International Psychoanalysis

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
(more…)

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.

October Poetry Monday: Joan Peronto

 Joan Peronto

Joan Peronto is an emerging poet it gives me great pleasure to introduce.  Her poems thus far have appeared only in a number of small publications and in Crossing Paths, an anthology of Western New England poets, but we will be hearing more of her.  Currently, after raising seven children who are now, as she tells us “educated and thrust upon the world,” and after working for thirty-four years as a reference librarian, she has retired to devote herself to poetry.  Her new and soon-to-be-realized project is a collection of poems about a small Midwestern town, similar to the one in which she grew up. (more…)

Five riddles for psychoanalysts

(In honor of the Sphynx whose code was cracked  When Sophocles and Freud the myth attacked)

                                                                  1.
    What looks up
    But sees below
    The surface 
    Of all human show,
    By wording all the things
    In flight
    From reason
    And the rhymes of night? (more…)

 POETRY MONDAY: September 7, 2009

JAY UDALL

Jay Udall’s poems and short-stories have appeared in many literary journals, magazines, newspapers and anthologies.  He is the author of five books of poetry, the most recent of which is The Welcome Table, published this year by the University of New Mexico Press. Born in Washington, D.C., the sixth child of parents he describes as “an environmentalist politician and an arts activist,” he taught at community colleges and worked as a legal aide on behalf of Navajo uranium miners pursuing compensation from the United States Justice Department before completing an M.F.A. at New England College.  He is now a
Visiting Lecturer in writing at the University of Nevada.

Here, for your pleasure, are three new poems by Jay Udall.

                                              
                                                                                 Irene Willis
                                                                                 Poetry Editor
                                    

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Jules Gibbs

POETRY MONDAY: August 3, 2009

Jules Gibbs’ poems have appeared in literary journals such as Spoon River Poetry Review, Salt Hill, Pearl and others, as well as in several anthologies. Twice the recipient of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize for Poetry, she was awarded a Ucross Foundation Fellowship in 2007.  This summer her poetry is accompanying a multi-gallery photography show of the work of Kevin O’Connell at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, Colorado. Further, we’ve just learned that Jules Gibbs has been selected by Kim Addonizio for inclusion in the annual anthology, Best New Poets, 2009, to be released this October by University of Virginia Press.  This is an annual competition for poets without first books, and Gibbs was one of only fifty poets chosen nationwide. (more…)

JULY POETRY MONDAY: Cheryl Keeler

Cheryl Keeler

Poet Cheryl Keeler lives with her husband and son in a small town in Virginia where, she tells us, she is taken on brisk morning walks by her rescued Jack Russell terrier. Her poems have been published in 5 A.M. and the online journal, Dirty Napkin. An early childhood specialist, she has also published several short-stories for children. Currently, she is firming up a manuscript of breast cancer poems, Six Letters and a Lump, which awaits a publisher. This isn’t the only important thing Cheryl Keeler is doing, however. Since her small town lacked a public library, she started one, which she now manages—always trying to work in a little poetry with her brown bag lunches. (more…)

POETRY MONDAY:  June 1, 2009

LOIS MARIE HARROD

Lois Marie Harrod has won many awards for her poetry, including three fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and seven Pushcart Prize nominations.  She has published six full-length collections and three chapbooks, the most recent of which,  Furniture, won the Grayson Books 2008 Poetry Chapbook Competition.  Wisdom, humor and compassion run through all of her poems, but most noteworthy, in our view, are those in Spelling the World Backwards, which, as she says, is “both a story of a family coping with Alzheimer’s disease and a meditation on the nature of memory and poetry.”  The strikingly original Furniture deserves to be read in its entirety, but the sample below will give you an idea of how Lois Marie Harrod imbues even inanimate objects with soul.

The third poem, “Her kisses were more stone than licorice,” is published here for the first time.

                                                                          Irene Willis
                                                                          Poetry Editor (more…)

Click Here To Read: Two Riddles: These poems have right answers. Does that diminish them? By Robert Pinsky on the Slate website on May 26, 2009.

Sir Walter Raleigh

Click Here To Read: “They Fuck You Up,” Philip Larkin’s, This Be The Verse by Henry M. Seiden, Ph.D. ABPP.

This previously appeared as Seiden, Henry M. (Spring 2009).  “They Fuck You Up,” Philip Larkin’s, This Be The Verse.  Psychologist-Psychoanalyst, the newsletter of Division 39 (Psychoanalysis) of the American Psychological Association and appears here with all requisite rights and permissions.

POETRY MONDAY:  May 4, 2009
 

The absence of  a photo this month is intentional, because our featured poet prefers to remain gender-neutral.  donnarkevic is the pen-name of a poet who was born in 1954, grew up in a small steel-town in Pennsylvania, and has lived for the last 28 years in West Virginia, working currently as a correctional counselor.  A graduate of the University of Pittsburgh with a parochial school background, donnarkevic also earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 2008 from National University.

 The following dramatic monologues are based, the poet tells us, on actual case studies to which fictional identities have been assigned.  I hope you will find the channeled voices of these speakers as remarkable and disturbing as I did.  Perhaps, since this is your field, you won’t.  At any rate, we would welcome your comments.

                                                                         Irene Willis
                                                                         Poetry Editor

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