in midst and mists of epic storms, Gerard Manley Hopkins, with Charles Tripi’s “Get Up,” (W.E. Henley’s “Invictus,” Tennyson’s “Ulysses”), 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!”), Joan Baez singing Bob Dylan (“any day now”), San Cooke (“been a long time comin, a change is gonna come”). 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.”

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.

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