First of all, welcome to our PoetrySlowDown you’re slowing down with me, Professor Mossberg, aka Dr. B, with our Producer Zappa Johns, and the idea for the show is from Simon and Garfunkle’s 59th Street Bridge Song slow down, you move too fast, you’ve got to make the morning last. This show began as AM Talk Radio on 540AM, KRXA, and people called in from all over the U.S. and from several countries, and it was very ironic it was at noon, and so I thought that we would make the morning last, literally, by slowing down with poetry . . . There was news at the top of the hour, and I thought of time that way, as a shape, as a space, as a ball, and it was 54 minutes in diameter, although in my head it was an hour. I had three breaks for commercials, and it had to be exactly scheduled. So here I was, providing a time and place for people to slow down in their daily lives, and make the morning last, literally, and metaphorically for those on the east coast and Midwest and overseas, and I was hurrying, panting, a mile-a-minute trying to fit all the words in by the time it would go silent and the news, the late-breaking, heartbreaking news go on, eclipsing our heart-shaking news WITHOUT WHICH MEN DIE MISERABLY EVERY DAY (William Carlos Williams), so it was kind of paradoxical. Slowing down at breakneck speed. It was funny, too, because Paul Simon’s lyrics about slowing down were specifically about being a poet, engaging with the world that way: Hello, lamppost, whatcha knowin? I’ve come to watch your flowers growin, ain’t ya got no rhymes for me . . . So he’s looking around his world, totally relaxed and chill, counting on rhymes, on the prowl and amble for poetry around every corner. I was thinking about rhymes . . . they are sort of a miracle! How words that seemingly have nothing to do with each other sound alike, and thus call each other to mind as if they are actually connected. And so the brain thereby connects them. And each carries a meaning, something we can visualize–an object, an experience, a feeling, an idea, and to see such words rhyme, we instantly are connecting them, seeing how they relate. I was just reciting e.e. cummings’ “I thank You God for this amazing” for my eco literature class, and by saying it out loud, you apprehend rhymes you might not notice by sight on the page. I’ll say it for us, since it is definitely a New Years’ Poem, a new day, new decade, new life, waking up poem. Since it’s a sonnet, it has a formal rhyme scheme; every other line’s last word rhymes, in theory . . . thus, we have amazing and everything; trees and yes; earth and birth; day and gay; no and You; awake and, and opened. These rhymes make us understand the message, cummings’ gospel, that everything is amazing. This is a fairly not subversive, but radical proposition for the mind: a human responsibility to experience wonder, awe, reverence, astonishment, without boundaries, unconditionally. The final couplet almost gets by us: awake and/opened. It took me a few years to notice this, reading it and reciting it. I know! And so you think how brilliant, how clever cummings is, in his physics ministry, to make us get this connection between being awake and opened, in the sense of Henry David Thoreau and Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses–do you know this book? She has a slew of books on the neuroscience of consciousness from the point of view of poetry she is as lyric as they come a Pablo Neruda a sensual visualist; she is earthy, she smacks of earth-smells, of moss and rain and honeysuckle; she is intense and her point is that if we open ourselves to our world, we experience the beauty, the reverence.We hear Dolly Parton’s song, sung with Willie Nelson, “Everything Is Beautiful In Its Own Way.”And there is a method I am learning from an artist at the University of Madrid, Rosalinda Ruiz-Scarfuto, the Flaneur method, which p[...]

As we consider Emerson (whom the late Harold Bloom called “God”) and Einstein, and Astra theology, and what is known about the universe in ancient and emergent minds, considering human and civil rights, peace, and the environment (Peace! Love! Freedom! Happiness!) in which we hear (Hear! Hear!) from Listen, John Steinbeck, Rumi, John Lennon, Elvis, and Hair, as well as Leonard Bernstein, as well as Ian Chillag’s Radiotopia’s “Everything is Alive.” And more thoughts with the University of Oregon’s Insight Seminar and Clark Honors College’s “Thinking Like the Sun: Travel in Ancient and Emergent Minds.” This is Professor Barbara Mossberg with our Producer Zappa Johns.  Who understands e=mc²? It takes a genius, right? Do we think genius is beyond us? That genius is Einstein maybe, but not you? Do we think Einstein is in his own orbit, far removed from us? We may think knowledge of the world is far from what we can grasp in our everyday life–and thus let it go as an intellectual luxury we cannot afford, and turn back to our daily reality, the shoelace and the biscuit, the diagnosis, the wine, the tomato harvested from the garden. Love worry, trying so hard to do the right thing, these are our joys and work. And as for Emerson, well, is he just impossible to understand to the point of irrelevance? 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. William Carlos Williams gives both a diagnosis and Rx in poetry, as difficult and despised as it may be. Together with the idea of irrelevance to our stressed responsible lives, these ideas of literature, and genius as something we don’t have to worry about, are contested and exuberantly and earnestly interrogated by two of the greatest minds of the 19th and 20th centuries, who sought to convince us that WE are what the doctor ordered. In fact, that we are geniuses the world needs now. And they are going to define just what they think this means, as wise, enlightened citizenry. © Barbara Mossberg 2019

