Click Here To Read: “They Fuck You Up,” Philip Larkin’s, This Be The Verse by Henry M. Seiden, Ph.D. ABPP.

This previously appeared as Seiden, Henry M. (Spring 2009).  “They Fuck You Up,” Philip Larkin’s, This Be The Verse.  Psychologist-Psychoanalyst, the newsletter of Division 39 (Psychoanalysis) of the American Psychological Association and appears here with all requisite rights and permissions.

  Continue reading POETRY MONDAY: May 4, 2009

 Freddy Frankel

Until now, all the poets we’ve featured have been those whose work we already knew and admired.  Today I have the pleasure of introducing someone whose poems arrived as a delightful surprise.  I was impressed, not only with the quality of his work but with the story of how he came, late in life, to devote himself to poetry. 

Continue reading April Poetry Monday

 Click Here To Read: Stephen Spender’s Jewish roots: Unlike W. H. Auden, Spender believed that poetry could make something happen by David Aberbach From The Times Literary Supplement on February 25, 2009.

 Stephen Spender

Linda McCarriston

I’ve been an admirer of Linda McCarriston’s work for many years, for the way she confronts trauma and pain, both her own and that of others, to create poems of layered complexity and grace.  What she gives us in her poems in this vein is not the recovery of repressed memories but stark personal witness — actual memories, courageously actualized.
 
Of her three excellent collections, Talking Soft Dutch, Eva-Mary and Little River, the award-winning Eva-Mary (Tri-Quarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press) has received the most attention  The first two poems below are from Eva-Mary; the third is a new, unpublished poem Linda McCarriston has generously agreed to share with us.  I know our readers will fully appreciate the depths these poems plumb, what they have to offer, and to whom.
  Continue reading POETRY MONDAY: Linda McCarriston

POETRY MONDAY: IRENE WILLIS

Welcome once again to Poetry Monday. This is to wish all of you a healthy, sufficiently prosperous and as happy a new year as you can achieve, given all that is happening on our precious Earth.

One thing I’m very grateful for is that International Psychoanalysis has continued to provide us with this space for poetry each month. For 2009, we are announcing a new policy. Although all of our poems thus far have been solicited, we are now opening submissions to all poets, year-round. We will welcome all kinds of poems, both formal and free verse and will guarantee them, if not acceptance, at least a careful reading and prompt /reply. Complete guidelines can be found by clicking here.

I thought it was about time I shared some of my own work with you and came out from behind the editor’s curtain, so here I am. My poems have been published in many journals and anthologies and in two collections, They Tell Me You Danced (University Press of Florida) and At the Fortune Café, to which Snake Nation Press awarded its 2005 Violet Reed Haas Prize. The poems below are all from my new and forthcoming book, Those Flames.

(Photo by Keith Emerling) 

Irene Willis
Poetry Editor Continue reading Poetry Monday: Irene Willis

 Karen Chase

Some of you may have already encountered the poems of Karen Chase.  Her poems have appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Gettysburg Review  and The New Republic, in the Norton anthologies Introduction to Literature and Introduction to Poetry,  in Billy Collins’ Poetry 180, and in two collections, Kazimierz Square and Bear. In 2007, however, she published a different kind of book – one that may be of special interest to readers of this publication.  The non-fiction Land of Stone: Breaking Silence through Poetry  (Wayne State University Press) is Chase’s account of two years during the decade she spent as Poet-in-Residence at a large psychiatric hospital outside of New York City.   Working one-on-one with a young man who refused to talk, she developed a technique that helped him break through his silence and begin to write poetry.  A gifted, intuitive teacher, she never violated her student’s privacy or dignity, nor did she overstep and confuse her role with that of the clinicians who were working with him in other ways.  Her technique, “I write a line/you write a line,” emphasized craft.  Pupil-teacher communication was about such things as metaphor and musicality. Remembering her own struggle to walk again when her legs were paralyzed from childhood polio helped her to do what she had to do to help her student.  Many of the poems they wrote together are included in this remarkable, sensitive and loving book, which was named the Bronze Medal winner of the 2008 Independent Publishers’ Book Award. 

