TAKE A FEAR AND TWIST IT: OR STIR; OR MAKE IT BLUE(S): WHEN IT’S TOO HECTIC, WHEN THE NEWS IS TOO HARD, TWIST, STIR, SING THE BLUES, IN OTHER WORDS, SLOW DOWN QUARK-LAND! WHEN SOMETHING’S THE MATTER!
PITCHING WOO: BIRTHDAY, EARTH DAY, BEING ALIVE AND ELATION EQUATION (it’s pretty quantum) In which we hear (hear hear!) love tributes to life itself, including and especially when all seems pretty precarious—
Me on an erupting volcano (what was I thinking?) in passionate embrace, reflections as a mom on the role of metaphor in loving beings, birthday boys John Muir and Shakespeare, connected vitally with earth, poignancy from Thornton Wilder, Helen Reddy, Carol King, David Whyte, Keith Douglas, James Wright, Billy Collins, Frederick Holderlin, George Barker, Li Po, Stephen Spender, Rilke, Michael Blumenthal, Yeats, Rumi, translations by Robert Bly, e.e. cummings OF COURSE—ultimate birthday poet, Willie Nelson singing you are my sunshine, which you are, literally: this is our hour together, slowing down to celebrate birthdays of being, miracles of what can be, and what poetry has to do with it, pitching woo.
© Barbara Mossberg 2015
THE POETRY SLOW DOWN, produced for radiomonterey.com, by Zappa Johns, with Professor Barbara Mossberg, Sunday PST Noon-1 pm
What is all this juice and all this joy?—Gerard Manley Hopkins
O to have my life henceforth a poem of new joys!
To dance, clap hands, exult, shout, skip, leap, roll on, float on
—Walt Whitman
Continue reading
Poets Noticing the Overlooked, Succumbing to the Despised, Forsaken, and Frankly Hated
Yep, it’s everything you hate—well not YOU, of course, poetry listener, but—well, yes, you, at least me, or sometimes me: the things we sweep and kill, poison and trap, tred and stomp, dismiss, roast, don’t think twice about, or even once, use and throw away for scrap . . .
Emily Dickinson serves as earthling hostess for the season and our show today on March 1, for, as she says, “We like March. His shoes are purple.†Continue reading