Let us consider poetry as necessary for life as 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 grow beanstalks for giants. And so poetry, remarkable makings of new life and old life, what is mud and what shines, the quotidian reality revealed as utterly remarkable. It turns out nursery rhymes are literal. People live in shoes. The dish runs away with the spoon. When we figure out dark energy, phantom energy, weâ€ll know this was right. Weâ€ll know it is violin music that makes the chemicals in soil come to life, the spirit, Godâ€s breath. As we consider harvest days, and pumpkins in the fields, itâ€s not the pumpkin spice we love in all the products now flavored with pumpkin, itâ€s the orange, the roundness we want, that we taste, itâ€s the goodness of its soil that makes the orange and the round, the remarkable of everything we see, everything we are. This is the dust of our minds, of our spirits, this not taking for granted what is here, this is the spin, the miracle of it.c Barbara Mossberg 2019 Food is on my mind, as you see, but on your mind as well. I know this, because you have written me about our “helpful banana bread” series on the poetry of food and hunger. So Iâ€m in. This show does include an original recipe for pumpkin soup, so keep your pens handy—you remember pens—you remember hands—you remember hands—of course you do—youâ€re the POETRY SLOW DOWN, youâ€re evolved, youâ€re ancient wisdom on which so much depends, your ears are what the doctor ordered, the earth needs now: so HEARâ€s the skinny (alas) on food from the point of view of your radio host, Iâ€m your Professor Barbara Mossberg, aka Dr. B, produced by our faithful Zappa Johns, yes THAT Zappa, a West Coast commitment along the tectonic plates, and speaking of plates, and plating it, letâ€s begin, letâ€s gather at the table, for the Contents! The Tableof Contents! Ah, I get it, Dr. B! Of course you do—youâ€re the POETRY SLOW DOWN.  © Barbara Mossberg 2019

WWRS? (What Would Rumi Say?) What does poetry have to do with it? Stay tuned for The Poetry Slow Down with Professor Barbara Mossberg.  Enjoy the video for this week’s episode on our Facebeook page.

Poetry Slow Down, our episode this week begins a series wherein we embark on ancient ships and rocky land routes to engage with trees, as people have always done, and I mean always. Since recorded history, our first forays into writing down whatâ€s in our human brains have been records of talks with trees. Gilgamesh, Greek mythology, the Bible, Mohammed, Pliny the Elder, Caesar, Tolkien, King Arthur, Shakespeare, Alice Walker: the list is long, surprising, star-studded, and global. Now science is saying that trees do talk (for example, Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Fell, How They Communicate,a bestseller in many countries—and his wife told him to write it, Iâ€m just sayin). And Michael Pollanâ€s The Botany of Desire: A Plantâ€s-Eye View of the World, another best-seller. Yet poets have ever said so: how trees talk to us, not just to each other. We hear them in words. We hear them in poems. In our episode, we review the world over for the cases in which trees are recorded in history and literature of actually breaking into conversations, weeping when being left out, and needing to be consoled, and giving gritty and divine advice and healing love. We recall how in Steven Sondheimâ€s Into the WoodsCinderella “asks the tree” (whom her mother has become) for advice. In our next show, weâ€ll look at more of these stories about us talking to trees (Clint Eastwood “I Talk to the Trees”), and trees talking to us and what poets make of them, from Rilke and Alice Walker to John Muir and John Steinbeck, and the myths and religions that wrap around these events of tree-human relations. Then weâ€ll consider poets who wonder in what ways trees are human, and we are trees, and what happens to each of us when weâ€re cut down (Mars?). Trees, it seems, are inextricable from how we understand not only our human fate, but our actual humanity in the first place. Join me on this journey—youâ€ll be surprised (I am) and slowed down, way down—you know you move too fast! Write me at Barbara.mossberg@gmail.com for your own story of your encounter with a tree. What has a tree said to YOU? Youâ€re not alone. Weâ€ll all in this together! ©  Barbara Mossberg 2019

As we celebrate Walt Whitmanâ€s birthday, we consider how seriously as a poet he took joy (very). As it turns out, in fact, poets taking joy seriously is a thing. Weâ€re slowing down today (you know you move too fast) to consider this phenomenon, and ferret out the gloom in June that besets us on this journey of ours. Weâ€ll hear from bossy poets and obedient poets on taking joy seriously—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, e.e. cummings, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, W.B. Yeats, Charles Tripi, Mary Oliver, Shakespeare, Whitman, Brian Doyle. As our family says when we begin a trip, Hi ho! Let us go then, you and I, as T.S. Eliot said, let us arise and go then, as W.B. Yeats said, letâ€s go, says bc Mossberg, your joyful host today, with our Producer Zappa Johns, for the Poetry Slow Down–seriously joyful considering us seriously and our remarkable and necessary capacity for joy! © Barbara Mossberg 2019 

