We will be having a show on bench memorial poetry–if you email me at bmossberg@csumb.edu we can share our sightings of this wonderful expression of our humanity.
Title: GRAND OPENINGS! GREAT BEGINNINGS!
Location: Pacific Grove Library 550 Central Avenue Pacific Grove CA
Description: Dr. Barbara Mossberg PG Poet-in-Residence
Presents
OPENING LINES THAT MADE HISTORY
A hands-on workshop with an extraordinary poet and teacher who will inspire you to “be bold in your beginnings.â€
Cost $15 per person
Contact Lisa Maddalena at 6495760 or LMaddale@pacificgrove.lib.ca.us to make your reservations. Seating is limited
Start Time: 09:00
Date: 2011-04-16
End Time: 12:00
Title: Barbara Mossberg: Changing The World: A Tribute to the Power of Words.
Location: Casa Munras Hotel 700 Munras Avenue Monterey CA
Link out: Click here
Description: We know writing is transformational for the writer, but for the world, the real world? Cultural data from earliest recorded history shows literary arts transforming social, political, civic, and environmental dimensions of our lives for war and peace and civil and human rights. Even–or especially–writers who see themselves or are seen as marginal, save and redeem our planet and our souls.This message may seem like preaching to the choir, but the power in experiencing oneself as a member of a community, not only of one’s profession and region, but of a global and historic enterprise that changes the world, can be a force of resilience and heroic resolve, a la Churchill, to never, never, never, never, never give up.
Start Time: 17:30
Date: 2011-04-19
FOR MOLES AND HEDGEHOGS AND BADGERS AND BALLOON MEN AND ALL EMERGENT IMPROBABLE WILD CHARACTERS IN OUR LIVES, our show today is about love, improbable love, and life improbably emergent in just Spring. It all begins in Brooklyn with Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman’s Everyman fluted mourning of lost gardens (are we going to get out of those woods—those winds?—not likely, not in the near future, and we’ll hear Edgar Arlington Robinson with Broken Flutes of Arcady), our oldest consciousness perhaps marrying grief over lost gardens and the wood-wind flute. 40,000 years ago flutes are made, from bones of bear and swan, vulture, mammoth and crane, found from Germany to China as humanity evolves from Neanderthals. We hear poets from every land and time on the topic of flutes: poetry and flutes are the original Mac and cheese, soup and sandwich combo. Aristotle and King Frederick of Prussia warn against both (mothers, don’t let your children grow up to be flute players and poets) and so does Lutheran Guide Garrison Keillor, but Goethe (not to mention Mozart) says get over it, people, the flute and poetry are here to stay. Hear, hear! says Kahlil Gibran, Genesis, and Rumi.
Our opening line-up, e.e. cummings’s “in just Spring,†and Nancy Willard’s “The Man in the Marmelade Hat,†and we celebrate the 40th anniversary of a certain couple, whose beginnings are the exchange of Kenneth Graham, Wind in the Willows and Knut Hamsun’s Pan, and results in a wedding in the woods and a dog named Moley. We’ll hear lots about Pan-playing flutes and flute-playing Pans, (and more on that subject and pots and pans to follow). Speaking of spring-cleaning and hearing Pan’s Piper of Dawn, we’ll hear some poems about that gloriously toiling mole and origin of a labour of moles, (stay tuned for the origin of Holey Moley in subsequent shows), notes of Judith Kitchen, “Catching the Moles,†Christina Rossetti, “A Handy Mole,†Mary Oliver, “The Moles,†and William Stafford’s “Starting With Little Things,†which we will return to in next week’s show from Oregon, and your host’s own “Next Stop: Klamath Falls,†and continuation of the theme of late winter, early spring, emergent love, and certain improbabilities. Let’s slow down as the ice begins to melt . . . do you hear some music? Or is that the wind . . . love and live to you, The Poetry Slow Down, KRXA 540AM
© Barbara Mossberg 2011
in midst and mists of epic storms, Gerard Manley Hopkins, with Charles Tripi’s “Get Up,†(W.E. Henley’s “Invictus,†Tennyson’s “Ulyssesâ€), and paean “Imaginary Brooklyn,†W.S. Merwin’s “The Blind Seer of Ambon†and more, Karen Bryant (responding to John Muir) as vinegar and piss polecat warrior on lost gardens, Emily Dickinson’s “a little madness,†poems from Sweeping Beauty, poets on housework, and notes of Jacques Brel (“no love, you’re not alone, come on, now!â€), Joan Baez singing Bob Dylan (“any day nowâ€), San Cooke (“been a long time comin, a change is gonna comeâ€). And don’t forget the “Man in the Marmelade Hat,†thank you Nancy Willard, A Visit to William Blake’s Inn, a rousing way to say, “winter is over my loves, come away from your hollows and holes.â€
To be continued in our March series on getting ourselves back to the garden. Look for more Brooklyn hope and wisdom in Miss Rumphius, catastrophes and resilience wisdom for children in Winnie the Pooh and Frederick, garden music in Wind in the Willows, and other ways poetry saves the day, and poetry and music from the Garden State, yes, everyone you’re thinking of . . . write me at bmossberg@csumb.edu.
In our show today, we consider signs of hope and the bravery to face momentous forces on literal and mental land and sea, poetry as part of the earth’s rhythms . . . we March forward, this first day of spring and we’ll talk about spring cleaning and spring training (in sonnets, that is) and sweeping and renewal and words’ healing and world’s healing. Carrying on. Resilience. And more works from our continuing theme of We’ve Got to Get Ourselves Back to the Garden. . . Every day in the headline news, we are seeing more and more reason to get under the covers, if we are so lucky as to have covers to get under—for a poetry workshop I gave yesterday in Pacific Grove, in which I asked people at the outset to write down a problem that afflicts us, and a worry which demoralizes us, we did a sonnet as an exercise in turning our minds around about something vexing, and the group chose the topic of insomnia–that makes sense, right, and the challenge was to come up with that redemptive couplet at the end which FLIPS our despair and helplessness and hopelessness, I’m talking about serious resilience here, at The Poetry Slow Down.
