International Psychoanalysis

POETRY MONDAY:  July 5, 2010

Jim Haba

I’m proud to be able to introduce someone that many of you will recognize in this photo. Jim Haba was the tireless person everywhere at once at the famous Dodge Poetry Festival — behind the microphone introducing world-famous poets to cheering crowds and organizing talks and workshops all over a sylvan campus every two years. There was much more, as you will read below, but what many of you may not know is that he is, and has been for many years, a fine poet himself. (more…)

Click here to Read: The Freudian Muse: Psychoanalysis and the Problem of Self-Revelation in Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” and “Medusa” by Laure De Nervaux on the reveus.org website on May 1, 2007.

Sylvia Plath

POETRY MONDAY:  June 3, 2010

Laurel Blossom

 (Photo by Steven Haas)

Our June poet, Laurel Blossom, has published widely, in such journals and anthologies as The Paris Review, Harper’s, and Billy Collins’ 180 More: Exraordinary Poems for Every Day. Since her first published collection, a chapbook, Any Minute (Greenhouse Review Press, 1979), she has published four books, the most recent of which are a book-length narrative poem, Degrees of  Latitude (Four Way Books, 2007) and Wednesday: New and Selected Poems (Ridgeway Press, 2004).  Her poetry has been nominated for both a Pushcart Prize and the Elliston Prize.

Blossom has also edited two anthologies: Splash! Great Writing about Swimming (Ecco Press, 1996) and Many Lights in Many Windows: Twenty Years of Great Fiction and Poetry from The Writers Community (Milkweed Editions, 1997).  She also serves on the editorial board of Heliotrope: a Journal of Poetry.  (more…)

POETRY MONDAY:  May 3, 2010

Jay Rubin

I’m pleased this month to introduce Jay Rubin, whose poems have appeared widely in the past few years, in such publications as Blue Earth Review, Rosebud, Prague Review, Poetry South, and The Poetry of Relationships.  He teaches writing at The College of Alameda in the San Francisco Bay area and lives in San Francisco with his wife and son.  He is also the founder, editor and publisher of the all-poetry literary journal, Alehouse (www.alehousepress.com), an enterprise about which  his  comments in a recent interview might be of special interest to our readers.  “Serving as an editor, after years of writing poetry, is like a long-term psychoanalysis patient becoming the psychiatrist.  It’s a whole different game when you sit on the chair across from the couch.  The  whole world opens up, and it changes you – and your poetry.”

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Click Here to Read:  Helen Meyers: 1925 – 2010 on this website.

Sonnet for Helen Meyers

Childhood as stepping stone became the road ‘
all roads led to, ever-branching,
The future in the mason’s hands building a city
In the mind no wind could tear asunder,
A city where light feared darkness not,
And dark itself found light enough to claim (more…)

Click Here to Read: Smith College Professor Justin Cammy remembers Abraham Sutzkever, the most important Yiddish poet of the Holocaust By Anne-Gerard Flynn in The Republican on April 09, 2010.

Justin D. Cammy, assistant professor of Jewish Studies at Smith College in Northampton, poses with some of the works of the legendary Yiddish poet and Holocaust survivor Abraham Sutzkever, who died on Jan 20, at the age of 96 in Tel Aviv.

Click Here to Read:  The  Poem “To My Child” by Abraham Sutzkever was used in Anna Ornstein’s Plenary at the American Psychoanalytic Association.

Click Here to Read:  Abraham Sutzkever: In Memoriam By Ruth R. Wisse The Jewish Ideas Dialy on January 22, 2010 on this website.

POETRY MONDAY : April 5, 2010

A Tribute to Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

 Although homage to this great poet would seem fitting at any time, it seems especially fitting for this column to offer it during National Poetry Month. I’m delighted, for strongly personal reasons, to have this opportunity. I remember how I felt as a teenager, sitting in my high-school English classroom and opening a literature anthology to her poem, “Renascence,” the way it spread thrillingly across the page, lifting me up and out of it.

Other women have reported a similar experience with that poem, which catapulted Millay into fame when she was only nineteen years old.  She became wildly popular, in a way that few poets are today, went on to publish many poetry collections, plays, and short-stories, and in 1923 was the first woman awarded the Pulitzer Prize.  Dismissed by some critics because of the feminist tone of her work, by others because of what they considered her anti-modernism and sentimentality, and later for her political activism, Millay began to be re-assessed and now is firmly established as a member of the canon.  In most anthologies of American poetry, her name is back in the index, with multiple pages listed.  She is fully recognized now for her technical virtuosity and dazzling range and is regarded as one of the most important American poets.  (more…)

Click Here to Read:  The Shakespeare Whodunit: A scholar tackles doubters on who wrote the plays; Hollywood weighs by Alexandra Alter in the Wall Street Journal on April 2, 2010.

Click Here to Read: Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? By James Shapiro, Reviewed by Boyd Tonkin on the Independent Boosk Website on March 26, 2010.

Click Here to Read: The Psychology of the Authorship Question by Richard Waugaman in the online Journal Brief Chronicles: An Interdisciplinary Journa.

Click Here to Read: The pseudonymous author of Shakespeare’s works by Richard Waugaman in the Princeton Alumni Weekly.

Click Here to Read: Chapter 1: Four Pivotal Sonnets: Sonnets 20, 62, 104, 129 from What Silent Love Hath Writ: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Shakepeare’s Sonnets by Martin S. Bergmann and Michael Bergmann. 