CONFESSIONS OF KILLER OF CATERPILLARS, HEADS UP TO DEER (AND OTHERS) AT RISK, BEING RAPT, RAPTORMANIA, RAPTURE, AND RIPARIAN ECSTASY YOU HAVE TIME FOR IF YOU SLOW DOWN: Poems and Lyric Prose “On Life” and Utterly Necessary Living, Life, and Death. This just in, #PoetrySlowDown#saveyourlifenow, fresh from saving my lavender from The Very Hungry Caterpillar (apologies to Eric Carle who just.doesnâ€t.know—or does ) with white oozy sticky caterpillar remains and output on my hands, fresh from killing mindfully the white foam-containing fanged monsters, to talk to you lyrically with great sensitivity and empathy about our world and why and how to love it, for all our sakes, yes, tis moi, and all Iâ€m going to say about that is this: if you love a gardener, and you should, you are at great risk of hating bonafide elements of our world and harboring murderous thoughts, and by the way, you know, you know you know, give it up– itâ€s hopeless. But fear not, because in our show this week, we uplift ourselves with Shelley, no less, “On Life,” and “Mutability,” Patricia Hamplâ€s The Art of the Wasted Day(along with our essential Mary Oliver and James Wright), Brian Doyleâ€s riffs on life from How the Light Gets In (you otter listen, and Iâ€m not just badgering you), Doriann Lauxâ€s “Life is Beautiful” (each getting us all misty about creatures that make us crawl and yelp—oh, wait—they crawl and yelp, and we, we shudder, we look for weaponized brooms: what happens when you love a gardener (if you learn you hate creatures what then becomes of you?). Well, poetry helps us figure it out, this age-old crisis of conscience, of being on two opposing sides at once, but only if we take time out, slow down—you know you move too fast– to live right. Itâ€s true, perhaps, people could judge you, think youâ€re wasting your time right now, listening to poetry and its gab, but thereâ€s a lot of evidence that what we call wasting our timeand being unproductive is actually supremely practical in getting done what needs to get done in this life—like being rapt, amazed, astonished, awed, grateful, humble, at all we can see and feel. Our showâ€s abiding spirit, William Carlos Williams, who felt that “so much depends upon a red wheel barrow” glistening in the rain next to which white chickens—yep, thatâ€s it, but he said poetry is news thatâ€s life and death—we die miserably without it—thatâ€s pretty down to earth and practical as survival Rx.  The drama and trauma of a garden is only part of it: weâ€re in this world and weâ€re not alone  © Barbara Mossberg

Never mind the headlines, thereâ€s plenty of drama in the kitchen . . . itâ€s a lot.  A play in the making about a daughter raising her mother from the dead, an act of which her mother approves, although not the means, which is poetry and gets you nowhere . . . . Our show considers a poetâ€s writing about her mother and ultimately making her mother immortal in the process, and the role poetry can play in days of headline news (there may come a day in newspapers†demise when that is going to be a quaint expression, only metaphor—) (let it not be so!), with framing poems by Dorianne Laux and Shakespeare,  and music from “Hair” and Carol King and Judy Collins and “Que Sera Sera.” So Iâ€m sharing with you my poems about my mother, as a tribute program to Motherâ€s Day, and some day, I will share my poems about being a mother, and what that has to do with poetry! Are you listening because you love mothers or because you love poetry? I will try to honor both kinds of listening! May the 4thand every day be with you. Yours sincerely, Professor Mossberg, aka Dr. B © Barbara Mossberg 2019 

Please help yourself to an hour (plucked from Daylight Savings Time), slowing down (because you know you move too fast) for the up of the ThePoetrySlowDown that aspires to be a Holy Fire Reiki for your spirit (as poetry perhaps always has been). With our Producer Zappa Johns, on Californiaâ€s Central Coast, and me, your host Professor Barbara Mossberg, known to my students and certain bartenders as Dr. B, you are taking this time for yourself to dwell in mystery and wonder, as Paul Simon sings it, or the terrain of miracle, as Einstein conceives it, or Possibility, as the quantum practitioner Emily Dickinson says is a place and way she dwells.  Through the lens of Radiotopiaâ€s podcast with Ian Chillag, “Everything Is Alive,” which shows us how the human imagination can comprehend objects in our world as our relations, mysterious companions on this life journey—illuminating our capacities for compassion and empathy, our humility in the face of an imagined soda can or lamppost or grain of sand (as the podcast episodes introduce us), we consider a kind of quantum miracle, how a poem, nothing alive, not even here, perhaps sound waves, or a piece of paper, can touch you powerfully—or perhaps even more powerfully, than being physically touched. In Reiki, energy flows from one being to another through intention. What are the physics, as well as metaphysics, of a poem lighting you, lifting you? How is that a poem can quicken you, slow you down, make you feel seen and heard, and from what? Squiggles on a page? Someone somewhere whom you may not even know, in a language you may not even speak, in a place you have never seen, a body unlike your own, eating food you think is disgusting, perhaps ill, perhaps starving, someone you may perhaps not speak to if you passed on the street, has paused in their day to write down words. Perhaps I should not say “pause,” because perhaps what is written is the work of the day after all, the destination of oneâ€s energy. Perhaps the poem is the path on which one finds oneself at last, even if lost, even if seeking, realizing, as Wendell Berry says in “Our Real Work,”  It may be that when we no longer know what to dowe have come to our real work,and that when we no longer know which way to gowe have come to our real journey.The mind that is not baffled is not employed.The impeded stream is the one that sings. Speaking of “impeded stream,” we’ll ponder poetry as Holy Fire Reiki, how a poem can move you, touch you, ease what’s been impeding you, how something by another being removed from you in time and space can rock your world, and save us: that is the intent of the focused energy. Emily Dickinson, Thoreau, Walt Whitman, schooled by Ralph Waldo Emerson, will be revealed as quantum physicists anticipating Einstein. We’ll hear how Rilke, William Carlos Williams, James Wright, and Mary Oliver, have the specific intent to change and save our lives with their poetry, how phycisist e.e. cummings takes us from “everything is alive” to “every thing” as amazing, and how Brian Doyle gives us moving poems in Reiki style that bring us “fellow mortals” into one human coherence, and my own poem “Your Life as an Earth” joins the fray of poets with intention to save us, save the day. It’s all here (hear hear!) for your hearing, for as Walt Whitman says, your good health, and as your grateful host says, your sense of gift for consciousness on this “amazing day,” “alive again today.” That’s the intent of this Holy Fire Reiki show today, and thank you for beinghear.  © Barbara Mossberg 2019

