Top o the morning to you, Poetry community! Post-Valentines, in the thick of birthdays of civic leaders, we’re slowing down for our Poetry Slow Down, I’m your host Professor Barbara Mossberg, with our West Coast Producer Zappa Johns, broadcasting live from the tree house, Eugene, Oregon. We’ve got good news today—we need it—in between the headline, deadline, late-breaking, heart-breaking news, we’ve got heart-lines, heart-making, heart-shaking, a slew of poems from our amazing next generation, students at the University of Oregon, with poetic feet in our poetry shoe (if the show fits, hear it!). They’ll throw their hats into the ring with John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, e.e. cummings, Mary Oliver, William Butler Yeats, Pablo Neruda, Wendell Berry, and a slew of others, and I’ll get our ball rolling, greeting you first with my own valentine to you: glorious listener, friends and fellow earth-lings, ear-lings, this is the anniversary of our 10^th year on the air, broadcasting every week since 2008.

© Barbara Mossberg

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Life and Death Stakes in Paying Attention, Your Own, Each Other’s, Our Earth’s, and What Amazed Poetry Has To Do With It. (Mary Oliver (a lot), D. H. Lawrence, Emily Dickinson (of course), John Muir (a lot), John Steinbeck, Arthur Miller, Ray Armantrout, Rachel Carson, Susan Schultz, Thich Nhat Hanh, Andrew Epstein and more)

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When there’s a murder, we investigate “who dunnit.” When something’s gone wrong, we look for evidence. But what about when something goes right? With good acts, great acts, can we also investigate “who dunnit?” What’s the “weapon?” What’s the motive?

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The Poetry Slow Down with Professor Barbara Mossberg. In our show, broadcast live from Los Angeles, where John Muir died 103 years ago today, we consider his last words, sprawled as he lay in a hospital bed with the manuscript of Travels in Alaska. The book concludes extolling the beauty of aurora borealis, the Northern Lights, the most exalted he “has ever beheld. THE END.” At a time when the fates of the national parks and lands are uncertain, it is useful—and hopeful—to remember that John Muir’s heartache on his death, his mourning the drowning of Yosemite National Park’s Hetch Hetchy Valley for San Francisco’s supplemental water and power source, did not stop him from writing to preserve wilderness that still remained. And the furor over Congress’ 1913 decision to drown a national park valley led to the 1916 National Park System legislation. John Muir wanted to be the poet to the rescue to save wilderness, and in a profound way, he has done just that over time. How? He is, at the end of the day, a poetry man. His death certificate lists his occupation as Geologist, but it is as a poet that he created earthquakes in the minds and hearts of the American public. Today, we celebrate his work, building on poets from thousands of years, to behold earth so that we value it and save it. Thank you for joining our Poetry Slow Down, with Producer Zappa Johns, live at our podcast, Barbaramossberg.com

© Barbara Mossberg 2017

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My little chickadees! Hello! This is your Professor Barbara Mossberg and I’m greeting you this dark December day, one of the shortest and darkest of the whole year, with the sound of a chickadee, on THE POETRY SLOW DOWN with Professor Barbara Mossberg, podcast at BarbaraMossberg.com, Produced by Zappa Johns, and it was my intention today to bring us news of encouragement via poetry, the all-time encourager for all dark times when we are lost in the middle of the woods in the middle of our lives as in Dante’s Inferno. . . with the likes of Tennyson and William Ernest Henley and Teddy Roosevelt and then poems of sustainability, poems of resilience, poems of endurance, poems of going on, and advice, and encouragement, from Cafavy, and Mark Strand, whose life we mark this week, Mark Strand, yes, the one who wrote one of my favorite lines, ink is dripping from the corners of my lips, there is no happiness like mine, I have been eating poetry, that Mark Strand, and many others, poems rooted in epic, the epic spirit of journey, of continuing on through storm and monster and captivity and spell and bad luck and ire of the gods and all the farfalle that befalls us as we strive to reach our Ithacas, as Odysseys in The Odyssey of three thousand years ago . . . and then in the tree outside the window is a chickadee, improbable against the drab cold gray of day, so here is our show today, THE NEWS OF CHICKADEE: RX IN A TIME OF STRUGGLE Brought to you by our poets of all time

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