Here, for our December offering, are three of  Karen Chase’s own poems.

  Continue reading POETRY MONDAY: KAREN CHASE

William Jay Smith

William Jay Smith, as many of you already know, is one of America’s greatest poets, translators and literary critics.  He was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (the position now known as Poet Laureate) from 1968-1970, has read his work and has had his work read all over the world, and at 90 years old, is still going strong. His thirteenth book of poems, Words by the Water, has just been published by Johns Hopkins University Press, and his memoir, Dancing in the Garden: A Bittersweet Love Affair with France by Bay Oak Publishers, Ltd. in Dover, Delaware.  He gave a wonderful, vigorous reading from both of these books in his hometown of Cummington, Massachusetts last month, where I had the pleasure of renewing my acquaintance with him. The last time I had seen him was in the early 90’s, when, at my invitation, he gave a joint reading at the Arts Council of Princeton (New Jersey) with Romanian poet Nina Cassian, whose work he had just translated.

 Smith’s poems are so direct, artful and timeless that some he wrote years ago, such as the famous “American Primitive,” can seem as if created to address our present moment.  Here is that poem, as well as one from his new book, and a translation to add to the global conversation.

                                                                        Irene Willis
                                                                        Poetry Editor

WILLIAM JAY SMITH

Two Poems and a Translation

American Primitive

Look at him there in his stovepipe hat,
His high-top shoes, and his handsome collar;
Only my Daddy could look like that,
And I love my Daddy like he loves his Dollar.

The screen door bangs, and it sounds so funny –
There he is in a shower of gold;
His pockets are stuffed with folding money.
His lips are blue, and his hands feel cold.

He hangs in the hall by his black cravat,
The ladies faint, and the children holler:
Only my Daddy could look like that,
And I love my Daddy like he loves his Dollar.

         from The Traveler’s Tree: New and Selected Poems
         Persea Books, 1980

Contemplation of a Conspiracy

 Where the table-leg projects into the yellow autumn
      sunlight
like the poor premise of an argument,
the plotters gather, rotting wood at a creek’s end
tirelessly planning the devastation of the spirit,
wiring the heart for a final explosion.

Where can they lead you but over the bridges of beetroot
into the country of spiders?

Do not follow them to their camp pitched in a cranny;
bring your fist down hard on the table …
                            and send them flying.

    from Words by the Water copyright 2008 William Jay Smith
    Reprinted with permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press

Do Not Forget

 by Andrei Voznesensky

Somewhere a man puts on his shorts,
his blue striped T-shirt,
his blue jeans;
a man puts on
his jacket on which there is a button
reading COUNTRY FIRST
and over the jacket, his topcoat.

Over the topcoat,
after dusting it off, he puts on his automobile,
and over that he puts on his garage
(just big enough for his car)
over that his apartment courtyard,
and then he belts himself with the courtyard wall.

Then he puts on his wife
and after her the next one
and then the next one;
and over that he puts on his subdivision
and over that his county
and like a knight he then buckles on
the borders of his country;
and with his head swaying,
puts on the whole globe.

Then he dons the black cosmos
and buttons himself up with the stars.
He slings the Milky Way over one shoulder,
and after that some secret beyond.

He looks around:
Suddenly
in the vicinity of the constellation Libra
he recalls that he has forgotten his watch.
Somewhere it must be ticking
(all by itself).

The man takes off the countries,
the sea,
the oceans,
the automobile, and the topcoat.
He is nothing without Time.
 
Naked he stands on his balcony
and shouts to the passers-by:
“For God’s sake, do not forget your watch!”

       a Russian translation from The Traveler’s Tree:
       New and Selected Poems.  Persea Books, 1980