A consideration of what we consider slow news, and whatâ€s at stake, for our own survival and for society at large. In which we take up the fate of earth and all life (including spiders—and youâ€ll be glad) (you truly will) in poems by Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Brian Doyle, Mary Oliver, James Wright, Theodore Roethke, Wendell Berry, Cynthia Wolloch, Elizabeth Bishop, Mark Doty, Robert Burns, Walt Whitman, Stanley Kunitz, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Lux, Shakespeare, Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Leo Lionni, Maxfield Poizat-Newcomb, Caden Oâ€Connell, and more. In such poems, so-called pests and weeds and other unloved creatures thrive by our own hand, thrive by our notice, thrive by our attention, thrive by our love, thrive by our gratitude: weâ€ll hear valentines to earth—love is still in the air! Yes, even Spiders and what not live, and we live! So what matters? So much. And thus we sort out the news we need, the news we heed, the news without which men die miserably every day( —thank you William Carlos Williams).  Let us go then, welcoming you to the Poetry Slow Down, you know you move too fast, weâ€re produced on the West Coast by Zappa Johns, Iâ€m based here in Eugene, Oregon, Track Capital of the World, for poetic feet, podcast at barbaramossberg.com, and weâ€re taking time out from the headline news, late-breaking fast-breaking heart-breaking news, for the news you need, the news we heed, the news without which men die miserably every day. Well, what do I mean by this, exactly, as I invite you to slow down . . . these words are taken from a long poem by William Carlos Williams, who was featured in a feature film Paterson a few years ago, named for the epic poem he wrote about his home town. In “To Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” Williams says, my heart rouses . . . and he should know! Whatâ€s in these poems, anyway? He claims it will save our life and make us happy. Then he writes a poem like “The Red Wheelbarrow.” What is he talking about? How can he say that? What depends? Letâ€s look at some poems that call on us to be happy and to save our life—not waste it . . .  © Barbara Mossberg 2019

In which our show showcases poets†love of teaching (their poems are proof of the pudding) and in which I learn from students†questions to me about the role and use of poetry in our lives, and, in their own discoveries of what poetry means to them, I come to new consciousness about what it means to me: yes, itâ€s a pretty great life, this teaching poetry, this learning with students, this being taught by earnest learning. This is The Poetry Slow Down, with me, Professor Barbara Mossberg, your grateful host, and our Producer Zappa Johns, recording us from Californiaâ€s Central Coast, while Iâ€m in my studio up in Eugene, Oregon where Iâ€m teaching eco literature and Emerson and Einstein as poets, at the University of Oregon. Weâ€ll hear notes of Rumi, and poems by Mark Strand, Billy Collins, William Carlos Williams, Dorothea Lasky, Mary Oliver, e.e. cummings, Diane Wakowski, Howard Neverov, Lucilla Perillo, Elizabeth Alexander, Yvor Winters, W.D. Snodgrass, Kenneth Koch, D. H. Lawrence, Brian Doyle, and more. The questions that sent me on this journey were by a team of students interviewing me for Faculty Friday for the Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon. Here is what they asked—for a ten-minute interview: we hear tell that you assign fairy tales in an Einstein genius course? What is up with that?    What role does hope have to play in the creation of genius?    “You do so many fun projects with your classes, which one is your favorite and why?”    What is the importance of journaling and revolutionary imagination?    What poem or poet do you live by?    What role does poetry play in our lives? In a way the first questions about fairy tales, genius, revolutionary imagination, journaling, set up the last two epic questions—what poem or poet do I live by, and what role poetry plays in our lives. I confess to you I had pause. Einstein said if you want to know about water donâ€t ask a fish—but why not? The fish swims, feeds, breeds, lives its whole life in this water—who else to ask? But the fish doesnâ€t know water! Take it OUT of water, and, gasping, flailing, in crisis, the fish knows water, waterness, waterhood, waterty—and fishity. We can take it for granted what poetry is in our lives, why poetry is, and having to try to explain—poet-splain—it in a few minutes brings to consciousness what we think. So I just went in there and hoped that the “water” would, in Emersonâ€s words, “sing itself”—that in the crisis of being outside of myself, and having to look in to see the poetry in my mind and heart, I would know, after all this time, what to say to such momentous questions. I will share this with you—the UP in whatâ€s up with that?—poetry in our lives, of our lives, for our lives.  I want to start us off with a framework for these questions, a gift book of poems on my desk that I leaf through in my little slow down moments, Brian Doyleâ€s How the Light Gets In, and Other Headlong Epiphanies. And weâ€re off! Thank you for joining me on this journey. Please write to me at drb@barbaramossberg.com, or Barbara.mossberg@gmail.com.  c Barbara Mossberg 2019

