As Dr. B travels this week, we’re looking back on this episode from July 2015:

From 14^th century Queen’s College, broadcast live for radiomonterey.com, produced by Zappa Johns, with Professor Barbara Mossberg, on the news we heed, the news we heed, the news “without which men die miserably every day” (William Carlos Williams, who knows whereof he speaks): poetry. We are investigating the phenomenon that what goes for “new” (and news) and genius is an amalgam and collision of old and older and older again, different ways of knowing and expressing from the past and other disciplines. Thus we find ourselves with Oxford exemplars, who each study Latin and Greek and arts and sciences, from STEMers Sir Christopher Wren reading The Aeneidand Lewis Carroll reading Oxford poetry to T. S. Eliot and the new Oxford laureate Simon Armitage, who, naturally, are engaging classical worlds and The Odyssey. We consider Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth covering William Blake, and Nancy Willard covering Blake, and David Lehman covering Wordsworth (who was an honorary at Oxford). Features of our show this week include the theory that the architecture of Wren’s St. Paul’s Cathedral and Eliot’s “The Wasteland” are the same “new” breaking-away works of genius and beauty, jazz, chaos (theory), and colliding amalgamation, that make today’s headliner Armitage seem positively . . . in the company of ancients, as Wordsworth would have us have it:

Where holy ground begins, unhallowed ends,

Is marked by no distinguishable line;

The turf unites, the pathways intertwine;

And, wheresoe’er the stealing footstep tends,

Garden, and that domain where kindred, friends,

And neighbours rest together, here confound

Their several features, mingled like the sound

Of many waters, or as evening blends

With shady night. Soft airs, from shrub and flower,

Waft fragrant greetings to each silent grave;

And while those lofty poplars gently wave

Their tops, between them comes and goes a sky

Bright as the glimpses of eternity,

To saints accorded in their mortal hour. William Wordsworth

Wordsworth is speaking of joy, which Blake makes “poetic,” and that joy from the beauty of poetry is something incandescent. Thank you for listening, in whatever time zone (our listeners span 15 time zones), and for the joy, as it flies . . . . (thank you Mr. Blake).

© Barbara Mossberg 2015

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This radio show, Poetry Slow down, is so lyrically wet that you will be drenched in river imagery, you will need to dry off after the show. Is there a river in your life? We all have a river in our lives, in stories and songs that matter to us. Rivers seem inextricably related to how we experience earth—civilizations developed around rivers. They are the veins, the arteries of earth, our special planet.

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(Yes, you read right!). People might not think of either of these two poets in terms of comedy or even robust spirit–much less joy in being oneself, living this life— an obscure life extinguished after decades of early debilitating illness, and suicide at the age of thirty: these are not happy endings. Nor do their famously fraught lives and poetry suggest froth or frolic.  Both Dickinson and Plath are in the news these days in ways that bring up these very issues: how can we understand and represent a poet’s life? As our show considers recent public representations of Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, in the film A Quiet Passion, and the exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum, and the new exhibition on Plath at the Smithsonian in The National Portrait Gallery, we will ponder (like Dickinson’s Clown) the elements that make a life comic and tragic—and imagine their lives as heroic and epic—in the way of Don Quixote, who takes a sordid and anguished reality and sees it as noble, dignified, beautiful, holy; and epic in general, that elevates and enlarges whatever is small, confined, limited. This might seem strange to apply to someone who wrote, I’m Nobody, who are you? Or about a teenage angst so severe she tries to kill herself: identities that are lacking in esteem . . . yet, in both writers, one mid 19^th century, one mid 20^th century, we see a celebration of powerful identity of enormous proportion, bursting with a Cyrano de Bergerac like swagger, and convinced of immortality if not also goddess destiny.

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Yes: it all begins with sound, with wave, and of course, our voices are ways we connect with each other, our brain waves, becoming voice, and radio waves, and I think it makes sense on the imagery of waves that it’s the Beach Boys who produce Good Vibrations, as it’s all about frequency:

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and other things I learn from my students: a celebration for graduation week, AND REFLECTIONS ON POETRY IN THE NEWSFEED AND ON THE SCREEN THIS WEEK—the news we need, the news we heed, the news “without which men die miserably every day.” We are all about living, living happily, every day.  Towards that end . . .

Hello, Poetry Slow Down, my peoples, speaking of living happily every day, we’re all about making the morning last! Paul Simon says to slow down, we move too fast, we’ve got to make the morning last. What’s up with morning?  We’ll hear from Thoreau, and Mary Oliver, and Tracy Smith, and video game and Eagles and Whitney Houston, and to start us off, a hymn by Eleanor Farjean, sung by Cat Stevens, and the great song from “Hair,” Good Morning Starshine.

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