oliver’s “West Wind #2”, urging us to live in boisterous yes to our certain dooms. As I say goodbye for now, I am reflecting how Jacques Brel, the troubadour poet, sang, if we only have love then tomorrow will dawn, we’ll find our way out, . . . miracles of peace will be possible. . . well, it’s clear from 9-11, in the direst of circumstances, moments before fiery and unthinkable deaths, what people do have is love; love in spades, unquenchable love, there is love so deep and abiding nothing takes away, and there is poetry, deep and abiding, within us all,  as the walls come tumbling down. Poetry outs this capacity for noblest human empathy and compassion, and thinking of you today, caring about poetry, it “is not too late to seek a newer world,” and it seems a better world already.

© Barbara Mossberg 2011

Standard Podcast [ 52:51 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Whoa! What’s happened to your knees? You are dripping with mud! There’s grass all over you! 

Well, yeah, I was listening to The Poetry Slow Down, 

a program discussing amazing poetry of what we see when we get down with

the grass! When we see close-up, and behold our earth . . . 

Gentle listeners, this too can be you. Listen on! 

And . . . enjoy.

Stay tuned for the special 9-11 show September 11, 2011: the role of poets

in helping us understand and come to terms with what Emily Dickinson calls

“Great Pain.” We’ll have poems about the kind of courage to hurl oneself into

a burning tower, rage against loss, appeals to love each other–and some of these

poems date back, oh, 3000 and more years . . . . Can we live without poetry?

We seem never to have been without it, as long as we have walked on earth.

And it is more important than ever to be inspired to look at this earth–and each

other–up close. Our lives depend on it. More anon, Dr. B

Standard Podcast [ 43:58 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Dr. B, with all due respect, what if we are slowed down . . . way slowed down . . . TOO slowed down . . . stuck in traffic, waiting for a storm, waiting out a storm . . . .

That’s what I’m talking about! Maybe you are listening on a battery-powered radio or a radio or computer powered by a generator, and it’s new moon, high tides. It’s high time, right now, for our Rx, for times such as these, poetry, each poem generating its own heat, its own power, its own light, its own sanctuary, its own nourishment, its own succor, its own solace. In times of fear and times of waiting, times of helplessness, what can you do? Well, Poetry Slow Down, take out your mind, hold onto your hats, for our show today, in respect of Hurricane/Tropical Storm Irene: poetry for slowing down when the world is spinning and hurtling, surging and storming, down and all around.

As it turns out, in the creating universe, it’s often stormy weather, and that’s a good thing, from the poet’s point of view. We begin (and end) with weather poet Shakespeare, devotee of Tempest, with a hey, ho, the wind and the rain, the rain it raineth every day, Feste the “fool’s” philosophy of life on earth, and a vision of the transforming effect of the greatest storm scene in literature, King Lear on the heath with his crew, the so-called Fool, singing hey, ho, the wind and the rain, and his buddy Kent and “Tom,” the wronged Edgar. Lear is enraged by the treatment of him by his daughters which puts him (in Toni Morrison’s conceit in The Bluest Eye) “outdoors,” not a good place to be in a raging storm (he’s not the best dad in the world, but he claims he is more “sinned against than sinning”—that’s his story). In fact, Lear has been in a rage most of the play; he is a one-man storm system, spouting and carrying on. Now he cries foul for how his poor white-haired head is being pelted in a furious storm. But we see him transformed by the experience, the storm righting him to his senses, calming him down. He comes to consciousness as a human being, morphing from king to kind to kin, in his treatment of the Fool who becomes a “good boy” of concern to the King for the first time. We see, by the agency of the storm, Lear become a man. One of the most famous storm scenes in literary history, it’s the storm itself, and experiencing it defenseless, in the howling wind and rain, that transforms Lear from a selfish, autocratic, heedless king into a man, shocked into sympathy, roused from self-pity to empathy: soaked, drenched, wind-whipped, this is his shining moment, his morph-moment. As you listen, Poetry Slow Down, make whoooooing noises, for the first iconic words as he gives the storm a piece of his own raging mind. We’ll hear stormy words from Odgen Nash, the Bible, Jeffrey Yang (reflecting on his 75 anniversary edition for New Directions, including the poetry of nature, and how we may heal from natural disasters), two poems Yang brings to us, William Everson’s “We in the Fields,” and Gottfried Benn’s “Epilogue.” Then we give a shout to Teresa Cader’s “History of Hurricane,” Bin Ramke’s “Into Bad Weather Bounding,” William Carlos Williams’ “The Hurricane,” Chris Martin’s “Becoming Weather, 21”—and yes, we don’t plan on doing it alone: we need to travel with Fool, the one who sings to us of the wind and rain, hey, ho. We hear an inspired Dr. B read her take on rain from immersion in these poems, Jack Gilbert’s “Tear It Down,” and two poems on rain the Hollywood way, rain in films: Don Paterson’s “Rain,” and Lawrence Raab’s “Why It Often Rains in the Movies.” We hear Anne Stevenson’s “Drench,” and you are already saying, but Professor Mossberg, what about Emily D? And yes, we hear about storms through the lens of domestica, kitchen and housekeeping quotidian realities, both versions of “The Wind begun to knead the Grass” and “The Wind begun to rock the Grass,” and more poetry on wind by her, Henry David Thoreau, and of course, John Muir’s iconic essay on the wind storm in Yuba during which he climbed a 100-foot swaying tree the better to observe nature in “high festival.” Robert Frost and Theodore Roethke weigh in on storms, and Seamus Heaney narrates “Storm on the Island.” Finally, John Tansey takes it home for us, as I ask how we could bring people in from the storm, quoting our poet President Obama and New Jersey Governor Christie, on how to stay safe. Tansey asks us to be in the moment, and we hear good advice on this from Rumi, Laura McCullough, Tim Seibles, and Gerald Stern, who I knew would have momentous words for us on the role of storm in the loving and passionate life. In our days of hurricanes and squalls and prayers for rain and flight from wind, our poets make storms in our minds to transform and redeem and enliven and enlarge us, creative storm surges disrupting the quotidian, the topic of our next show, and thank you for joining me for our journey. Take a Fool, and you’ll never walk alone; you’ll walk to singing, singing in the rain.

