“THE [EXTRAORDINARY] JOY OF TASTING TOMATOES, APPLES, AND PEARS†(William Martin)
POETRICIAN, n. Nutritious Character of Poetry, a show in which we consider poetry a soil necessary for growth, in the UN’s Year of the Soil–the viewpoint of poetry as our cognitive and spiritual soil. Just because nutritious soil is necessary to life, all our lives on earth, does not mean it is not downright miraculous. A little clay here, rock there, dust, remains, odds and ends of minerals, a hodgepodge of organic and inorganic, make up a living brew. And so poetry, remarkable makings of new life and old life, what is mud and what shines, the quotidian reality revealed as utterly remarkable.
We’ll slow down to examine the soil of poetry on our Poetry Slow Down, radiomonterey.com, Magic-4-Life, podcast BarbaraMossberg.com, produced by Zappa Johns, and I’m your host, Professor Barbara Mossberg, mixing it up with soil, as we consider harvest days, and pumpkins in the fields, and it’s not the pumpkin spice we love in all the products now flavored with pumpkin, it’s the orange, the roundness, we want, that we taste, it’s the soil that makes the orange and the round, and everything we see, everything we are.
We are framed by philosophy of Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme (Dream of the Earth), eco Buddhism, and Wendell Berry, D.H. Lawrence, Walt Whitman, Barbara Kingsolver, cameos of scientists, presidents, gardeners, poets, and my own thinking on the role of violin music in generative soil, and from the Tupelo Press 30-30 On-line post-a-poem-a-day fundraising project, advice to Peyton Manning, to think of himself as a limber pine (over 2000 years old), which can find soil anywhere . . .
© Barbara Mossberg