A perspective on how we (should) spend our daily energies. A bossiness of poets weigh in, from the late (but always here) Mary Oliver, William Stafford, Raymond Carver, Emily Dickinson, Billy Collins, Lorine Neidecker, Alice Dunbar -Nelson, Gerald Manley Hopkins, William Butler Yeats, Christopher Smart, Richard Wilbur, John Milton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Doty, e.e. cummings (who loved the world as much?). Thereâ€s a lot of loving going on in the work of poets, and the world needs it: maybe this is all our work, loving the world. Yes, I guess, weâ€re pregaming Valentineâ€s Day, The Poetry Slow Down with Professor Barbara Mossberg, Produced by Zappa Johns.  At the conclusion to our show in which poets tell of their work before our eyes, loving the world, loving the work itself, we hear Emerson in “The Poet” saying what happens when someone takes up such work: O poet! a new nobility is conferred in groves and pastures, and not in castles, or by the sword-blade, any longer. The conditions are hard, but equal. Thou shalt leave the world, and know the muse only. Thou shalt not know any longer the times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions of men, but shalt take all from the muse. For the time of towns is tolled from the world by funeral chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy. God wills also that thou abdicate a manifold and duplex life, and that thou be content that others speak for thee. Others shall be thy gentlemen, and shall represent all courtesy and worldly life for thee; others shall do the great and resounding actions also. Thou shalt lie close hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to the Capitol or the Exchange. The world is full of renunciations and apprenticeships, and this is thine: thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a long season. This is the screen and sheath in which Pan has protected his well-beloved flower, and thou shalt be known only to thine own, and they shall console thee with tenderest love. And thou shalt not be able to rehearse the names of thy friends in thy verse, for an old shame before the holy ideal. And this is the reward: that the ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions of the actual world shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not troublesome, to thy invulnerable essence. Thou shalt have the whole land for thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath and navigation, without tax and without envy; the woods and the rivers thou shalt own; and thou shalt possess that wherein others are only tenants and boarders. Thou true land-lord! sea-lord! air-lord! Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble. But we already know, from our poets this morning (it is always morning on the Poetry Slow Down, because you know you move to fast, and this is the way to make the morning last), that this work is its own reward, in Emily Dickinsonâ€s words, “to gather . . . Paradise.” Thank you for listening, being with us today, our Producer Zappa Johns, and me, your Dr. B. Keep up the good work, O good listeners to our poets who love you, trust you—in your ears, your hearts, are we saved, and saving! And our world says, hear hear!  © Barbara Mossberg 2019

Hello, and happy new year, O friends, O ears, hear hear! Youâ€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 itâ€s .  . . well, itâ€s beautiful, but itâ€s also strange, letâ€s be frank, and difficult, and despised even—this isnâ€t just me talking, itâ€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. –Thatâ€s what he said in To Asphodel, That Greeny Flower. Thatâ€s a lot. Thatâ€s life and death. Now you could say, well, Dr. B, of course he is saying that, heâ€s a poet. He is an interest in our reading poetry. But his day job is a doctor. Itâ€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. So our show today, produced by our own Zappa-named for that Zappa –Johns, and hosted by me, your showâ€s creator, Professor Barbara Mossberg, the luckiest person, to be here with you—hear hear!—going on our 10thyear, this next week weâ€re coming on to our tenth anniversary of our show, produced every week, beginning with Talk Radio AM, and then internet radio, RadioMonterey, and now a podcast, produced on Californiaâ€s Central Coast, and Iâ€m broadcasting here in Eugene, Oregon, and you, listeners, are around the world, and itâ€s an honor and joy to be with you.  Today, weâ€re talking about how we are needed in this world, our great brains, to behold what we see—and love it. Yes—to think of ourselves as lovers of this world, as our purpose! To think of our brains as evolved by earth to love it—Michael Pollen has written about how plants in fact evolve us, and the idea of akrogenesis, psychic plant manipulation of us—an intelligent universe creating in us something it desperately needs—a mirror, eyes, spirit of wonder and awe and amazement, because if we have this way of seeing earth, cherishing it, it is preserved. So itâ€s very practical, itâ€s very hard-nosed, this need of trees to be loved by us . . . and who are the PR agents of our earth? Poets come running to the rescue like Rumiâ€s 12thcentury description of hope for distracted people with lifeâ€s traumas (he himself was running from Genghis Khan for 2000 miles from Afghanistan to Turkey): Be helpless, dumbfounded, Unable to say yes or no. Then a stretcher will come from grace To gather us up. We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty If we say we can, weâ€re lying. If we say No, we donâ€t see it, That No will behead us And shut tight our window onto spirit. So let us rather not be sure of anything, Besides ourselves, and only that, so Miraculous beings come running to help. Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute, We shall be saying finally, With tremendous eloquence, Lead us. When we have totally surrendered to that beauty, We shall be a mighty kindness.. Iâ€m thinking of this as news is coming in over my news feed about trees—the Archangel project, and cities planting trees, and the fate of our National Parks, right now, and Iâ€m thinking that we can start our year right with poetry that turns our gaze on what is amazing, on awe, on what is shining, on what fills us with rapture. It could be anything, but it seems to me that we have evolved to be able to appreciate beauty, to love, to develop relationships and kinship with species, and that this may not be a coincidence, that we have humans going around overcome with our world and trying to capture it in words—yes, in words that require us to . . .slow down. So letâ€s begin with poems that bring us to our knees, and us slow down, and poems that have us look down at our feet, and up in the air, and be[...]