© Barbara Mossberg

Standard Podcast [ 52:51 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This is my letter to the world who never wrote to me–

That’s Emily Dickinson, posting from her Amherst bedroom, and this is your host of post, Professor Barbara Mossberg, welcoming you to The Poetry Slow Down. We’re featuring bloggers and tweetsters Walt Whitman, Gary Snyder, Mary Oliver, Jim Heynas, William Stafford, Vijay Seshadri , Chu Hsi, Tao Ching, Tim Seibles, Eleni Sikélianòs

. . .

Now what do you mean by this, Dr. B, with all due respect? You aren’t talking about the aesthetics of the new media, are you, relating it to the ancient practice of poetry? Hey now: Poetry Slow Down, and your newfangled smartiness, we–ll, maybe it’s because I’ve been with my daughter before she headed back to college, or because this coming week I am back in the classroom with 18 year olds in First Year Seminar, and my ingenious purple ones, so internet savvy, Integrated Studies Special Majors rocking our world, and so I’m in this new world of internet tweet and twitter and flicker and Facebook and SMS postings—a metaphoric term for what people say on the internet, as in posting a message on a wall, that’s the phrase, so, yes, our program today reflects on the current practice and devotion to be-ing in public, going public, in the act of tweeting, in what is called twitter, and how it may in fact, the more I understand it, if I understand it, be the same as, poetry has ever been.

No way! Way!

Oh Dr. B, not you, who champion Homer and Horace and old-school classic learning and books and libraries and handwritten letters, who try to bring us back to the Grove! Et tu, Dr. B? Well, ah, I confess the first book I am assigning first year students is The Odyssey, but also, Chaos: Making the New Science, emergence theories of how we see our complex happening world around us, making order out of chaos . . . as poetry always has done—I see the connections between sitting on the sand, only sky and tree and hand for a text to figure things out, and what we today call twitter or tweet or posting or messaging or texting—reading and writing texts to collectively decipher our mysterious momentous world and lives.  This profusion of new media which is destabilizing our publishing and experience with books and how we read: maybe the flutter about twitter is how people once felt about clay and leaves as the new technology for telling our stories, from the chanting voice of the epic and lyric poets . . . Do you blog? Do you read blogs? Well, Poetry Slow Down, I realize I have been reading Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, which he added to and revised his whole life, as one long blog; we can look at poetry whether ancient or written today, as a blog—or tweet—a lens that illuminates the core of poetry’s role in our lives.

In instant messaging, our communications get shorter and shorter—faster and faster—as if we have so little TIME to say and hear, but yet long to cry out, to know, what’s up with you? It may be a loneliness, a hunger, our ultimate humanity, to sing our song, to be known– perhaps this is what poetry in its core is, but slowed down to wrestle with how to say, to stop for an insight, of how the world appears and organizes itself to our brains just then. Through the lens of twitter and tweet I see our poets posting all along, the original posters, twitsters . . . So let’s get started, what do you say, this August day? It all begins actually with sharing with you what I was doing when I was playing hookey from our live show, carousing in the court of the queen of tweet, Emily Dickinson, at Amherst College at the Emily Dickinson International Society Annual Meeting, and Board of Directors meeting, and teaching two Master Classes on “I’m Nobody.” We’ll talk about Emily Dickinson’s tweets, her good days and bad days, hard nights and wild nights, joys and pains, observations on the weather, and other “Bulletins from Immortality.”

We’ll talk about good news in the news, news we need, news we heed, news feeds, and “this just in” news of restoration and resurrection and reverence of the wild world, including the story of the Highway 101 Klamath River whale visitation and the role of twitter and Facebook newsfeeds as we try to figure it out. We hear this story through the lens of poets engaging imaginatively with whales, including Mary Oliver and Gary Snyder. We hear news feeds on earth watch from William Stafford and Jim Heynas and Vijay Seshadri, and bulletins about our hands from Tim Seibles, and Walt Whitman’s conviction he is the king of tweet. It’s all old school, poetry at full tilt, when we slow down and let each other know what it is like for each of us to be conscious here on earth.

Write me at bmossberg@csumb.edu, or “message” me on Facebook.

Yours sincerely, Dr. B

© Barbara Mossberg 2011

Standard Podcast [ 52:51 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download