That’s Nikki Giovanni, her Kidnap poem, kidnapping you today for our annual Thanksgiving PoetrySlowDown ANK OU ERY UCH, or, LET’S GIVE THANKS FOR THE POEM I’M WRITING (AND THESE WORDS I EAT) and this is your host Professor Barbara Mossberg, as we hear (hear! hear!)
I reflect that kind is three quarters kin. Our bonds, the actual equation of us, the Mayan saying, you are my other me. Emily Dickinson’s I’m Nobody draws us in to this secret shared identity. We are in this together. We ARE this together. We are the metaphor, that impossibility of connection, the poet’s vision. Dickinson is providing me spiritual leadership during this time of a French which is a world crisis. Our poetry organizations, you, Poetry Slow Down listeners, provide me solace of community as we reel from the revelation that no place is safe. But we have to live as if it is still our beloved world.
A show about memory and the spirit and spirits of what we treasure and hold precious when we slow down, and the role of Muse, of poetry, in bringing life to life. Music is “Memory,” from Cats, Got a Lotta Living To Do, Elvis Presley, I Remember You, Frank Ifield, That One Day, That Summer, Nat King Cole.
(with thanks to Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, and Kenneth Helphand, Defiant Gardens, Thoreau, Walden, Edmund Rostand, Chanticler, Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, and a few maverick rooster-loving emperors and poets here and there)
I TOLD YOU IT WOULD BE ALL RIGHT–
(Title of painting by William Park, Waiting Room, Department of Orthopedics, Kaiser Permanente Westside Center, Portland, Oregon),
or,
I WHO HAVE DIED AM ALIVE AGAIN TODAY (e.e. cummings, “i thank You God for most this amazingâ€)
“there is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets inâ€â€”Leonard Cohen covering Groucho Marx (“blessed are the cracked, for they shall let in the lightâ€) covering Rumi (“the wound is the place where the light enters youâ€)
A radio show that ponders and bounces rating systems as we traverse our world. What do we bring to the table of life? And if marvelosity is “not a word†then how do we know what it means? Because you know what it means, and that’s why this show is for you, dear listener, dedicated to your appetite for what is grand in the day, and how do I know this? Because you are taking your time, your “one wild and precious life,†as Mary Oliver calls it, to listen to a show about poetry, the way in which we humans have always made something out of what there is to see, and messed with language and ways to express our world to do justice to this gift of consciousness and vision. You join me in slowing down for our PoetrySlowDown, when we “make the morning last,†in Simon and Garfunkle’s “59 St Bridge Song,†where the Muse is everywhere they look: “hello lamppost, whatcha knowin? I’ve come to watch your flowers growin, aint ya got no rhymes for me, doot-in doo-doo, feeling groovy.â€