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. Weâ€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 Iâ€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 youâ€re not alone. In your existential crisis, youâ€re with your Poetry Slow Down, our program laying out the case for the need for humans on earth. Weâ€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, thatâ€s the trees cheering for you, your inner poet, to think on them through the poetic lens. Iâ€m your host, Professor Barbara Mossberg, and weâ€re produced by Zappa-that-Zappa Johns. © Barbara Mossberg 2018

Youâ€re under the weather, my friend, feeling stressed and blue! Dr. B has a potion that will do: Itâ€s light as a feather, word flour and fat, called for when the world seems sour and flat! Just when youâ€re going to fall on your face, Rumiâ€s people run in with stretchers of grace, talking about a mighty kindness, and Wendell Berry is right there with a flighty mindfulness. You may be able to tell, evolved listener as you are, Iâ€ve been reading Dr. Suess, beloved inspirational star, and the rhymes are coming in fast and loose. But like all dishes we need, a little of that and this, weâ€re stirring in Dante (in dark days in the middle of our lives), and Cavafy (who says embrace the strife and hives).  And more rich fare to air, and that is only part of whatâ€s in store, in our toolbox, our toolkit, our wheelhouse galore, a pantry of angst whisperer and poetic roar. Itâ€s the news feed you need, the news you heed, the news without which “men die miserably every day” (William Carlos Williams), our POETRY SLOW DOWN, with your host Professor Barbara Mossberg (aka Dr. B) and Producer Zappa (that Zappa) Johns, at barbaramossberg.com, live from Eugene, Oregon and Californiaâ€s Central Coast, with notes of east coast lake district and college riverbank towns, Texas hill country watering holes, Los Angeles plains and mountain lakes, Colorado peak towns where poetry thrives. We have questions for you on our show today, and you can send them our way at drb@barbaramossberg.com, or Barbara.mossberg@gmail.com. Youâ€ll receive—and you can write to request– our I SLOW DOWN FOR THE POETRY SLOW DOWN or NO PLACE SAFE FROM POETRY bumper sticker, because you do, and inhabit that space where poetry is welcome. And on that note, Iâ€m grateful to you, who hear this hum, to your ear, to your being here. So letâ€s begin. Here is a little Dr. B Rx roue for what you rue, Cavafy’s “Ithaka,” Rumi, stirring in a little Raymond Carver, Wendell Berry, Margaret Atwood, Mary Oliver, and fairy tale theory, ruminating on finding the light and one’s path gloriously in dark days, the middle of our lives, our cantos, where Virgil finds US! Yes, all we have to do is stand there quivering in terror and despair, and epic poet does a pop up deus ex machina, and leads us to light! © Barbara Mossberg 2018

(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! THE POETRY SLOW DOWN, or, as a listener corrected me, OUR POETRY SLOW DOWN, as I’m radio waving, streaming and beaming my way into your private space, where we are engaged with the most ancient and enduring activities known to humans, telling each other stories, from one mind to another, our voices in the darkness, around a campfire your host Professor Barbara Mossberg, Dr. B, and you, good listener, honored listener, or as Cervantes said, gentle (he also said idle, but that’s not you . . .no, we’re slowing down, which is far far different from idling), slowing down for the news you need, the news  you heed, the news without which men die miserably every day; this latter, that we die miserably without this news, is said by a poet, about poetry, as you might expect, but here’s the thing; in his day job, he’s a physician; he’s trying to heal people; people are dying; he’s got blood on his hands, and he should know . . he goes home at the end of the day, and he writes poems on prescription pads, to save his life, to save his patients’ lives, all of ours . . . And so that’s what we’re doing here, right now, together, we’re gathering with sound waves and we’re listening to poetry. The Poetry Slow Down, podcast Barbaramossberg.com © Barbara Mossberg 2018

