Category: Literature

POETRY MONDAY: October 5, 2020
By Categories: Literature

                                                                                         PHIL TIMPANE

Good morning, everyone!  It seems strange to say “good morning” when I’m writing this after dark, but everything seems strange in what Farhad Manjoo called “a present as nutty as ours” (NY Times, 9/24/20). But poetry, as always, will help us to survive.

Our poet today is an old friend to this column, as he was featured here in one of our earliest years.  Now here he is again, looking venerable and bardic, with new poems and details about his life, of the kind I always like to share with readers.

Phil Timpane works with his hands, his business mind and his ever-working philosophical mind.  By day he is a building contractor; the rest of his time, he says, he “designs and builds new poems.” This kind of day job is not unusual for serious artists in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts.  I know two other contractors who are well-published poets, another who is an Equity actor and a third who runs a Continue reading POETRY MONDAY: October 5, 2020

POETRY MONDAY: SEPTEMBER 7, 2020
By Categories: Literature

                                                                                                                     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