Our New Show Is Hot Out of the Oven and Ready to be Plated!
We’re featuring the launch of the Tupelo Press 30-30 Project and the 9 well-known writers committed to a poem a day to support poetry shenanigans.
…Precious McKenzie, on the optometrist’s reply to the nymph, rhymed, giving an ancient patina–we have never seen this perky lust, amorous sensibility in the exam chair before, who longs to “push away the slit lamp stand/and ravish you like a young man.” Whoa–fanning myself here. Outed.
Catharine Sutthoff Slaton, “what was once tree”–science, geologic lyricism, astronomy verve: astonishing!—“the shatter and flint of brittle glass–a momentary Milky Way, the clash of shards on concrete–/the startle of an unstable glass.”
I say to myself this morning, in this company of poets, pinch me.
We’ll hear examples of the poets posting at Tupelo Press 30-30 Project –30 poems in 30 days: Rachel Adams, Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, Guillermo Cancio-Bello, Luanne Castle, Veronica Haunani Fitzhugh, Joseph O. Legaspi, Precious McKenzie, Barbara Mossberg, and Catherine Sutthoff Slaton. We’ll also hear, on the theme of all things rising and converging, in the making of pies, bread, poems, and one’s life, Pablo Neruda on essentials (Salt), W.S. Merwin (Bread), written for Wendell Berry, and Roddy Lumsden (Yeast), as well as hear from Emily Dickinson making “twin loaves of bread” in her kitchen (“MY kitchen I think I called it, God forbid it was or ever shall be my own, God keep me from what they call households!”), and at the mention of Emily, old Walt shows up, of course, and has a lot to say about what I interpret to be the making of bread. We conclude with e.e. cummings, rounding the show with the symmetry of him and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, as well as Emerson, and what it means to make the day, make it through, and rise, and rise again.
Stay tuned, dear Listener of great appetite, moving too fast (as you know), and we’ll sit  you right down for poetry that feeds our hungers, the news “without which men die miserably every day” (Wm. Carlos Williams). We’ll be like Emily Dickinson wrote, “he ate and drank the precious words.” Write me atbmossber@uoregon.edu, and follow me on twitter @barbaramossberg.com, and thank you for being with me, so happy together (The Turtles). On behalf of radiomonterey.com, Producer Zappa Johns, Founding Producer Emerita Sara Hughes, Solazar, and the loyalty and devotion that makes our show possible, ” I am Professor Barbara Mossberg, honored to be your appeticious host.
© Barbara Mossberg 2015