From ancient drama to todayâ€s poetry, lyric wisdom suggests (do or  die –“miserably”) that our sense of success, “home” and other destinations, and goals need to be rethought. Living is fraught with perils and defeats—or are our “defeats” really something to be re-imagined , evidence of necessary and heroic struggle? Is it brave to have a goal? How do we judge ourselves, and think others are judging us? Yes, Poetry Slow Down, we are slowing down to consider plots from Oedipus to The Odyssey, and the ways ancient and modern poets portray our lives. In these weeks we are thinking of Wendell Berry, Joanne Penn Cooper, David Denby, Mary Oliver, T.S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Dante, Shakespeare, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Oscar Wilde, weighing in on our human predicaments—brave, foolish, earnest—of identity, what it means to be human, now, and apparently always?  Iâ€m your host Professor Barbara Mossberg, and weâ€re produced by Zappa Johns, so thank you for listening, as people always have, around some campfire, to poets and storytellers, sharing news of what it means to be us! Because, we live life from the inside out. We canâ€t see ourselves. We only see each other. Einstein—whom we consider a genius for saying e=mc2, and yes, it is a metaphor—says if you want to know about water, donâ€t ask a fish . . . But who else would we ask than the creature who swims in the water? Breeds, feeds, dies in it? But the fish doesnâ€t know water! Take it out of the water, however, and, gasping and flailing, it knows water. If we take ourselves out of our element, into the realm of other, out of ourselves, we can know ourselves. And that happens on the page, on the stage, in story for one another . . . and this is where our ancient wisdom begins, thousands of years ago, in the story of the Sphinx. So letâ€s slow down, you know you move too fast! © Barbara Mossberg 2018

So Poetry Slow Down! Youâ€re slowing down here (hear hear!) with me, your host Professor Barbara Mossberg, Dr. B, and our production team, Zappa Johns and Nico Moss: you know you move too fast! This is our time to slow down, for the news we need, the news we heed, the news without which men die every day—that idea, –that people can die miserably without the news of poetry, is by William Carlos Williams. But heâ€s a poet, Dr. B! Of course he thinks that! Youâ€re right, of course, evolved listener, but he was also a physician, seeing patients during the day. Heâ€d go home at night, with memory blood on his hands, and write poems on prescription pads, to save his life, and his patients†lives—and all of our lives. Yes, he is the one who wrote, so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. Thatâ€s the whole poem, and heâ€s claiming that things matter, that they are amazing, the view out the kitchen window, the weedy yard, and for that to happen, to see blaze in raindrops, thereâ€s this eye and mind and heart: the truth that weâ€re each this cauldron of emotions, that in us is so much greatness of heart, of great feeling, magnitude of feeling, longing, emptiness, tragedy and pain, worry, a sense of importance of our lives, and the most innocent innocuous little things . . . well, there are no little things. Everything matters—as humans, we are triggered by anything, anything in this world, that invokes our ability to care. O, being human! What a piece of work we are! To quote the Bard– This past week I was thinking about drama—our lives as drama, and what poetry and drama make of it . . . and I wanted to share with you what I was saying to our community, in the Insight Seminars at the University of Oregon, and Osher Institute of Lifelong Learning, It can be that drama is the most natural of all literary arts—itâ€s just us, being ourselves. Think of a conversation, not even a conversation, just talking to someone, in person, on the phone—you may have had this morning, perhaps on the way here. What were those words? What happened? Youâ€re going to say now thatâ€s not drama, thatâ€s not art, thatâ€s just …normal life. Now what happens if you imagine that exact scene, and us watching it? All of a sudden, moments that may have been charged, or maybe that seemed inconsequential, are full of portent, meaning, significance. Through the lens of our vision, they become art. Workaday language we use to order a latte or draft beer or kombucha or say goodbye to our partner or ask whoâ€s seen your phone or to say debit card or I love you or itâ€s time to take out the garbage become, on stage, art. Drama–tragedy and comedy–provides stage directions for our experience of lifeâ€s stages. What did Oedipus learn from the Sphinx? We will engage fierce and funny lifesaving wisdom on aging as we read examples of bravery, foolery, and panache in these and other plays and stage monologues: Author! Author! Whoâ€s writing our lines? We live our lives from the inside out. Only on the stage page is our human experience visible if not also perceived as meaningful, noble, tragic, and yes, comic. Osher Lifelong Learning, yes: as we seek wisdom for sustainable life, weâ€re reading together a few fierce and funny famous plays that spotlight the most precious, challenging aspects of our human journey, and give us insight into the age-old wisdom of this dynamic literary form. Facing lifeâ€s drama, what is seen about our lives in Oedipus, the Salesman, Blanche, Cyrano, Quixote, Lettice Douffet? From T.S. Eliot to “Hair,” weâ€ll see drama making tragic and comic hay of our inner Hamlets (and secret Prufrocks). So slow down, and weâ€ll stage right now for your ears how drama illuminates whatâ€s to laugh, cry and sigh about when the worldgets you down–or, the Tragedy and Comedy of our Curtain Fates. Thank you for joining me in the wings, and I would love to hear [...]

