A celebration of an earth-struck poetry-loving man, as a geologist “rocks” around the clock. John Muir’s death certificate lists him as a geologist, but it’s not as a geologist that we name hospitals, stars, glaciers, schools, trails, flowers, and forests after him; it’s in his poetry we feel his glacial powers to create a flowing unstoppable force of civic support for our national parks, whose 100th anniversary we celebrate this year.
Our celebration John Muir and of the 100th anniversary of the National Parks Service will be heading your way December 19th! Listen early as Dr. B gives us a teaser of the upcoming episode.
I shall grow old but never lose life’s zest, Because the road’s last turn will be the best.—Henry Van Dyke
“THE DIFFERENCE MADE ME BOLD:†CELEBRATING EMILY DICKINSON’S LIFE OF SERVICE, IN HONOR OF HER 186 BIRTHDAY, THE MEANING SHARING ONE’S LIFE CAN MAKE TO THE SPIRIT WITH WHICH WE EACH GO FORTH BOLDLY WHERE NO ONE HAS BEEN BEFORE, WITH THE LIKES OF MAY SARTON, RUTH STONE, TILLIE OLSEN, WENDY BARKER, SANDRA GILBERT, LINDA GREGG, LUCLILLE CLIFTON, DEB CASEY, AND NOT ONLY FEISTY LADIES INCLUDING THE SPHINX BUT THE GUYS, DANTE, ELIOT, GERALD STERN, STANLEY KUNITZ, DONALD HALL, W.S. MERWIN, JAMES WRIGHT, CHARLES GIBILTERRA, AND CHARLES TRIPI, CHRISTIAN WIMAN, WITH SPECIAL TRIBUTES TO JACK GILBERT AND LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI
“i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun’s birthday, and this is the birthday of life, and of love and wings, and the gay great happening illimitably earth†–e.e. cummings WELCOME to our Poetry Slow Down . . .I’m your host Professor Barbara Mossberg, we’re produced by Zappa Johns, a fact for which we pause to acknowledge the immortal Frank Zappa, who died on this day, but, as a Mother of Invention, is alive again today, we’re slowing down to make the morning last . . . You know you move too fast!
“The explorer finds little evidence for any of the way Homer describes Troy . . . Yet here, in the mind’s eye, stood an awe-inspiring city with soaring battlements dominating the plans. Homer and the bards were not deliberate liars, they were describing the place as poets. The magic of their words took a minor citadel and turned it into a stupendous stronghold immortalized in their descriptions. This is a credit to poetic imagination . . . [the poet] takes human figures and transmutes them into heroes. He inflates ordinary places so as to make them seem vast and impressive.†This, Poetry Slow Down, seems a great way to understand how epic poetry can inspire mere us to see our lives as heroic—no, not mere us—because what poets have their fingers on the pulse of, us, is the magnitude, I think, of our actual being; we are large to ourselves, our hungers, our pains, our fears, our hopes, our joys . . . the obstacles in the path, blocking our dreams, are huge to us—monsters, giants, huge forces . . . and every day, we confront and face them, and it requires bravery to be us, regular us, strength, resolve, resilience. . . When we read these poems describing the taking on of larger monstrous forces, it’s our inner life we are experiencing . . . a reality. Cervantes in the 1500s shows a man reading epic who transforms a dispiriting everyday life into something heroic. Paul Farmer, reading this literature, believes he can do something, be something . . . more . . . useful. To “shine in use,†as Tennyson says in “Ulysses.â€
