THE RADIO SHOE: Poetic footwork in the POETRY SLOW DOWN, with Professor Barbara Mossberg (“no place safe from poetryâ€), in which the news of poetry is a civic force of community building and health, and general happiness, and world peace, and this IS rocket science. So get your show shoes on, knock your socks off, and get a move on, those poetic feet slowing down (you know you move too fast!)for the news you need, the news you heed, the news “without which men die miserably every day†(Dr. William Carlos Williams, who should know). We’re talking about heroes of the earth today, and what angels and poets have to do with it.
We’ll hear about William Blake, who saw angels in the trees outside his window, David Milarch, whose vision of angels brought him back to life, and with poetic justice, generated the Archangel Project to resurrect the world’s most ancient trees, Joyce Kilmer, whose poem “Trees†let to the effort to preserve forests, and we’ll check in with W.S. Merwin, the poet laureate, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and environmental activist who has dedicated himself to preserving and regenerating native plants, one by one, by hand, at his home on Maui. And we’ll hear about his book of poems from his nineties, Garden Time, and about another poet in his nineties, Stanley Kunitz, The Wild Braid—speaking of making the morning last—literally with three feet in the afternoon! What does the ancient riddle of the Sphinx and poetic feet have to do with saving earth, AHA! And we’ll hear from Mary Oliver, Terry Tempest Williams, Barbara Kingsolver, Wangari Maathai, Sandra Cisneros, Nancy Willard, John Muir, Robert Frost, and a host of other angels on poetic feet. We’re podcast at barbaramossberg.com, and produced by the Zappa Johns on California’s Central Coast! So here we go, slowing down to make the morning last! If the (radio) shoe fits, wear it!
© Dr. Barbara Mossberg