In fact it leads to heartwarming knowledge about our own humanity! And we need to hear this! Now! So weâ€ll slow down to take that windy path where goats go, lambs gambol. Iâ€m your host Barbara Mossberg, with this ministry of sorts, to bring the words we use and think in and express love in and order coffee with, to appreciation of who we are, and what weâ€re doing on this life journey together on earth. Weâ€re produced by Zappa Johns, who is on the Central Coast, and you, dear listener, are on a lake, on a ranch, in a loft, and weâ€re connected in this very moment by sound waves as in days of old, when we sat around campfires and told each other our stories. Sheep, Goats, and Fellow Mortals In our show today, as we slow down and savor texts that mean something encouraging in our lives, fire our conscience, light our consciousness about the gift of consciousness on this earth, we consider our age-old human love for sheep and goats—eating, yes, our Homer readers will remind us, but also as pets, and as fellow journey companions (think of the role of the shepherd in our human experience). In this lens, we will hear some of our greatest writers hold forth with compassion, with empathy, for what Robert Burns calls “our fellow mortals.” Weâ€ll hear excerpts from John Muirâ€s “Stickeen,” one of the best dog (and glacier) stories ever written, and poetry of Mary Oliver, D.H. Lawrence, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Eugenio Del Andrade, Naomi Shihab Nye, Aaron Fogel, Robert Service, e.e. cummings, Jane Yolen, some folklore history, and two books out there that are companions to the great Gerald Durrell of My Family and Other Animalsfame, Carole George, The Lambs: My Father, a Farm, and the Gift of a Flock of Sheep, and Goat Songby Brad Kessler, books that started me on this goat path, and we end with Billy Collins, who reflects on the printing history alleging that one Gutenberg Bible requires 300 sheep skins. Yes, sheep skin—what we write on. Itâ€s very complicated, this relationship we have with our fellow mortals (if we dare call them that after eating them and making them paper). We begin with Barry Lopezâ€s “Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion,” and reflect on Emily Dickinson (of course) and her poem on the Clown beholding this earth as “tremendous” and “a whole Experiment of Green” even though he doesnâ€t own it. Letâ€s slow down now to follow this goat trail and consider how efforts as human beings to be compassionate and extend our imaginations to the idea that denizens on earth are fellow mortals. Happy morning to you—Yours truly, Barbara Mossberg © Barbara Mossberg 2018

To eat or to be eaten, or both? That is the question. Life and death. What is our human fate and purpose? These are large questions, indeed, and poetry has some answers to get us slowed down in these hurtling days where we are going too fast to notice all thatâ€s here, to sense the sensational, to pay attention, as Mary Oliver says, to be astonished. . . Henry Thoreau said he went to the woods to live deliberately, to slow down, so as not to find at the end of his life he has not lived at all. Youâ€re at the Poetry Slow Down, produced by Zappa Johns, Iâ€m your host, Professor Barbara Mossberg, my students†Dr. B, and you can tell already, evolved listener, that weâ€re slowing down, going into the weeds, the rough, on purpose, which is what poetry is, really: the weeds of language, the luring terrifying mysterious woods, what grows naturally, where and how it will, wildly, profusely, appreciated or unwanted, used or routed out, needed or cast aside–a language of difficulty and strangeness, using the very words on which we depend for all that we need, our bodily and spiritual and emotional needs, prayers to God and Creation, love to others, requests for help: poetry slows us down, with what William Carlos Williams said is news we need and without which we die miserably, expressed in ways that are experienced as “difficult” and “despised.” We need it, we heed it, this news, but itâ€s for what matters, the big things, like fate: like, what we are for, here, we on earth. This question of our purpose of being, our fate, our raison dâ€etre, is not something we can get to looking for a parking place, or sitting in a stadium, or scanning headline news—or, maybe not, maybe these activities, sitting at our desk at work, dealing with clients and patients, bosses and colleagues, family members, partners—maybe this is the simmering question, what I am for? Poetry is right there for you, because poets take time out, or they might see it as making time count, slowed down to work out insights about the one thing psychologists say we cannot live without: meaning. Oh, we can try. We can try to get through our minutes and hurried and worried life without saying, what am I for, what is my fate, why am I here, but you know itâ€s no good. Because youâ€re wondering. Poets stop the clock, and take us into the weeds, the swamp, the woods of our lives. For Thoreau, these were the preferred places—Emerson said of Thoreau, He was the attorney of the indigenous plants, and owned to a preference of the weeds to the imported plants, as of the Indian to the civilized man,—and noticed, with pleasure, that the willow bean-poles of his neighbor had grown more than his beans. “See these weeds,” he said, “which have been hoed at by a million farmers all spring and summer, and yet have prevailed, and just now come out triumphant over all lanes, pastures, fields, and gardens, such is their vigor. We have insulted them with low names, too,—as Pigweed, Wormwood, Chickweed, Shad-Blossom.” He says, “They have brave names, too,—Ambrosia, Stellaria, Amelanchia, Amaranth, etc.” and itâ€s interesting that the names we give for disrespect of plants we dismiss as “weeds,” as of no value, but of particular ire to us, as hardy as they are unwanted, we call animals, also those we . . . well, take up, literally, serve up, to serve us: pigs, worms, chicks, shad . . . . Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps. When, formerly, I have analyzed my partiality for some farm which I had contemplated purchasing, I have frequently found that I was attracted solely by a few square rods of impermeable and unfathomable bog—a natural sink in one corner of it. That was the jewel which dazzled me. I derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village. T[...]