Dr. Barbara Mossberg » Podcast Feed

CRUEL AND TAXING APRIL(S). April perturbs and taxes the mind of Emily Dickinson and T.S. Eliot, while Thoreau doesn’t worry about how to do justice to this season; he proclaims morning as the season of the day, the time of … Continue reading →

A KNOCKING OF FOOLS, TREES, AND RESURRECTION FROLIC With notes of “April, come she will,” Dylan’s standing in the doorway cryin,’ You Are My Sunshine, and What kind of fool Am I, we take up the malignment of April, poetically … Continue reading →

FOR MOLES AND HEDGEHOGS AND BADGERS AND BALLOON MEN AND ALL EMERGENT IMPROBABLE WILD CHARACTERS IN OUR LIVES, our show today is about love, improbable love, and life improbably emergent in just Spring. It all begins in Brooklyn with Death … Continue reading →

in midst and mists of epic storms, Gerard Manley Hopkins, with Charles Tripi’s “Get Up,” (W.E. Henley’s “Invictus,” Tennyson’s “Ulysses”), and paean “Imaginary Brooklyn,” W.S. Merwin’s “The Blind Seer of Ambon” and more, Karen Bryant (responding to John Muir) as … Continue reading →

Music: Joni Mitchell ., Big Yellow Taxi (we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden) Jonathan Elias, Requiem for the Americas, Songs from the Lost World Stephen Stills, Garden of Eden Elvis Presley, Love Me Tender You don’t think … Continue reading →

I am the daughter of manifest destiny,

Spawned by the Brooklyn Bridge

A BROOKLYN STATE OF MIND, continued: what is Brooklyn to you, Poetry Slow Down community, on the theme of slowing down our hurried minds with poetry: Is Brooklyn, USA, the opposite of poetry to you, or its apotheosis? You’re with me here, wondering about how poetry makes sense of a place, or creates sense of value of place, the meaning we give to the place we live in, or call home, in our minds . . . There is something about Brooklyn, that takes us into the heart of how poetry makes a place live, how poets work the soil, and to me now, the Manhattan-Brooklyn relation is revelation at the heart of the nation’s heart and mind: you can’t get there from here, yet we live parallel and inextricably related lives, in the lost-country and the city, a psychological chasm, uncrossable, and then I’m thinking, wait, “Crossing Brookyn Ferry,” that great poem of Whitman’s, wait, hold on here, the setting and theme of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman . . . and wait . . . Feynman was here . . . wait, Woody Allen . . . . Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a novel whose title was always a little ominous to me: a place where it is a miracle that a tree grows? Land laid waste? And speaking of ominous, Thomas Wolfe’s” Only the Dead Know Brooklyn,” so . . . this psychic ghost town with its one tree, and . . .then, all the iconography of Coney Island, and the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Dodgers (ya bums!). So, last week we talked about the poetry of Brooklyn, and Marianne Moore’s paean (pee-en, expression of joy or praise, as opposed to pain in, expression of suffering), to the Brooklyn-ya-bums Dodgers, and you know what, we ran out of time, I had material for . . ten shows! And in the process of thinking about the show, as an outsider, a foreigner, an anthropologist of poetry, I mean, I grew up as far away as possible, out west, and you don’t stop until you reach that Pacific Ocean, 3000 miles away, where the Dodgers had dodged, LA, I told you when I grew up it was always the Brooklyn Dodgers in our house, a fact I never thought about, and as I was thinking about Brooklyn with you, and then Ferlingetti’s autobiography—he the San Fransisco City Lights man, yet, he places himself back in Brooklyn in his mind—his Coney Island of the Mind makes Brooklyn the center of his artistic awakening, I realized this past week that I, too, have a poem about my own artistic awakening, and identity, and it is a Brooklyn poem: I imagined my own past in terms of this Brooklyn-Manhattan nexus, and the Huck in me, needing to light out (“where can you go when the territory has all been taken? I had to go west”) . . . I couldn’t believe it when I remembered the original opening lines:

I am the daughter of Manifest Destiny,

Spawned by the Brooklyn Bridge.

