Zara Raab

Happy New Year, everyone!  Well, it seems as if we’ve survived 2016  — and what a year it was.

Now, back to poetry, which is one of the things that helps us stay alive and human.

You must think so, too, or you wouldn’t be reading this page. Our poet today is someone whose sophisticated and mature work I had the pleasure of discovering only recently.  Zara Raab grew up in northern California, where her
grandparents’ grandparents settled in the 19^th century.  Settled now in western Massachusetts, she works on-line in media communications and is putting together two new books, leading workshops in formal aspects of poetry and helping out at MassPoetry.

Salman Akhtar

Good morning, and Happy New Year, everyone—the first day of 2018, after a tumultuous 2017.

In times like these, or at any time, it’s refreshing to read poetry, and I’m happy to say that our poet this morning is someone we’re honored to have on our pages, Salman Akhtar, who has contributed so much to our understanding of both poetry and psychoanalysis.

Dr. Akhtar, who comes from a family of renowned poets and writers in India, is himself the author of eleven poetry collections. I first encountered his work in a volume he edited called Between Hours: A Collection of Poems by Psychoanalysts (Karnac Books, 2012) and was struck by his poem in that book, “Summary.” With his permission, I was proud to include it in an anthology I edited, Climate of Opinion: Sigmund Freud in Poetry (IP Books, 2017).

Six of his eleven collections, The Hidden Knot (1985), Conditions (1993), Turned to Light (1998), After Landing (2014), Blood and Ink (2016), and Freshness of the Child (2018) contain his poems in the English language; the other five are in his native Urdu. He is also a prolific contributor to the psychoanalytic literature, having authored or edited eighty-nine books. For his distinguished contributions to psychoanalysis, he received the prestigious Sigourney Award in 2012.
A psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and teacher by profession, Dr. Akhtar has been a Visiting Lecturer in Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and currently is Professor of Psychiatry at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, Supervising and Training Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia and (probably of the greatest interest to poets) a Scholar-in-Residence at the Inter-Act Theater Company in Philadelphia.

We hope you will enjoy the following three poems by Salman Akhtar: “The Limit
of Instruction,” “A Wish,” and, reprinted here from Between Hours, “Summary.” In times like these, the third one is particularly instructive.

–Irene Willis
                                                 Poetry Editor

THE LIMIT OF INSTRUCTION