Click Here to Read: Chapter 2 from What Silent Love Hath Writ by Martin S. Bergmann and Michael Bergmann

Click Here to View: Dr. Sigmund Freud Discovers the Sea Shell by Archibald MacLeish.

Archibald MacLeish

POETRY MONDAY -  March 1, 2010

Chard deNiord

I have admired Chard deNiord’s poems for some time, but his life — the whole tale of how he came to pursue a career in poetry — is so impressive as an example of the sacrifices that some people make for poetry that I want to share it with you before telling you of his publishing history.  Following his graduation from Yale Divinity School, where he had considered pursuing ordination as an Episcopal minister, he followed the advice of his bishop to gain some work experience first. For five years (1978-1983) he worked at the Connecticut Mental Health Center in New Haven, spending three years on the research floor, where he helped to carry out many double blind protocols in the treatment of depression, schizophrenia and heroin addiction and later moving to the outpatient department, where he worked as a therapist for two years. At that point – and here is where the fields of poetry and psychoanalysis intersect most interestingly – he learned that he had been accepted at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His supervisor in New Haven was the analyst and psychiatric historian, Dr. Stanley Jackson, who had been a friend and doctor to the eminent American poet, Theodore Roethke.  Jackson advised deNiord that this “once in a lifetime opportunity” had to be pursued. (more…)

Alicia Ostriker, our April 2008 Poetry Monday featured poet,  has just won the 2009 National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, for her collection of poems  The Book of Seventy.  The “gala ceremony” will be on March 9, at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan, located at 15 West 16th Street. The ceremony begins at 7:30 p.m., is free and open to the public.

POETRY MONDAY   February 1, 2010

Irene Willis

 We’ve had requests to feature more of the poems and background of our Poetry Editor, so here she is.

Irene Willis has been publishing in different genres and venues for many years –   children’s books (including four co-authored with Arlene Kramer Richards), textbooks, articles and poetry. Her first published  poems, in the  1970’s, appeared in Cosmopolitan, which at the time, she tells us, had a good poetry editor and featured poets like Robert Graves and Erica Jong.  Later she began appearing in literary journals such as  Crazyhorse, Laurel Review, Literary Review, and New York Quarterly.  Since the 1990’s she has devoted herself primarily to poetry, with considerable success. (more…)

Click Here to Read:  Abraham Sutzkever, 1913-2010 By Benny Mer on the Haaretz.com website on January 22, 2010.

Click Here to Read:  Splinters of Eternity: The Poetry of Abraham Sutzkever Vilna Stories on the Vilna Website.

Click Here to Read: Abraham Sutzkever, 96, Jewish Poet and Partisan, Dies By Joseph Berger in the New York Times on January 23, 2010 .

Abraham Sutzkever

POETRY MODAY: JANUARY 4, 2010

Kathleen Fagley

To all our readers, a Happy, Healthy and (Reasonably) Prosperous New Year!

I’m pleased to introduce our featured poet for January, Kathleen Fagley. A 2005 graduate of the New England College MFA Program in Poetry, she has had poems published in a number of print and online journals, such as The Comstock Review, Slipstream, Houston Literary Review and DMQ Review. Currently, she is also a poetry editor of Amoskeag: The Poetry Journal of Southern New Hampshire University.

Kathleen lives in Keene, NH, with her husband Paul and teaches at Keene State University.

Irene Willis
Poetry Editor
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To those who read or even glance at our poetry pages, I hope you will take the time to read carefully the essay, “Pearls from Tears” by Arlene Kramer Richards. It is simply magnificent, in its choice of poems, the excerpts from critics and translators, the information about the Yiddish language, her own commentary about the psychoanalytic connection and, most wonderfully, the sharing of her personal experience. We are most grateful for this addition to the ongoing conversation about poetry.

Irene Willis
Poetry Editor

Click Here To Read: Arlene Kramer Richards’s Pearls from Tears on this website.

POETRY MONDAY: DECEMBER 7, 2009

Kimberly Mahler

 Kimberly Mahler, former editor of Caesura, the literary magazine of Poetry Center San Jose, California, is executive director of The  International Poetry Library of San Francisco. Her recent poems and other writing have appeared or are forthcoming in The Cimarron Review, Naugatuck River Review, 5 A.M. and other publications.  She teaches college writing in the San Francisco Bay Area and lives in Half Moon Bay with her nine-year-old autistic son, whom she calls “the inspiration behind much of my writing and life.”

Irene Willis
Poetry Editor

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POETRY MONDAY

Penny Harter

I think you will like these quiet, reflective poems by Penny Harter.  The first two are from her collection Buried in the Sky (La Alameda Press, Albuqueque, NM, 2001).   The third, “Last Night I Woke Crying,” appears for the first time here.
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To our readers:
 
Irene Willis’s new poetry collection, Those Flames, is now available and may be ordered from:
 
 Poetry Editor
 International Psychoanalysis
 P.O. Box 217
 South Egremont, MA 01258 (more…)

 Click Here To Read:  Pearls From Tears: The Poetry of Irene Klepfisz  by Arlene Kramer Richards from the IPTAR Arts Symposium on October 25, 2009.

The poet whose work about the Shoah is closest to my heart is Irena Klepfisz. She was brought up by a single mother who survived the Holocaust after Irena’s father died fighting for the Jewish people. Mother and daughter emigrated to the US after the war and lived together in New York until Irena grew up. Here are a pair of poems that try to make sense of the incomprehensible:

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Click Here To Read:  Bisexual Poet H.D.’s paragon lesbian relationship survived WWII by Susan Jordon on the  website Bay Windows newspaper on October 16, 2009.