Sharon Olds                                                      Mary Jo Salter

Two recent poetry collections – one in 2012 and one just released – deal with a topic that should be of particular interest to our readers, both professionally, because so many of you are psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, but also personally, because so many have experienced it. The topic is divorce, which in past years, reflecting prevailing cultural attitudes, was not often discussed publicly. Divorce was viewed as failure, rather than success in fixing what was broken, and divorced people, especially divorced women, as flawed. Continue reading November Poetry Monday: Sharon Olds and Mary Jo Salter

Hilary Russell

Hilary Russell is the author of a chapbook of poems, Giving up the House (Mad River Press), The Anthology of American Poetry (Wayside Press), The Portable Writer  (Wayside Press), and, in a different mode, Building Skin-on-Frame Double Paddle Canoes (Berkshire Boat Building School Press). His poems have appeared in journals such as Ploughshares, Boulevard, The Beloit Poetry Review and George Washington Review.

Perhaps because he lived for thirteen years in rural Pennsylvania, where he hunted and fished with local people and loved both the land and the language, many of his poems are set in a fictitious town in Chester County, PA.His alter ego later became chair of the English Department of Berkshire School in Continue reading POETRY MONDAY: October 7, 2013

Click here to Read:  Ed Dorn and the politics of the New American Poetry By Andras Gyorgy on the World Socialist Web Site on  October 9, 2013.

Ed and Jennifer Dunbar Dorn at gallery opening, Pearl Street Mall, Boulder.

Roberta George

Welcome back, everyone.  I hope you’ve been enjoying a relaxing and reflective Labor Day weekend.

Our September poet, Roberta George, shares some details of a laborious childhood in “War Stories,” the last of the poems below.

Born in Brisbee, Arizona, Roberta George lived in California, Arizona  and Texas.  Almost every summer of her life, however, she spent with her German grandmother on a 20-acre farm in the South.  She has seven children and lives with her third-generation Lebanese husband in Valdosta, Continue reading POETRY MONDAY: September 2, 2013

Click Here to Read: The Midrashic Achievement of Poet John Hollander:  Yale Critic Dies at 83 By Benjamin Ivry on the Forward Mobile website on August 22, 2013.

Click Here to Read: Sylvia Plath’s Neighborhood By Roger Cohen in The New York Times on July 25, 2013.

Roger Cohen

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 Continue reading POETRY MONDAY: June 3, 2013