CONFESSIONS OF KILLER OF CATERPILLARS, HEADS UP TO DEER (AND OTHERS) AT RISK, BEING RAPT, RAPTORMANIA, RAPTURE, AND RIPARIAN ECSTASY YOU HAVE TIME FOR IF YOU SLOW DOWN: Poems and Lyric Prose “On Life” and Utterly Necessary Living, Life, and Death. This just in, #PoetrySlowDown#saveyourlifenow, fresh from saving my lavender from The Very Hungry Caterpillar (apologies to Eric Carle who just.doesn’t.know—or does ) with white oozy sticky caterpillar remains and output on my hands, fresh from killing mindfully the white foam-containing fanged monsters, to talk to you lyrically with great sensitivity and empathy about our world and why and how to love it, for all our sakes, yes, tis moi, and all I’m going to say about that is this: if you love a gardener, and you should, you are at great risk of hating bonafide elements of our world and harboring murderous thoughts, and by the way, you know, you know you know, give it up– it’s hopeless. But fear not, because in our show this week, we uplift ourselves with Shelley, no less, “On Life,” and “Mutability,” Patricia Hampl’s The Art of the Wasted Day(along with our essential Mary Oliver and James Wright), Brian Doyle’s riffs on life from How the Light Gets In (you otter listen, and I’m not just badgering you), Doriann Laux’s “Life is Beautiful” (each getting us all misty about creatures that make us crawl and yelp—oh, wait—they crawl and yelp, and we, we shudder, we look for weaponized brooms: what happens when you love a gardener (if you learn you hate creatures what then becomes of you?). Well, poetry helps us figure it out, this age-old crisis of conscience, of being on two opposing sides at once, but only if we take time out, slow down—you know you move too fast– to live right. It’s true, perhaps, people could judge you, think you’re wasting your time right now, listening to poetry and its gab, but there’s a lot of evidence that what we call wasting our timeand being unproductive is actually supremely practical in getting done what needs to get done in this life—like being rapt, amazed, astonished, awed, grateful, humble, at all we can see and feel. Our show’s abiding spirit, William Carlos Williams, who felt that “so much depends upon a red wheel barrow” glistening in the rain next to which white chickens—yep, that’s it, but he said poetry is news that’s life and death—we die miserably without it—that’s pretty down to earth and practical as survival Rx.  The drama and trauma of a garden is only part of it: we’re in this world and we’re not alone 

© Barbara Mossberg

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Never mind the headlines, there’s plenty of drama in the kitchen . . . it’s a lot.  A play in the making about a daughter raising her mother from the dead, an act of which her mother approves, although not the means, which is poetry and gets you nowhere . . . . Our show considers a poet’s writing about her mother and ultimately making her mother immortal in the process, and the role poetry can play in days of headline news (there may come a day in newspapers’ demise when that is going to be a quaint expression, only metaphor—) (let it not be so!), with framing poems by Dorianne Laux and Shakespeare,  and music from “Hair” and Carol King and Judy Collins and “Que Sera Sera.” So I’m sharing with you my poems about my mother, as a tribute program to Mother’s Day, and some day, I will share my poems about being a mother, and what that has to do with poetry! Are you listening because you love mothers or because you love poetry? I will try to honor both kinds of listening! May the 4^thand every day be with you. Yours sincerely, Professor Mossberg, aka Dr. B

© Barbara Mossberg 2019 

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