Our Poetry Editor, Irene Willis, is on vacation and will be back after the beginning of the new year, 2023.
Category: Poetry Monday
POETRY MONDAY: October 3, 2022
Hilary Russell
Good morning, everyone. Fall is upon us, it seems. Apples are ripe and abundant, and so does nature nourish and sustain us.
Our poet today, Hilary Russell, has had an interesting life. Having grown up outside of New York City, he now lives in the Berkshires, in Western Massachusetts. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Villanova University and a master’s from Wesleyan University. But what is interesting is what he now does for a living. After teaching high school English for many years, he took up small boat building and, through his company, Berkshire Boat Building School, he teaches classes in boat-building. While many, if not most poets have college and graduate school degrees, few, if any, build boats.
His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Boulevard, The George Washington Review, and other well-known journals. He is the author of Giving up the House, a chapbook (Mad River Press); The Anthology of American Poetry (Wayside Press), and The Portable Writer (Wayside Continue reading POETRY MONDAY: October 3, 2022
Poetry Monday September 5, 2022
Poetry Monday: August 1, 2022
Eugene Mahon
Good morning, everyone. I do hope it’s a good one for most of you. How I wish we could feel relieved that the pandemic is over, but of course we can’t – not yet. And we have a new one dawning. Hope is not a cure, but hope can help – as can poetry, which eases the soul.
Our poet today, Eugene Mahon, is someone known to many of you in the psychiatric profession, but for those who aren’t, here are some facts about his interesting background.
Eugene Mahon, M.D., is a Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst on the faculty of Columbia Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research. A member of the Center for Advanced Psychoanalytic Studies, Princeton, N.J., he practices adult and child psychoanalysis in New York City.
He has published four books on psychoanalysis: A Psychoanalytic Odyssey (Karnac Books, 2014), Rensal the Rabbit (Karnac Books, 2014), Boneshop of the Heart (IPBooks, 2016), and Such Stuff as Dreams: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry with an Introduction by Theodore Jacobs (IPBooks, 2022), as well as more Continue reading Poetry Monday: August 1, 2022
POETRY MONDAY: JULY 4, 2022
P.D. PIN
Good morning, everyone. Happy (we hope) Fourth of July, here in the good old U.S.A., in a year when we’re all worried about whether we still have a
democracy. The good news today is that we’re finally getting somewhere with our gun laws — a bipartisan result that means we’re also finally getting somewhere with bi-partisanship.
Enough about that. Now it time for the healing of our souls with poetry. Our poet this morning is a brand-new one with a modest publishing history but a fascinating background.
P.D. Pin was born and raised in southwestern Ontario. Her parents moved to Canada before she was born from Friuli, Italy, a region bordering Austria and Slovenia. She lived in several places, like Milan, Italy, St. John’s, Newfoundland and Toronto, Ontario before moving to Western Massachusetts in 2011.
She has an undergraduate degree from the University of Western Ontario in London and a Master of Fine Arts in poetry and translation from Vermont College. Since 2014 she has worked at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s homestead in Lenox, MA; first as a docent, then as bookstore manager, and currently as Public Programs Director. Continue reading POETRY MONDAY: JULY 4, 2022
Poetry Monday: June 6, 2022
Jamey Hecht
Good morning, everyone! This is beginning to sound like same-old, same-0ld, but that’s because it is.
Depending on where we live and percentages of viruses, vaccinations, masking and hand-washing, we’ve all seen recommendations go up and down and, being the intelligent rule-followers that we are, we’ve done our best to obey.
But it’s exhausting – and even expensive, as our prices also go up and down. It’s at times like these that we most need the soul-healing experience of poetry.
With this in mind, I’m happy to introduce you to a wonderful poet named Jamey Hecht.
He’s new to me and probably not new to many of you, because he’s been writing for a very long time. Jamey is the author of five books to date: Plato’s Symposium: Eros and the Human Predicament (Twayne, 1999); Sophocles’ Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the Tyrant, Oedipus at Colonus, a translation with commentary, (Wordsworth Editions, 2005); Bloom’s How to Write about Homer (Chelsea, 2010); and two books of poetry. Limousine, Midnight Blue (Red Hen Press, 2009) is fifty elegies for President Kennedy. Dodo Feathers: Poems 1989 – 2019 is a collection published by IPBooks. Continue reading Poetry Monday: June 6, 2022