Poetry! What is it good for?

Back at our usual poetry-reading haunt -- Gebhard's Beer Culture Bar -- Chris Brandt, Rebecca McKean and Alan Winson talk with poets Amy Barone and Ron Kolm -- about:Extinction / Gambling with God / Men's love of their penes / COVID / Bison comeback / Book thieves and Ceiling stompers / Suicide and Attempted suicide / and -- of course -- A child's bicycle. Can you resist?CONTACT: barcrawlradio@gmail.com

Phillis Levin’s poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Poetry magazine, Kenyon Review, among others, she has also published 5 collections of poems, and edited the sonnet anthology. She has taught at The University of Maryland, the Unterberg Poetry Center, the New School, and New York University, and currently is professor of English and poet-in-residence at Hofstra University. Among her honors are the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship and a residency at the American Academy in Rome Heather Dubrow holds the John D. Boyd Chair in the Poetic Imagination at Fordham; she specializes in early modern lyric poetry and Shakespeare. She also taught at the University of Wisconsin. Faced with the academic profession’s stigma that scholars should not be creative writers, Dubrow had given up writing poetry for twenty years, but returned to poetry in the 1990s. She has published two chapbooks and two collections. Among the journals where her poetry has appeared are Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Yale Review. She was co-director of Fordham's Poets Out Loud public reading series from Fall 2009 to Summer 2020.CORRECTION: Chris gave the wrong date for the publication of Phillis Levin's newest poetry book. An Anthology of Rain will be available after April 15, 2025.

It has been awhile since we have posted a "Poetry! What Is It Good For" episode. And this one was not done on Zoom but with the living poets before us at Gebhard's Beer Culture Bar on Manhattan's Upper West Side. For this conversation we talked about running live poetry readings with three poets and organizers: Anton Yakovlev is a well-published poet born in Moscow, Russia; he co-hosts the Carmine Street Metrics poetry reading series. We first heard about Lola Koundakjian when she hosted the World Poetry Movement's "For a World Without Walls" global poetry reading event. Lola heads up the Dead Armenian Poetry Society. And, Rachel Aydt has moved from writing poetry to short stories; she formerly co-hosted the Crystal Radio Sessions poetry reading series at a local UWS bar.

The Poetry Foundation editors write: “When major parts of our lives seem to change in a flash, we are reminded that poetry can help us to cope with new realities and to assess the unknowns ahead. When we are stepping out into uncharted terrain, alone or together, poetry can capture our emotions. It can share our vulnerabilities and scars, along with our strengths.”Today. we are sharing the first program of our new podcast co-produced with Chris Brandt -- “Poetry. What is it good for?” For this first episode, we explored the 20-year social and emotional after-tremors of the attack by Saudi Arabian terrorists on the United States through the powerful tool of poetry with J. Chester Johnson and Cornelius Eady. J. Chester Johnson is a poet, playwright, essayist, translator, speaker and teacher. He visited Bar Crawl Radio a couple of months ago to talk about his book – “Damaged Heritage” -- on the history and his family’s connection with the 1919 Elaine, Arkansas Massacre, one of many human crimes against humanity in which U. S. White citizens killed over 100 U.S. Black citizens and then prosecuted the survivors for their act of murder. Though Cornelius Eady, an American poet, focuses on issues of race and society, his verse accomplishes a lot more as indicated in his deeply felt reactions to the 9/11 attack on this country. Cornelius is also a musician whose verse is performed as song by The Cornelius Eady Trio. His poetry is simple and accessible, centering on jazz and blues, family life, violence, and society from a racial and class-based POV.

PWIIGF podcast brings together two poets who have something in common read and talk about their work. For this episode we consider how word, image and mass interact within the creative artist. Rick Mullin’s poetry has been published in many journals and anthologies, including The Dark Horse, American Arts Quarterly, The New Criterion, and Rabbit Ears:TV Poems. His collection “Lullaby and Wheel,” was published in 2019 by Kelsay Books. When he was in his mid-30s Rick visited the LosAngeles County Museum of Art and encountered paintings by Matisse, Braque and other Fauve artists that changed his life and he began to paint. Later, hebecame fascinated with the painter Chaim Soutine and wrote a biography of Soutine in poetry form. Thank you, Rick for joining us. Sculptor Meredith Bergmann creates public monuments exploring issues of history, social justice, race, human rights, disabilities, and the power of poetry andmusic. Bergmann’s work is well known in New York City for the FDR Hope Memorial on Roosevelt Island unveiled in 2019 – the September11th Memorial in Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 2012 – and most recently the “Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument” in Central Park. MeredithBergmann is also an accomplished poet and poetry critic -- her writing has appeared in Contemporary Poetry, Hudson Review and The New Criterion and she was poetry editor of The American Arts Quarterly from 2006 - 2017 

Coming out of the call for “Black Power” in the 1960s by Malcolm X and others, historian and playwright Larry Neal describes a new breed of Black artist taking on the contradictions of the Black person’s experience in the racist West and developing a “black aesthetic.” For this "Poetry--What Is It Good For?" episode, we talked with one of the lead architects of Black Arts Movement [BAM] poetry, Eugene B. Redmond -- the longtime poet laureate of East St. Louis -- and with poet and Redmond colleague Darlene Roy who has run the Eugene B. Redmond Writer's Club of E. St. Louis for several decades. The conversation ranged from the beginnings of BAM within the Black Power era of the 1960s -- to the important poets of the period -- to the changes that were happening in this country as "negro / colored" turned to "Black." Ms. Roy read from her book "Afrosynthesis: A feast of Poetry and Folklore."

We were joined by two world-class poets from Hispaniola -- Jean Dany Joachim writes in Haitian Creole and Spanish poet Rhina P. Espaillat who left the Dominican Republic as a young girl fleeing the Trujillo massacre of 1937. Their poetry cuts to the bone of the immigrant experience in simple but deeply revealing ways. This episode is a lively conversation with lovely people who interpret their poetry in most accessible performances.

Estha Weiner was born in Maine and from an early age, yearned to live in New York City and be an actress. Her early experiences as an actor and working for the BBC clearly show up in her poetry. Amongst her many other books of poetry – At the Last Minute – was published in Ireland in 2019. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic and Barrow Street and many others. Estha is an alum of Sarah Lawrence where she is the founding director of the College’s  NY Alumni/ae Writers Nights.  She is a Speaker on Shakespeare for The New York Council for the Humanities and is a Professor in the English Dept. at City College of NY, CUNY, and the Sarah Lawrence Writing Institute.Alan Walowitz has been writing poetry, sometimes successfully and sometimes un-, for more than 50 years. He has a small portion of an MFA in Writing from Goddard College, and an entire degree from Eastern Connecticut State University and several from Queens College of the City University of NY. And he studied with Estha Weiner. Though writing poems can be quite lucrative, Alan has earned the bulk of my fortune as a teacher and supervisor of secondary English for 34 years.  He is retired after teaching at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York. His poems can be found lots of places on the web and off.This podcast was recorded in January 2022 at Gebhard's Beer Culture Bar.