MORE DUST UP ON POETRY’S PHILSOPHERS OF SWEEPS AND SACRED SWEEPINGS, FROM RUMI, KABIR, HAFIZ, TO WENDELL BERRY TO WILLIAM CRONON, TO EMILY DICKINSON TO RITA DOVE TO JULIANNA BAGGOTT TO GINGER ANDREWS TO ELEANOR LERMAN, TO DOROTHY BARRESI AND JAN BEATTY, A SWEEP OF POETRY FROM STARDUST TO METEORS
and I don’t know about you but I can’t seem to get enough of housework . . . poems. I know! You can sweep, or you can write a poem about it. You can dust, or try to capture its essence, the quintessential experience of it, the magnitude of it all, the sparkle in artful words that sweep your mind and clean its hollows and make its dark spaces shine. You can clean the house or your mind: what do you say, Poetry Slow
Down, shall we put down our brooms and shake those mops and listen to those who put them down, in words, that is, slowed down to put down into language that shakes and makes a clean sweep of everything but the right word to shine in our minds, like some gleaming Truth and Beauty?
WHAT IF I DON’T OWN A BROOM?
But um, Professor Mossberg, while I would like to go on this wild meteoric metaphoric broomride with you, I, ahem, well I don’t own a broom! Okay, stop, wait: you    don’t    own   a  broom? OKAY Poetry Slow Down, you have to have a broom! A real broom—your hands on it, your fingers around it, clasped, they fit just so, they always have, our intimacy with brooms, probably first a forest branch, go back to days of earliest humans, it’s your dancing partner, this harmony, with earth’s curve, this cosmic sway, swish, you move back and forth, like the tides, like the moon moves the seas, like the wind moves the leaves, oh, it’s wonderful! Stirring dust in a Zen right-brain left-brain satisfying work, and you can put it down for glorious writing and reading and hearing poems about it! This reminds me: A little boy is fed up with his parents and their lack of support for everything he wants to do, which is nothing. I’m going to run away, he says. So, his mom is sweeping, I’m not making this up, and she keeps sweeping. He’s standing there. I’m going to run away! He’s getting madder and madder. But he doesn’t leave. I thought you were going to run away? He says, well, aren’t you going to drive me? We want the broom and we want not-the-broom, we want to need to put it down to write about it, isn’t that the way?
THE WAY
We are so lucky, we have it both ways. We can have our broom and poem about sweeping too, which makes us love the sweeping, love the broom all the more, it returns us to an appreciation of what it is, our life, the thing itself, and good complaints make great art: what did Henry David Thoreau say, in his book on the art of living, deliberately, slowed down, so at the end of the day we do not discover we have not lived at all?—“my life is the book I would have writ, but I could not both live my life and utter it.†But he did, didn’t he? He swept away all the extraneous and lived a simple sweet life to write about it. So Poetry Slow Down, let’s get to work, we’ll hear Rumi, a glorious take on sweeping and dust,
The Book of Common Prayer for burial services, Marilyn Nelson and Rita Dove, each a poem entitled “Dusting,†about gratitude and revery, a way the mind finds itself, what’s there in the corners, the overlooked, what has built up, these daily acts, of order. There is poetry in it; or is there, wonders Emily Dickinson and mother-of-four
Julianna Baggott, clearly a soul sister to Emily Dickinson from our own age—Richard Russo said about her, Julianna Baggott enjoys living on the knife edge between hilarity and heartbreak: “Poetry Despises Your Attempts at Domesticity.†We’ll hear Kabir, translated by Robert Bly, his poem about the way to find the sacred in the everyday, in everything: “There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the earth.â€
KISS MY EARTH
What Kabir says about kissing the earth, as a way of reverence, intimacy, to express gratitude, for what Marilyn Nelson reminds us is after all dust, made me think of an essay by William Cronon on what and when and where is wild—the possibility, as Nelson tells us in “Dusting,†for seeing miraculous marvelosity in dust, or everywhere—what it is we honor—and feel gratitude for–seemingly as far from dust and the acts of wrestling dust as you can get. We will hear from western historian and eco-essayist Cronon on the wild at home, the wild in an Emersonian near, familiar, and low, the wild near and dear to our very home-making places.
