Hello, and happy new year, O friends, O ears, hear hear! You’re slowing down for the Poetry Slow Down—you know you move too fast! You know you are supposed to slow down for your health, and mind, and spirit, and poetry is an excellent way of doing that, because it’s .  . . well, it’s beautiful, but it’s also strange, let’s be frank, and difficult, and despised even—this isn’t just me talking, it’s William Carlos Williams, who says, my heart rouses thinking to bring you news that concerns you and concerns many men. It is difficult to get the news from despised news yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. –That’s what he said in To Asphodel, That Greeny Flower. That’s a lot. That’s life and death. Now you could say, well, Dr. B, of course he is saying that, he’s a poet. He is an interest in our reading poetry. But his day job is a doctor. It’s his business to save lives. He writes poems on prescription pads, at the end of his day saving lives, with blood on his hands. He should know whereof he speaks, when he speaks of life and death and what can save us.

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If “everything is alive” (Ian Chillag), e=mc2 (Einstein), things “must be sung,” “sing themselves” (Emerson), then a) you are alive, b) you are everything, c) you are a song. We’re all in this together, like penguins and bats, singing our song, to find our way along, know how we belong to each other and this earth. Is your world singing and ringing? Are you? To a tree, and all things, YOU are indispensable, the song, the singer, and I’m talking to you, O listener for whom I have cast a pod, who has slowed down for the Poetry Slow Down, to consider poetry in our lives, in our every day. It turns out your mother loved it, your father wrote it, your friend frames it, and your colleague memorizes it. Who knew? You thought it was just you, this eccentric resonance with the oddly stated, quirkly reasoned, dapper and dappled language, put into girdles and tuxes, plaid flannel bathrobes, hooded, buttoned, stressed, pressed, wrested, strangling, wrangled, oddly fitting, evocative, provocative, word play that, frankly, for the world at least, is life and death. Poetry? Poetry! And herein lies an answer to that question fretting you all morning: I know how trees matter to me (let me count the ways); but do I, how can I, matter to them, or for that matter, to our world? And you’re not alone. In your existential crisis, you’re with your Poetry Slow Down, our program laying out the case for the need for humans on earth. We’ve been guilting ourselves lately, our roles in climate change, pollution, species extinction, and so we know we matter in a catastrophic way. But let us consider how we also matter in a redeeming, lifesaving way, a way on which the world depends, and perhaps for which we were brain-wired, purposed. Hear hear! We’ll hear Mary Oliver, Marianne Moore, John Muir, singing, and for things that must be sung, about David Milarch’s Archangel Ancient Trees, and Melbourne’s email trees civic project,  and more. Our PoetrySlowDown, the news feed you need, the news you heed, the news “without with men die miserably every day.” #poetrynowmorethanever #savedbypoem And if you hear the wind in the willows, that’s the trees cheering for you, your inner poet, to think on them through the poetic lens. I’m your host, Professor Barbara Mossberg, and we’re produced by Zappa-that-Zappa Johns.

© Barbara Mossberg 2018

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(A GOOD LOOK IN SHIRTS, NOT SO MUCH ON YOUR COMPUTER), AND DAYS ARE DARK, AND THE NEWS IS FRIGHTFUL, IT’S TIME TO LET GO THE NEWS FEED FOR THE NEWS YOU NEED: POETRY! YOU NEED TO GET OUT YOUR DANTE, WHEN YOU’RE FEELING DAUNTED, AND SEE YOUR NOBLE SELF EMERGE . . . AND WE’LL HEAR WHAT YOUTHS IN THE CLARK HONORS COLLEGE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OREGON ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE MIDDLE OF THEIR LIVES DID WITH THEIR VERSIONS OF BEING IN HELL ON EARTH . . . WE’LL HEAR IDEAS FOR HOW TO GET BACK ON TRACK IN YOUR LIFE WITH YOUR OWN VIRGILS, POETS WHO DO RESCUES OF US HUMANS, GEN-I-US-ES WHO LEAD US UP MOUNTAINS IN MORNING LIGHT . . . And this includes poets of morning and light and mountains, so slow down, and be ready for Thoreau, John Muir, Rumi, Mary Oliver, Kay Ryan, Gary Snyder, Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Wendell Berry. Brian Doyle!

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Standard Podcast [ 53:23 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download