Tag Archives: Saul Bennett

A Poem for Cassia Berman

What a shock: Cassia Berman dead, who’d always seemed so young with her moon big cheeks and world-spreading smile under that great curly crop of white hair; an unabashed hippie in her long flowing clothes, stylish and true to herself. … Continue reading

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How I Wrote “My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse”

In the early 1990s, I wrote my first poems on a whim one weekend at a Zen monastery in the western Catskills. At the time I lived in Manhattan with my wife, worked at a small environmental magazine, and didn’t … Continue reading

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Saul Bennett Memorial Poetry Books at the Woodstock Library

My late friend and poetry ally, Saul Bennett, was a library hound. I still remember walking back to the poetry section then in the Siberian corner of the building on a slow afternoon to find Saul already there, doing what … Continue reading

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God, Lynn Domina, and Gerard Manley Hopkins

My late friend and poetry mentor, Saul Bennett, though deeply immersed in his Jewish heritage that began with his boyhood in Sunnyside, Queens during World War Two, loved no poet as much as Gerard Manley Hopkins, the little Jesuit priest … Continue reading

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Michael Czarnecki, Chinese Poet

Where to begin? Perhaps with the publication of Robert Milby’s book, Ophelia’s Offspring, which set to page the declamatory poems inspired by Baudelaire, Shelley, Tom Waits, and doomed Romantics everywhere that Robert delivers night after night in the coffee houses … Continue reading

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Saul’s Gifts, Part Two

(The July/August 2011 issue of The Country and Abroad has published my earlier reminiscence about my late friend and mentor, Saul Bennett. There’s one more piece to the story…) Saul’s Gift, Part Two I dreamed I stood outside my death … Continue reading

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Saul’s Gifts

(Written to honor the wedding of Elizabeth S. Bennett and Benjamin E. Ross on April 3, 2011) The brass klezmer music bounced off the brick walls of the old brass foundry transformed into a wedding hall as big as a … Continue reading

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