Life, I Insist! It’s Autumn, and we’re in the mood. Change is in the air, and what does the universe portend? We hear from poet gardeners who see poetry and gardening inextricably connected, gardeners writing in their eighties and nineties, Stanley Kunitz (“he loved the earth so much he wanted to stay forever”), W.S. Merwin (Happy Birthday, and we’re coming to your inauguration as Poet Laureate!, with poems from the Poetry Slow Down community), and Gerard Sterns (including the tour de force “Grapefruit”); and from twenty-five poets taking it slow, facing and embracing all that autumn means for us, life and death, celebrating vividness, change and transformation. We hear from the Academy of American Poets Poem A Day Scott Hightower, and poems by Jennifer Boully, Richard Garcia, Edward Hirsch, James Hoch, Margaret Gibson, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Deborah Diggs, Kabir, Shakespeare, A.R. Ammons, Lucille Clifton, James Galvin, Li-Young Lee, Mark Strand, William Blake, Robert Frost, Amy King, Baudelaire, and your Dr. B on “The Improbability of Orange,” all October poems. Let’s end with this from Kunitz at 100, writing a poem, “I can scarcely wait til tomorrow, when a new life begins for me, as it does each day, as it does each day.” Music by Gershwin, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, and Van Morrison. Yours sincerely, Poetry Slow Down Host Professor Barbara Mossberg, and Producers Hal Ginsberg and Sara Hughes. c Barbara Mossberg 2010

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