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Letter to Bill Moyers

Bill_MoyersOctober 19, 2015

Bill Moyers
billmoyers.com

Dear Mr. Moyers,

Decades ago your outstanding programs with Joseph Campbell and Huston Smith were important influences on me, and on my epic poem, The Parliament of Poets, which was published in late November 2012, after thirty years in the making, and which takes place partly on the moon, at the Apollo 11 landing site. For many years I mulled over Campbell’s insight that the great image of Earthrise over the lunar landscape heralded a new spiritual awareness. In my epic I evoke a new global, universal vision of life on this planet.

In a world of Quantum Physics, Apollo, the Greek god of poetry, calls all the poets of the nations, ancient and modern, East and West, to assemble on the moon to consult on the meaning of modernity. The Parliament of Poets sends the main character, the Poet of the Moon, on a Journey to the seven continents to learn from all of the spiritual and wisdom traditions of humankind. On Earth and on the moon, the poets teach him a new global, universal vision of life.

One of the major themes is the power of women and the female spirit across cultures. Another is the nature of science and religion, including Quantum Physics, as well as the “two cultures,” science and the humanities.

It would be an honor for you to choose to Journey to the Moon… and judge my epic worthy of “reaching humanity,” if not on your program, now ended, through perhaps your good opinion. I’d be happy to send you a hardcover copy.

Sincerely yours,

Frederick Glaysher
www.fglaysher.com
fglaysher  AT gmail
5224 Aintree Road
Rochester, Michigan 48306
Phone: 248-652-4982

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Joseph Campbell, Earthrise–The Dawning of a New Spiritual Awareness

Earthrise

Earthrise

I’ve found myself over the years repeatedly going back to a few of Joseph Campbell’s books and articles. Among them, of course, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and his 1979 article “Earthrise–The Dawning of a New Spiritual Awareness,” reprinted in Thou Art That (2001), which I’ll let here speak for itself:

“Men stood on the moon and looked back and by television we were able to look back with them–to see earthrise….

With the moon walk, the religious myth that sustained these notions could no longer be held. With our view of earthrise, we could see that the earth and the heavens were no longer divided but that the earth is in the heavens. There is no division and all the theological notions based on the distinction between the heavens and the earth collapse with that realization. There is a unity in the universe and a unity in our own experience….

Symbolically, the same tradition suggests the return of Mother Earth to the heavens, the very thing that has occurred because of our journeys into space….The exclusivism of there being only one way in which we can be saved, the idea that there is a single religious group that is in sole possession of the truth–that is the world as we know it that must pass away. What is the kingdom? It lies in our realization of the ubiquity of the divine presence in our neighbors, in our enemies, in all of us…….the Space Age reminds us that it must come from within ourselves. The voyages into outer space turn us back to inner space.As Thomas Merton wrote, a symbol contains a structure that awakens our consciousness to a new awareness of the inner meaning of life and reality itself. Through symbols we enter emotionally into contact with our deepest selves, with each other, and with God–a word that is to be understood as a symbol.”

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Frederick Glaysher, Buffalo Small Press Book Fair

Frederick Glaysher reading from the fifth draft of his epic poem, The Parliament of Poets, at the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair, Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum, March 24, 2012.

FROM Book III, in medias res, on the moon. Copyright (c) 2012 Frederick Glaysher.

Frederick Glaysher, Reading from The Parliament of Poets, Book III.

Frederick Glaysher, Reading from The Parliament of Poets, Book III.

Reading from The Parliament of Poets, Book III, “Who needs warp drive when I’ve got Queen Mab, / My escort and midwife of my dreams.”

Frederick Glaysher

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