e.e. cummings says it all in his invocation “i thank You God for most this amazing,” the gratitude expressed in robust humility and grand spirit for every thing that is “natural,” “infinite, “yes”. Spirits of trees are leaping greenly. He who has died is “alive again today,” the earth is “happening illimitably,” the eyes of his eyes awake and the ears of his ears are open. So let us celebrate Earth Day, and a birthday of John Muir (coincidence? I think not) who is alive again today in all our minds, as we think about our gratitude for consciousness of this earth of ours.Our show today is a feisty but awed reading of John Muir’s reading of earth, his self-style role as earth’s PR guy, go to guy for advocacy of trees, interpreter of winds and clouds and rocks and trees, squirrels and ouzels, waterfalls and stars, sunshine and flowers, lobbyist for Forest and Valley, our heartbroken champion of the drowned Hetch Hetchy Valley (go to restorehetchhetchy.org), and our story is that he a celebrity today, sure he is, with a trail, flower, glacier, star, hospital, motel, high school named after him, just to name a few, and even our currency has his image, California’s quarter . . . not because he was a scientist respected in geology and botany and ecology, nor because he hobnobbed with presidents, nor because he was a tree-mendous climber of both mountains and trees (but never call him a hiker), nor because he was a tour guide to the rich and famous (but never say the view is pretty or nice or some other “cheap” adjetive), nor because he instigated for preservation of wilderness, and became godfather to the national parks, nor because he helped found and was president of the Sierra Club . . . he is a celebrity, in fact, a rock star, as a poet, for the way he wrote about stars, yes, and rocks, actually. You know I would say this, Poetry Slow Down, but it’s true. He was trained as a poet, in his fractured formal and home-schooled informal schooling, and he read poetry, and wrote with the lyrical grace and metaphoric oomph of an iambic-footed purple forest dweller.    Continue reading →

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(Poetry of Emily Dickinson, e.e. cummings, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Theodore Roethke, Stanley Kunitz, Barbara Mossberg aka Fat Lady Flying)

THAT APRIL! This April. This here April. –-No locked doors here, April’s welcome on our Poetry Slow Down, as we note Emily Dickinson’s issue with her bad boy April taking his own sweet time to arrive, and we’re reflecting on a time of recognizing and pondering earth‘s poem i thank You God for most this amazing, with its lines, “i who have died am alive again today”resilience and resurrection in Spring. We and eddieandbill and bettyandisabel are skipping past what e.e. cummings calls “in just spring” barely barely barely newness or re-newness when the world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful, and what Gerard Manley Hopkins and Theodore Roethke call the juiciness of deep down freshness, when against seemingly all odds of darkness and oppression and silence and death, up comes a green radiance, a color of purple, white petals, out of a frozen, crusted, ravaged earth, in a process T.S. Eliot calls cruel: April is the cruelest month, he says, a statement so surprising that in his honor we dedicate this month as National Poetry Month, and the reason he says this is because April is so mud-slushous. Through all time, poets have put their mental shoulders to the wheel of this time of year, this concept of new life out of what seems like death. And so today, we will celebrate what I call, Life and Death and Life Again, poems of spring as renewal, centered on e.e. cummings’

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It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous—T.S. Eliot

I cannot rest from travel, I will drink life to the lees, come, my friends, tis not too late to seek a newer world, that’s Alfred, Lloyd Tennyson, exhorting us to join him although “the gulfs may wash us down”–

 Traveling is a fool’s paradise, that’s Ralph Waldo Emerson, –ah,

April fools!

And who’s that, we’re talking about, I’m Professor Barbara Mossberg, welcoming you to our show. Today our show is about April and what makes fools of us and how that is a good thing?— I was thinking of  you, flying this past week, to Washington, D.C. to read poetry in celebration of the Fulbright program, the 60^th anniversary of the program between Finland and the U.S. at the leaf-covered blue-glass Finnish Embassy, and wondering about flying, looking out the window and wondering about this experience of being miles up in the air among and over and between the clouds, and tossed about in winds and  holding steady like some gull, and below is earth, and we’re hurtling in some arc as part of the planetary curve and space curve, and I was thinking, what if John Muir were in this plane seat, looking out, what would he think, what would he write, he who was rhapsodic about lying on grass looking up at the trees and skies and stars, Homer and Shakespeare and Milton and Burns and Wordsworth in his mind, what would Emily Dickinson write if she were here, I KNOW, she didn’t even want to get into a wagon, or train, or even on foot, “cross my father’s ground to any land or town,” what would she say, who could capture a view from her second story bedroom window over Main Street and the yard in Amherst, Massachusetts? What would Whitman do with this view? Continue reading →

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