I had never seen the Brooklyn Bridge, this was something in history, like George Washington’s cherry tree, some iconic symbol. Remember, I’m born under the Hollywood sign, my early life was in mountains overlooking the Pacific, the nearest store was two miles away and my mother, staying home with us kids, didn’t have a car: she didn’t drive—of course—now I see, this story shaping . . . she was from Manhattan . . . she didn’t need a car. My father was living in Brooklyn, he was born in Brooklyn, and he had a car. I remember a story they told us once, over a campfire in the Sierras, about their past, which they never really talked about except in New Yorkisms we took for granted as the eccentric vocab of our parents, these metaphoric ways of talking about the world that made no sense in our lives, what is this, grand central station? (we didn’t even know what that was, and had never been on a train); if that happens I’ll kiss your ass in Macy’s window, whoever Macy was . . . well, when my parents met on a photographers hike in New Jersey, my father took my mother’s arm and never let go. He drove her home. The problem was, she had never be[...]

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm—That’s Ralph Waldo Emerson, and hello, this is Professor Barbara Mossberg, welcoming you to the Poetry Slow Down, KRXA 540’s Think for Yourself radio, and enthusiasm has been in the air. I’ve been researching … Continue reading →

“It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.”–Gertrude Stein. And so we’re going to take a lot of time, an hour today, for our Poetry Slow … Continue reading →

NEED SCIENTISTS AND ENGINEERS?– CALLING FOR POETRY AND MUSIC EDUCATION, a mellifluous show that tells it like it is, at The Poetry Slow Down, think-for-yourself KRXA 540 AM on California’s Central Coast, and internationally at www.krxa540.com. Continuing the theme of … Continue reading →

When the President of the United States responds to a public massacre, an attack on America’s elected leaders and processes, calling for us to enlarge our moral imagination–question! What is moral imagination? Question! What is being called for, and how we are called upon? Question! Can we change the news of sorrow and disgrace? Question! Can a way of thinking and being change the heartbreak of the headline news? Question! Isn’t this something that the Sphinx was calling for—isn’t this what Einstein . . . what Shakespeare . . . what Gandhi . . . what King . . .  Ah . . . At our Poetry Slow Down at KRXA 540AM “(think for yourself”), we listen to poetry (which Dr. Williams claims may be despised and difficult but without which we will die miserably—and he was a doctor dealing with life and death every day so he should know) for insight into the moral imagination. Our music selections for our show give a clue to the genius and miracle of transformation, the power of the poetic mind to change our world: I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day . . . if somehow you could pack up your sorrows and give them all to me, you would lose them, I know how to use them, give them all to me . . . when you’re weary . . . when tears are in your eyes, I will dry them all, I’m on your side . . . like a bridge over troubled waters . . . you’ve got to give a little, you’ve got to live a little, that’s the story of, that’s the glory of love.” Who’s talking here? The poet, whose thinking can turn it all around. How so? “I turn to you,” O poet. So, we are going to talk about what kinds of thinking change our world, that we call genius. We frame our show with Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream,” an expression of moral imagination that is celebrated with a national holiday, and the role of poetry in King’s vision (we will hear Henry David Thoreau’s influence on the poetry of King’s mind and of the Civil Rights Movement). We begin with Poet Albert Einstein, and Poet Richard Feynmann, and other physicist poets, whose imagination of transformation calls for a moral sensibility at our most genius selves. We’ll talk about the Sphinx and the life and death stakes for community in having a moral imagination. We’ll talk about the relationship between genius and poetry, metaphor and moral imagination, and how it is that we have a President of the United States who is calling for this civic common genius. What is the role of poetry in President Obama’s vision of us and what is possible in our civic culture? We’ll hear from another President, as we think of upcoming Presidents’ Day, the role of poetry for President Abraham Lincoln, and for Barack Obama . . . we’ll hear some prophetic poetry by our president (pinch me!) on the moral imagination, the genius of empathy, of compassion, and a vision of how poetic thinking is what human wisdom, expressed in the Sphinx, called for so long ago, the essential knowledge we need to live in community, how we belong to each other and our earth. He’s a poet. I’m just sayin. This is Professor Barbara Mossberg, for the news we need. Write me your poetic thinking at [email protected], and stay tuned for the good-news-making high school sonnet project, “I’m Nobody: Turning It Around, the Genius in I, and You, and Us,” feeling Grovy, right here on The Poetry Slow Down.

© Barbara Mossberg 2011