A theory brought to you through blood, sweat, tears, and fears, through the post post-Civil War South, by your own fearful Dr. B, host of our PoetrySlowDown, recreating the experience of John Muir’s post-Civil War 1000 Mile Walk to the Gulf, enduring insects, cutting vines, alligators, and snakes, but failing utterly at starving. The slithery, slimy, stinging, starving and armed realities are a lens that illuminate Muir’s rapturous depictions of wilderness that turned our nation’s mind around in the light of trauma and danger in war-burned and desecrated land, shell-shocked people, and desperate crime. His sojourn through ravaged rural and community life forged his way of engaging wilderness in the Western Sierras. And on the note of converting trauma into poetry, we consider squirrels, as in googling, “squirrels peeing on patio furniture.†(We long ago became resigned to what we had googled as “squirrels eating all the seed in the birdfeeder†and “squirrels eating every last ripe peachâ€â€”to which the first google entry had “seven pumper.) There are ways to transform our annoyance. We’ll slow down our indignant heart rates to enjoy what poets know and say about squirrels. From Rilke to Emily Dickinson to Henry David Thoreau to yes, John Muir . . . . and who knew—these creatures have found their way into people’s hearts and if not my hearts, certainly my own poetry.
We’re produced today by Zappa Johns, our fusion man of tech arts and music science, and I’m Professor Barbara Mossberg.
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