“i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun’s birthday, and this is the birthday of life, and of love and wings, and the gay great happening illimitably earth” –e.e. cummings WELCOME to our Poetry Slow Down . . .I’m your host Professor Barbara Mossberg, we’re produced by Zappa Johns, a fact for which we pause to acknowledge the immortal Frank Zappa, who died on this day, but, as a Mother of Invention, is alive again today, we’re slowing down to make the morning last . . . You know you move too fast!

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Words from Galileo to John Glenn, Archibald MacLeish to Einstein and Emily Dickinson, Ray Bradbury, Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, WallaceStevens, William Cullen Bryant, John Brainard, and Lola Ridge from DUBlin, with music “I Will Survive,” “Happy Days,” “Starman,”“Woodstock,” “Oh Would You Like to Swing on a Star,” “Happy Together,” “Imagination,” “Pure Imagination,” “Just My Imagination,” and“Imagine,” from David Bowie to Crosby Stills Nash and Young to Bing Crosby and Gloria Gaynor to astronauts Buzz Aldrin (Snoop Dog),Chris Hadfield covering Bowie’s “Space Oddity” (get out your  handkerchiefs), and the Temptations, Earth Wind and Fire, Turtles, and GeneWilder (we loved him in “Young Frankenstein” but did you know he could sing and dance? With a cane?), and . . . it seems like a stretchgoing from the imagination called for in The Martian by a stranded botanist astronaut trying to survive, but yes John Lennon . . . imagine! We do!

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“So called lifeless rocks”—Star Power–the Life in Stones: Who Knew?—a rocking show on new science and old poetry—We will rock you from Homer to Shakespeare to John Muir—to T.S. Eliot–to D.H. Lawrence—to Ruth Padel –and even yours truly, You Are My Sunshine: Haven’t We Always Said (Sung) So? Poets, You Rock!

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A show about memory and the spirit and spirits of what we treasure and hold precious when we slow down, and the role of Muse, of poetry, in bringing life to life. Music is “Memory,” from Cats, Got a Lotta Living To Do, Elvis Presley, I Remember You, Frank Ifield, That One Day, That Summer, Nat King Cole.

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To music of Counting Crows, Lady Gaga covering Carol King (“You’ve Got a Friend”—and you do), Billy Joel “Piano Man” at Shea Stadium the night before its demise, Boys to Men “End of the Road,” and the dulcet pipes of Dr. B singing “you are my sunshine” and “let me call you sweetheart,” we’re gathering round the PoetrySlowDown campfire as we always have, to hear poetry in days of 9-11, concerned as we are with developments in the world. We need each other, as we always have, and turn to Homer, Rumi, Jane Hirshfield, Pablo Neruda, the Tupelo Press 30-30 Poets Team for September, Mark Twain, Douglas Adams, Rilke, Shakespeare; taking heart from Star Trek’s “survival is insufficient,” and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven which holds that in life’s extremities only the greatest art will do, and has a roving tattooed gang performing King Lear (and a symphony orchestra) amid the ruins of civilization. We explore how Lear informs all these poems and books, and Rumi (and Homer) were there first, to know how kind is ¾ kin, how we belong to each other and our earth, and how the answer is love and peace—as always, and now more than ever.

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Follow Dr. B on twitter @barbaramossberg and write drb@barbaramossberg.com

Producer Zappa Johns, © Barbara Mossberg 2015

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