Poets Noticing the Overlooked, Succumbing to the Despised, Forsaken, and Frankly Hated
Yep, it’s everything you hate—well not YOU, of course, poetry listener, but—well, yes, you, at least me, or sometimes me: the things we sweep and kill, poison and trap, tred and stomp, dismiss, roast, don’t think twice about, or even once, use and throw away for scrap . . .
We’ll talk trash, in our March sweeps, with Marilyn Nelson on dust, and Mark Doty on broken crab shell, multiple literati on weeds and mice, and Milne and me on spiders, Ellen Bass on moths, Tim Seibles on ants, Thoreau on beans, as in, that doesn’t amount to a pile of beans, W. B. Yeats on ditches and frogs, Lorca and Robert Frost on all that we dispose and need . . . “O let them live!†cries Gerald Manley Hopkins on weeds, to which we add, on behalf of the nothing special which poets transform into the cherished, let’s, on our Poetry Slow Down, produced by Sara Hughes for radiomonterey.com, and podcast at BarbaraMossberg.com, I’m your Professor Barbara Mossberg, inviting you to slow down today with poetry, news we need, news we heed, news without which men die miserably every day, to quote our shows’s doctor poet in residence Wiliam Carlos Williams, Let’s slow down—you know you move too fast!
c Barbara Mossberg 2015
