Thoreau’s Lines A Tattoo (Temporary but Permanent on the Inside) (“put it on your bicep, Dr. B!)”, or a Whitman “flag of my disposition,” and what those words together mean in our times. A show of green sleuthing as we explore the role of poetry in laws on behalf of wilderness and freedom. How can a few words change the world—literally, our lives, our physical world? Come, let’s into the woods, and think about what nature has to teach us, the lessons we need to live with each other on this earth, from trees, brooks, stones, and . . . everything (“. . . which is natural which is infinite which is yes”—e.e. cummings).

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SO . . . HOW SHOULD WE BEGIN? YOUR TRUSTY DIY GUIDE TO A NEW YEAR, BEING NEW THE POETRY WAY.

A Guideline to a New Year, the Poetry Way. Hello friends, who lend me your ears, we’re hear together for the Poetry Slow Down, slowing down for the news we need, the news we heed, the news without which men die miserably every day—so they say—our poet William Carlos Williams’ case for poetry saving the day, our lives—making our day, with the way we say. Today it’s about how we’re old and new, borrowed and blue, going forth bravely into a so called new year! I’m your host Professor Barbara Mossberg, Dr. B, with our Producer Zappa as in THE MR Frank Zappa Johns, and we’ve moved from old school tradish on-off, dial-in radio, to the new fangled forms of how we talk to each other these days, in podcast, at barbaramossberg.com, available 24/7, whenever!

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As we ring in the new year, we think about the days when January wasn’t even a month, much less the herald and threshold of a new year, and how to get things started right, with cleaning, you heard me, cleaning, and it will be a clean sweep of a show, getting the dust out and it’ll be quite the dust up, as we get all spruced up for a new year, with poetry. And no spiders will be injured in the making of this show, or in its advice.

Stay tuned for The Poetry Slow Down, with Dr. B, Professor Barbara Mossberg, Produced by Zappa (yes, named for that Zappa) Johns.

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Making an End: On Doing It Right: The Poetry Way

WRAPPING IT UP: POETRY AS PRESENT, A GIFT IN OUR LIVES “WITHOUT WHICH MEN DIE MISERABLY EVERY DAY” (“To Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” William Carlos Williams)—a wrap and rap of the New Year, for getting us in the mood for New Year’s Eve, in which we let poetry work its magic on us, and consider the folly of any curriculum that does not include poetry as essential practical knowledge for going forward with our own lives and our country’s and world’s and earth’s, to put it mildly:

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A celebration of an earth-struck poetry-loving man, as a geologist “rocks” around the clock. John Muir’s death certificate lists him as a geologist, but it’s not as a geologist that we name hospitals, stars, glaciers, schools, trails, flowers, and forests after him; it’s in his poetry we feel his glacial powers to create a flowing unstoppable force of civic support for our national parks, whose 100th anniversary we celebrate this year.

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