International Psychoanalysis

When a book comes along that deals with both poetry and psychoanalysis, it can’t be ignored here.  Below, instead of a featured poet, is a brief review.

An Accident of Hope: The Therapy Tapes of Anne Sexton by Dawn M. Skorczewski,  242 pp.  Routledge.

Dawn Skorczewski, an Associate Professor of English and Director of University Writing at Brandeis University, has a special interest in the relationship between psychoanalysis and pedagogy and did her doctoral dissertation at Rutgers on the work of Anne Sexton.  She asserts that her motivation for this book was to answer questions about how the content of Sexton’s therapeutic (more…)

Click Here to ReadL Poet Told All; Therapist Provides the Record By Alessandra Stanley in The New York Times on July 15, 1991/

Click Here to Read:  This One’s a Kippah: New York’s Idiosyncratic Jewish Renewal An auction of Judaica and passionate recitation of Yiddish poetry By Marty Peretz  in The New York Observer  on May 14, 2013.

The Mishneh Torah

Lisken Van Pelt Dus

Our poet this month is both multi-talented and rich in background and experience. A teacher and martial artist (yes, that’s right; she teaches classical Okinawan karate and kobudo (weapons) at a martial arts studio of which she and her husband Bob are co-owners). Her more conventional job is as a teacher of writing and languages at Monument Mountain Regional High School in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. I seem to recall that she is also a fine musician.

Raised internationally, in England, the U.S. and Mexico, she arrived in the Berkshires from London to attend Williams College, where she earned a B.A. in religion. Subsequently, she completed a Master’s in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. (more…)

Click Here to Read:  Hilda Doolittle and Creativity:  Freud’s Gift by Arlene Kramer Richards.   This paper originally appeared as:  Richards, Arlene Kramer (1992 ).  Hilda Dootlitle and Creativity:  Freud’s Gift. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 47:391-406 and appears here with all requisite rights and conditions.

Click Here to Read:  This paper in Chinese.

No picture today, and no single featured poet, because this is National Poetry Month, and I want to talk to you about poetry.

Those of you who visit these pages are already readers, and I know you go to bookstores and libraries pretty regularly. But please, this month, seek out the shelves that contain poetry – single-author collections, anthologies, and books about poetry. Usually, you will have to ask where those shelves are, because if you search for them yourself, you may not find them. Often, they are tucked away in corners. If you ask for a particular poet or collection, it may have to be special-ordered. But please, do it anyway. Let the bookstore owners know that you are looking for a generous selection of poetry. (more…)

Dane Cervine’s new book is entitled How Therapists Dance, from Plain View Press (2013), which also published his previous book The Jeweled Net of Indra. His poems have been chosen by Adrienne Rich, Tony Hoagland, Atlanta Review and Caesura for prizes or acknowledgement and have appeared in a wide variety of journals including The SUN Magazine, The Hudson Review, Catamaran, Red Wheelbarrow, anthologies, newspapers, video & animation. Visit his website at:  www.DaneCervine.typepad.com Dane is a therapist, and serves as Chief of Children’s Mental Health for Santa Cruz County.

Read the poem “Enlightenment Is a Bitch” on the website if The Sun.
Read about Dane’s new book, How Therapists Dance.

H.A. Maxson

Our March poet, H.A. Maxson, whose poems have been nominated many times for Pushcart Prizes, is the author of 15 books: four collections of poetry, Turning the Wood, Walker in the Storm, The Curley Poems and Hook; a book-length poem, The Walking Tour: Alexander Wilson in America; a novel in free verse, Brother Wolf; a novel, The Younger; seven works of historical fiction for young readers, and a critical study, On the Sonnets of Robert Frost. (more…)

Click Here to Read and View:  ‘Memoir’ Lisa Appignanesi and Blake Morrison in Conversation with Jane Haberlin at The Freud Museum London  on February 1st, 2013.

Click Here to Read:  Czeslaw Milosz, The Art of Poetry No. 70 Interviewed by Robert Faggen on The Paris Review website in the Winter 1994 Issue.

Czeslaw Milosz

Click Here to Read:  Between Hours: A Collection of Poems by Psychoanalysts edited by Salman Akhtar reviewed Lee Jenkins in Psychoanalytic Review.

This article originally appeared as Jenkins, Lee (2012). Review of Akhtar, Salman, ed,  A Between Hours: A Collection of Poems by Psychoanalysts.   The Pychoanalytic Review 99:6 and appears here with all requisite rights and permissions.

Click Here to Read: Sigmund Freud BY W.H. Auden on the New Republic Website on October 6, 1952.

Click Here to Read:  In Memory of Sigmund Freud by W. H. Auden on the Poets.org website.

Cynthia Gardner

Cynthia Gardner’s poems have  been published in a number of literary journals,  including Alaska Quarterly Review, Southern Poetry Review, and The Bridge,  and in anthologies such as Crossing Paths: An  Anthology of Poems by Women (Mad River Press, 2002).  Her first collection, a chapbook, How Will  They Find Me, was published by Finishing Line Press  last year, with a fine oil painting of her own on the cover. (more…)

Click Here to Read: Wants by Philip Larkin Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry on the Bully Pulpit website on January 31, 2013.

POETRY MONDAY: January 7, 2013

Jim Kelleher

Happy New Year, everyone! We’re beginning the year with something unusual – parts of a drama in verse, which can be read either as a novel or performed as a play. I do hope we have the opportunity in the near future to see it performed, because it’s quite wonderful. (more…)

Click Here to Read:   Eight Are Charged With Chilean Singer’s 1973 Murder After Military Coup By Pascale Bonnefoy in The New York Times on December 28, 2012/

Click Here to Read:   Victor Jara (1932–1973) He died on September 16 1973 on this website.   Includes audio of Victor Jara singing  Cigarritoand Arlo Guthrie singing about Victor Jara’s  and  Letter to Someone Who Said It Was Necessary, Poem about Victor Jara by Arlene Kramer Richards.

Click Here To Read:   Chile reburies coup victim and singer Jara on this Website.

From the Poetry Editor: An Interjection in Time of Mourning

I don’t need to remind you of what poetry does to help us live our lives; I know you know that very well indeed. But here is an interjection of my own, at a time when we are simultaneously mourning the horrific recent gun deaths and trying to rally ourselves to activity and legislation.

I know something about guns. Shocking as it seems to me now, I participated regularly in target practice, with a 22 rifle, at summer camp when I was ten (more…)

Pops from big kid roman candles cut across the time zones
narratives of personal surface burn and itchy imbedded metal scraps
sparklers tested by tiny fingers consequences of curiosity about what happens
when something gets too close or we…
get too close to something (more…)

Christopher Goodrich

Widely praised by senior poets, Pushcart Prize nominee Christopher Goodrich’s first full-length collection, Nevertheless, hello, was published by Steel Toe Books in 2009.  A chapbook, By Reaching, was brought out by Finishing Line Press in 2007.  His poems have also appeared in journals such as The New York Quarterly, Cider Press Review, The Sycamore Review and many others.  The recipient of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize as well as an (more…)

Click Here to Read:  Irene Willis & Richard Lipez Reading at the Good Purpose Gallery & Starving Artist Café on 40 Main Street Lee MA on  November 16 at 5:30.