WWRS? (What Would Rumi Say?) What does poetry have to do with it? Stay tuned for The Poetry Slow Down with Professor Barbara Mossberg.
Enjoy the video for this week’s episode on our Facebeook page.
As we celebrate Walt Whitman’s birthday, we consider how seriously as a poet he took joy (very). As it turns out, in fact, poets taking joy seriously is a thing. We’re slowing down today (you know you move too fast) to consider this phenomenon, and ferret out the gloom in June that besets us on this journey of ours. We’ll hear from bossy poets and obedient poets on taking joy seriously—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, e.e. cummings, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, W.B. Yeats, Charles Tripi, Mary Oliver, Shakespeare, Whitman, Brian Doyle. As our family says when we begin a trip, Hi ho! Let us go then, you and I, as T.S. Eliot said, let us arise and go then, as W.B. Yeats said, let’s go, says bc Mossberg, your joyful host today, with our Producer Zappa Johns, for the Poetry Slow Down–seriously joyful considering us seriously and our remarkable and necessary capacity for joy!
© Barbara Mossberg 2019Â
Please help yourself to an hour (plucked from Daylight Savings Time), slowing down (because you know you move too fast) for the up of the ThePoetrySlowDown that aspires to be a Holy Fire Reiki for your spirit (as poetry perhaps always has been). With our Producer Zappa Johns, on California’s Central Coast, and me, your host Professor Barbara Mossberg, known to my students and certain bartenders as Dr. B, you are taking this time for yourself to dwell in mystery and wonder, as Paul Simon sings it, or the terrain of miracle, as Einstein conceives it, or Possibility, as the quantum practitioner Emily Dickinson says is a place and way she dwells.
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A perspective on how we (should) spend our daily energies. A bossiness of poets weigh in, from the late (but always here) Mary Oliver, William Stafford, Raymond Carver, Emily Dickinson, Billy Collins, Lorine Neidecker, Alice Dunbar -Nelson, Gerald Manley Hopkins, William Butler Yeats, Christopher Smart, Richard Wilbur, John Milton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Doty, e.e. cummings (who loved the world as much?). There’s a lot of loving going on in the work of poets, and the world needs it: maybe this is all our work, loving the world. Yes, I guess, we’re pregaming Valentine’s Day, The Poetry Slow Down with Professor Barbara Mossberg, Produced by Zappa Johns.Â
You’re under the weather, my friend, feeling stressed and blue! Dr. B has a potion that will do: It’s light as a feather, word flour and fat, called for when the world seems sour and flat! Just when you’re going to fall on your face, Rumi’s people run in with stretchers of grace, talking about a mighty kindness, and Wendell Berry is right there with a flighty mindfulness. You may be able to tell, evolved listener as you are, I’ve been reading Dr. Suess, beloved inspirational star, and the rhymes are coming in fast and loose. But like all dishes we need, a little of that and this, we’re stirring in Dante (in dark days in the middle of our lives), and Cavafy (who says embrace the strife and hives).  And more rich fare to air, and that is only part of what’s in store, in our toolbox, our toolkit, our wheelhouse galore, a pantry of angst whisperer and poetic roar. It’s the news feed you need, the news you heed, the news without which “men die miserably every day†(William Carlos Williams), our POETRY SLOW DOWN, with your host Professor Barbara Mossberg (aka Dr. B) and Producer Zappa (that Zappa) Johns, at barbaramossberg.com, live from Eugene, Oregon and California’s Central Coast, with notes of east coast lake district and college riverbank towns, Texas hill country watering holes, Los Angeles plains and mountain lakes, Colorado peak towns where poetry thrives. We have questions for you on our show today, and you can send them our way at drb@barbaramossberg.com, or Barbara.mossberg@gmail.com. You’ll receive—and you can write to request– our I SLOW DOWN FOR THE POETRY SLOW DOWN or NO PLACE SAFE FROM POETRY bumper sticker, because you do, and inhabit that space where poetry is welcome. And on that note, I’m grateful to you, who hear this hum, to your ear, to your being here.