I read you from his essay challenging us to reconsider where and when we find wild, that is, what invokes our sense of sacred: how we think of nature as the task of making a home: home-making! Of our earth itself. . .  And whether it’s chores of housekeeping leading to revelation of glory of dust, or wilderness evoking gratitude for sacred space, it’s about the poet finding for us—having dropped the broom, so to speak. We’ll discuss what poetry has to do with it, our learning from wilderness and wild about something beautiful in the human mind engaged with our earth.
We hear from Emily Dickinson an agreement with Cronon on a transforming sweeping vision of Other, “the†earth to “our earth,†our own human care and housekeeping and gratitude and grace. We hear from Hafiz and Bethany Rountree on “Housecleaning†and on
vision into a matter of grace, of the “everything†that Hafiz envisions, Ginger Andrews falling down on her knees, the title of her poem, “Down on My Knees,†as Kabir calls for.
And speaking of finding grace in everything, and having our cake and eating it too, we’ll hear the fruits of Emily Dickinson’s labors in the kitchen, her recipe for coconut cake for your own tailgate party, and some optimistic poems about sweeping and stardust from the New York Giant terrain, Eleanor Lerman, and Alicia Ostriker, great poems about saving the day, from what is considered the world’s dirt and dust and trash and waste.
So I think these are great poems to inspire the football team of your choice, for turnaround thinking, that can transform even traffic to tuba symphonics and song, and glitter, and a victory of spirit . . . over the elements, the forces, earthy and earthly fates. That can make an earth, a planetary home, of dust swirls and sweeps.
My neck of the woods, which was all awash out here, literally, dazzled by the 49ers win over the Packers, who knew, with a Winston Churchillian message, for all of us, never, never, never, never, never give up: we hear the spirit of resilience in housekeeping, “The Hurricane Sisters Work Regardless,†by Ginger Andrews.
Well, a poet’s work is never done, and we can see that homework, housework, home-making, wild, domestic, is immortalized in poetry, stardust illuminating the matter of our lives, why and how to KISS the dust: Kabir said, there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the earth, and its dirt, its dust, and you know how we say, kiss the dust, as in, this definition from our handy reference,
kiss the dust
Sl. to fall to the earth, because of death or because of being struck. I’ll see that you kiss the dust before sunset, cowboy! You’ll kiss the dust before I will, Sheriff.
Who said westerns aren’t romantic, all that kissing, so dust, it’s our ending, it’s our beginning, when we rejoin earth, if we fall to our knees, kiss the dust, embrace our fates, when we rejoin star, it’s earth dust, stardust, from which we came and what we become once again, a flow of dust, endlessly swept, by us and cosmic forces, in reading poems on dust, leading me to reading the science of dust, our dusty universe and way the world keeps house, it’s so exciting, the intersection of science and poetry on dust makes it all star dust, Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson– self-described as Queen of the Dust– and so many poets weigh in on dust, we’ll even hear from wise guy Amelia Bedelia, who has it going on, so next week’s show I already have the title, and it’s on Superbowl Sunday so you can see a little reference there to a match-up, mixing it up, it’s called DUST UP AT THE POETRY SLOW DOWN, A HOE DOWN OF ASTROCHEM MIXING IT UP WITH THE SCIENTISTS’ DOWN LOW, AND POETS’ LOW DOWN, SECRETS OF STARDUST IN POETRY DUST RAGS and rags is slang for literary insouciance, edgy panache, so we’ll have some fun, always, anytime, I’m Professor Barbara Mossberg walking on the wild side, dusting it up as we make of this earth our home, getting swept away in the grandness of it all, by our poet broom! Thank you for listening, and write me at bmossberg@csumb.edu.
Check out the “EMILY DICKINSON FLASH MOB†ON A YOU TUBE NEAR YOU!
© Barbara Mossberg 2012
