THE POETRY SLOW DOWN
Live on KRXA 540AM
Dr. Barbara Mossberg
Produced by Hal Ginsberg
Podcast Produced by Sara Hughes at BarbaraMossberg.com
April 20, 2014
© Barbara Mossberg 2014

NOON-1 PM SUNDAY PST

The only news I know

Is bulletins all day

From Immortality.

 

The only shows I see,

Tomorrow and Today,

Perchance Eternity.

 

The only One I meet

Is God, -the only street,

Existence; this traversed

 

If other news there be,

Or admirabler show –

I’ll tell it you.—Emily Dickinson

RESURRECTION SHENANIGANS AND LINCOLN MEMORIAL:  THE YOSEMITE

“i who have died am alive again today” and so say you and I along with another big e, e.e. cummings, on our Poetry Slow Down, KRXA 540AM, live, Produced by our iconic Hal Ginsberg in our Sand City Studios, and podcast by Producer Sara Hughes at BarbaraMossberg.com.

Get out your purple and yellows! With music from the sincere, sorrowful, serene Franz Schuman, to “Good Morning Starshine” from the ebullient “Hair”, with Eva Cassidy’s cover of “Wonderful World” and the eponymous “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” this Easter Sunday we think about resurrection in the human imagination. So our show: RESURRECTION SHENANIGANS AND LINCOLN MEMORIAL:  THE YOSEMITE

What is not quenched or drowned or disappeared or shut up or down. Nature does it every day. This time of year, confronted with nature’s news, as Emily Dickinson would call it, did call it, improbable green bursting through snow and ice, parched mud and sidewalk cracks, highway mediums and runways and freeway overpasses, withered dry stalks, the pinks and whites and yellows and purples out of brown and dun hard scaly bark, keeping in mind the Boston Marathon tomorrow, one year after the bombing at the finish line, the anniversary yesterday of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral, this is the green news William Carlos Williams speaks of in To Asphodel, That Greeny Flower, my heart rouses,

thinking to bring you news

of something

that concerns you

and concerns many men.  Look at

what passes for the new.

You will not find it there but in

despised poems.

It is difficult

to get the news from poems

yet men die miserably every day

for lack

of what is found there.

There’s urgently-needed news, how and why the human spirit persists, what nourishes our ability to rise–nature does it every day—did you see the sunrise this morning?—if we slow down for poetry’s news, poetry we will hear today that is all about nature’s news.  e.e. cummings frames it for us, and we’ll hear the usual suspects, W. B. Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, A.E. Housman, Walt Whitman, Rudyard Kipling, Louis Macneice, and consider poets who influenced the poet Abraham Lincoln, whom we might not all read today, William Cullen Bryant (although you might sit on a bench at a New York City park named for him), John Greenleaf Whittier (you might sit on a bench by his statue in Whittier, CA), William Fitz-Green Halleck, one of four statues on Literary Walk in Central Park, Thomas Gray, and William Knox, famous in their day here and abroad, and Edgar Allen Poe, a round up of the unusual suspects when we have a deed and want to know who dunnit, and what do they have to do with resurrection shenanigans? Well Poetry Slow Down, we’ll be citizen sleuths on the case of a great mystery, a whodunit on epic scale, how and why we humans try to work on behalf of what is everlasting, continuous renewal, the idea of persistent resurrection, of what e.e. cummings describes as “i who have died am alive again today,” speaking broadly and globally (and also “greenly”) and I will share with you a story in the news—front page above the fold news—of resurrection of a leaping species, which as a poet I will make hay of in a poem sprouting from W.S. Merwin’s “Maniesto: The Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front” and e.e. cummings thank you sonnet, and a resurrection engineering project in process as we speak, hear hear! About the possibility of a river, a valley, rising, once again, saying, with Yeats, I will arise, and go now, and go to Innisfree: we will hear the song of resurrection of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, Restore Hetch Hetchy, arising from the poetry that Abraham Lincoln read, I’m just sayin . . . and for those who come back to Boston to run again, to cheer the marathon effort, once again: to participate in resurrection shenanigans, well, to all of us, this Easter Sunday show is dedicated, it will go so fast, as we slow down. Let’s get started then, let’s arise and go now . . . .

THE POETRY SLOW DOWN
Live on KRXA 540AM
Dr. Barbara Mossberg
Produced by Hal Ginsberg
Podcast Produced by Sara Hughes at BarbaraMossberg.com
April 20, 2014
© Barbara Mossberg 2014