NEED SCIENTISTS AND ENGINEERS?– CALLING FOR POETRY AND MUSIC EDUCATION, a mellifluous show that tells it like it is, at The Poetry Slow Down, think-for-yourself KRXA 540 AM on California’s Central Coast, and internationally at www.krxa540.com. Continuing the theme of the show’s series on poetry as the news we need, exploring the poetry solution to (and sometimes cause of) the headlines, we share with the nation’s leaders decrying America’s upcoming generations’ purported decline in science and engineering strength an old-school vision of what has worked for creativity, invention, innovation, and all around science superbity since time began: no suspense here . . . it’s poetry, it’s music, it’s arts, and it always has been. We’ll slow down to hear about music and poetry’s role in Einstein’s theory of relativity, Richard Feynmann’s physics insights, Murray Gell-Mann’s emergent science convictions, and astronaut technology poetic raptures of Story Musgrave (surely spirit brother of John Muir, and in future shows we’ll pause to hear about poetry and music in Thomas Berry’s analysis of earth’s eco dilemmas in Dream of the Earth and we’ll saunter with geologist and botanist John Muir to hear the Aeolian strains of wilderness reeds in a windstorm). We’ll hear Ralph Waldo Emerson calling, as a national security and prosperity issue, for The Poet. We’ll hear Walt Whitman’s take on science, and Emily Dickinson’s, and let’s not forget Gertrude Stein and William James and Plato and Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen and . . . We’ll consider the basis for the forms of the ode and sonnet and haiku and what they have to do with engineering (and for that matter, The Brooklyn Bridge). There are many studies of the brain on music, and if America wishes to launch a second Sputnik Moment, music, humanities, and arts education will be critical from pre-K on, and while we’re at it, let’s bring back Latin and Greek. It worked for Galileo and Jefferson and Thoreau and for that matter, most of the people whose inventions we live by today, I’m just sayin. Of course you’re just sayin, you say, you’re a poet, but I say, yes, and it IS rocket science. (By the way: Emily Dickinson said I died for beauty, and one who died for truth was in the next grave, and she concludes they are “one”–I’m  just sayin . . . .)

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