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Category: Literature
The Desk and the Daring
A Conversation with Justice Leah Ward Sears on Margaret Walker’s “For My People”
POETRY MONDAY: SEPTEMBER 7, 2020
LEE JENKINS
Good morning, everyone. Were these normal times, I would be saying, “Happy Labor Day,” but with so many out of work and many even hungry, it seems cruel to think of the picnics and barbecues of past years. Even last year seems like a lifetime away.
At any rate, poetry survives and helps us to – perhaps now more than ever, that so many are locked down. Many poets are writing Covid poems, and some of you may be among them.
Most, but not all of our readers are psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, and many are also professors. I trust that we also have readers from a variety of fields, who labor in their own way and who use poetry as its own kind of medicine.
Our poet today, Lee Jenkins, whose work I encountered just recently, is a retired Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY (City University of New York) and also a psychoanalyst in private practice on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. He sees people from all ethnic groups and all five boroughs, as well as neighboring states, and while his practice continues to thrive since his retirement from teaching, so does his writing life.
A bit more background first. Jenkins grew up in Tallahassee, Florida, and received a B.A. in philosophy from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Later he attended the University of Iowa to study playwriting in the theater arts department. His teaching began with a year at Talladega College, a small black liberal arts college in Alabama. From there he went to New York City, where he earned a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He then undertook psychoanalytic training at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP) and has since served as a faculty member, supervisor and training analyst at Blanton-Peale Institute, the Harlem Continue reading POETRY MONDAY: SEPTEMBER 7, 2020
