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 

Standard Podcast [ 58:58 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Hello, and happy new year, O friends, O ears, hear hear! You’re slowing down for the Poetry Slow Down—you know you move too fast! You know you are supposed to slow down for your health, and mind, and spirit, and poetry is an excellent way of doing that, because it’s .  . . well, it’s beautiful, but it’s also strange, let’s be frank, and difficult, and despised even—this isn’t just me talking, it’s William Carlos Williams, who says, my heart rouses thinking to bring you news that concerns you and concerns many men. It is difficult to get the news from despised news yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. –That’s what he said in To Asphodel, That Greeny Flower. That’s a lot. That’s life and death. Now you could say, well, Dr. B, of course he is saying that, he’s a poet. He is an interest in our reading poetry. But his day job is a doctor. It’s his business to save lives. He writes poems on prescription pads, at the end of his day saving lives, with blood on his hands. He should know whereof he speaks, when he speaks of life and death and what can save us.

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Standard Podcast [ 53:17 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Our #POETRYSLOWDOWN always says we are the news you need, the news you heed, the news “without which men die miserably every day” (Wm. Carlos Williams).  We are the news between the headlines, fast-breaking, late-breaking, heart-breaking news; we are the heart-making news. Here we hear a case where the headline, late-breaking, heart-breaking news and poetry’s news converge, as we make an homage to the man who put his heart and poetic feet in his mouth and made food and language exuberant art forms: Anthony Bourdain, whose life ended in France this week. We cannot know his sorrows or life anguish, as much as he was in our public eye, televised daily in his out-sized anthropologist fearless foodie role invoking stunt-like stories about food-making, but we can cherish his working life as a writer—fearless and fierce and open and joyous.

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Standard Podcast [ 57:42 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download