To the tunes of Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Etta James, Frank Sinatra, and Louis Armstrong, we are Poetry Slow Down, stopping to listen, we are heeding Gerald Stern, Yes SIR! Welcome to our show today, with me your host Professor Barbara Mossberg, produced by Sara Hughes. It’s midwinter, here in North America on the Western Hemisphere, and we’ve finished Valentine’s Day which got us thinking about love, and Tupelo Press, promoting imaginative and vivid poetry, musical language virtuosity, set forth a Winter Poetry Project asking for erotic poems. Eros: considered one of the primal gods, right after chaos, night, and earth (this makes sense, right?).

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RECIPES OF UNNECESSARY ESSENTIALS –FOR A DAY OF LOVE, A WAY OF LOVE, IN POETRY’S PANTRY, or, how to have your cake and eat it too and give it away with poetry—including steaming fragrant poems by Poet Maker Bakers Pablo Neruda, Walt Whitman, Sandra Gilbert, Raymond Carver, Frank O’Hara, Gary Soto, Philip Larkin, Shakespeare, Gerard Stern, Barbara Mossberg, notes of Sir Peter Shaffer, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Oscar Wilde, W. S. Merwin, Maurice Sendak, Kenneth Grahame, mentions of Mary Poppins and Pippi Longstocking and Pat-a-cake, recipes of Emily Dickinson (black cake), Dr. B (orange lemon olive oil cake) and more . . . passionate, slowlicious, delicious takes on cake.

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Frank Sinatra, Natalie Cole, Radio Jones sing of it, Shakespeare bards it, Dickinson escoffiers it:

the topic is dust. Yes, dust. Glorious dust. I cannot get away from this theme of sweeping and cleaning. I am like Monica on Friends.

EXTREMELY CHARGED DUST, VALIANT DUST:

QUINTESSENTIAL DUST UP AT THE POETRY SLOW DOWN, A HOE DOWN OF ASTROCHEM MIXING IT UP –THE SCIENTISTS’ DOWN LOW, POETS’ LOW DOWN SECRETS OF STARDUST IN POETRY DUST RAGS, from

Shakespeare’s kings and princes and nieces to the Maxwell-Einstein equation and stellar science, Book of Common Prayer to Einstein, Whitman to Feynman, Mary Oliver, Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Gerald Stern, Mark Doty, Shelley, Linda Gregg, Julie Stuckey, Rubert Brooke, to Peggy Parrish’s Amelia Bedelia. . . Continue reading →

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