Interviewer vs. Interviewer

Interviewer vs. Interviewer
( Click on picture to view) Elizabeth Lund--Host of Poetic Lines interviews Host of Poet to Poet-- Doug Holder

Thursday, July 12, 2018

July 17, 2018. Brandeis Women's Center Resident Scholar Rosie Rosenzweig


Rosie Rosenzweig

Rosenzweig’s early poetry was anthologized in the first gender-friendly American Hebrew prayer book as well as in various feminist anthologies. As the founder of the Jewish Poetry Festival in Sudbury Massachusetts, she hosted outstanding luminaries like the former the poet laureate Robert Pinsky.  Her more current poetry is being collected in a work-in-progress.

Rosenzweig’s interpretations of Biblical women appear in Reading Between the Lines, All the Women Followed Her, and Praise Her Works: Conversations with Biblical Women. Her essays have appeared in Ethical Wills, Making the Jewish Journey from Mid-life through the Elder Years, and the Foreword. Her travel memoir, A Jewish Mother in Shangri-la describes the Jewish Buddhist World of meditation.

Women’s Intergenerational issues have been a focus of her work and a recently completed a play, “Myths and Ms.” At Brandeis for almost a decade, she has been interviewing artists in various media and hosting a yearly panel at the Brandeis Rose Art Museum on the creative process in an effort to understand the psychological and spiritual state of consciousness present at the moment of creation. Defining how creativity can transform the artist, she has currently coined  a term called MotherArtTM.

Current Projects

My book-in-progress will newly define the process of creativity based on ten years of interviews with women artists and will re-define Mindfulness Meditation. The book’s thesis uses Buddhist Psychology to analyze the theory of Flow. My published article demonstratives the transformative effects of the creative process. The current book proposal will be finished this year. 

Representative Publications

Rosenzweig, Rosie. “MotherArtTM and Maternal Health: Transformation from Grief To Compassion.” Journal of the Association for Research in Mothering. York University, Toronto, Canada. Volume 11. Number 1. (2009): 224–238.

Rosenzweig, Rosie. “Post-triumphalism and the New Haskalah.” in New Jewish Feminism: Probing the Past, Forging the Future edited by Rabbi Elyse Goldstein, 397–403. Woodstock Vermont: Jewish Lights Publications, 2009.

Wednesday, July 04, 2018

I Wish Francisco Franco Would Love Me by Gloria Mindock






I Wish Francisco Franco Would Love Me
by Gloria Mindock
Copyright © 2018 Gloria Mindock
Nixes Mate Books
Allston, MA
ISBN 978-0-9993971-9-0
Softbound, 48 pages, $9.95

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

In her latest book of poetry Gloria Mindock resurrects Francisco Franco, the one-time brutal dictator of Spain. In previous works Mindock has provided descriptions of how dictatorships swim in the blood of victims. In I Wish Francisco Franco Would Love Me, Mindock uses Franco’s obsessiveness with a voice that shouts for an end to the cruelty of dictatorships everywhere.

Here is “Dictator” in which she tells readers about Franco and his ongoing need to destroy people:

A dictator is not a spectator.
A spectator is not a dictator.
Why do you make everyone in Spain listen?

Some will betray you, rise-up.
You do not love!
You do not love!
Brutal Franco!
Brutal Franco!
You slob!
Messy in the heart. Kicking it out of your chest.

Even your heart knows you have secrets
cascading down into your pants.

Throats are slit today, bullets are fired, bombs dropped.
Plaza’s preserved as killing fields.

Big man Franco leaves terror.
Too many Fathers are dead.
Never to hold their children again.
Killing in Bejar today …
Fascist!
Randomly killing what suits you.

Mindock is a particularly fine poet whose many dark works awaken people to the evil conduct of dictators-- which is often minimized in history and in the media, until the brave come forth to reveal the excesses of violence:

*In Les Milles a young girl raped at the age of ten somehow survives and is rescued so
“One less surrounded by dark colored roses,/a chill in the air and scars left on the face”

*”Big Killer Franco – Men want to shoot you in the back.? Turn your head towards them Franco./ Look them in the eye as they fire./But they don’t fire./You say, execute them and walk away./A grin on your face…/Customary.”

*”Franco murdered memories./The dead converse with their screams”

*”A hat falls on the ground boldly/hugging the blood”

And in the poem Orbit Mindock describes the aftermath of a bomb perfectly placed:

One bomb lunges
Chars the sunrise
Whispering graves now a museum
Scars left
Bones face the other planets
A planet showing what exile is

Mindock’s poetry is never to be taken lightly. It thrives on blood, torture and evil individuals while always letting the reader know that she is on the side of the oppressed wherever they live. In Blood Soaked Dresses and The Whiteness Of Bone she addressed the horrors of Central American dictatorships. And in this latest endeavor she reminds anyone who may want to remember Gen. Francisco Franco in some positive manner that he was nothing but another vicious despot.

Tuesday, July 03, 2018

July 10, 2018 Alan Bingham author of Dying Well Prepared-- 5PM

Alan Bingham
  See it live at 5PM   http://scatvsomerville.org



Alan Bingham is the author of  Dying Well Prepared  Conversations and Choices for Terminal Patients. He is a retired hospice and palliative care executive who has spent many hours with terminal patients and their families. A management graduate with a liberal arts background in philosophy he spent most of his career in healthcare informatics, working on HIPAA (starting with its genesis in the Kennedy Kassebaum Bill), developing medical records systems, becoming a HIPAA compliance officer and an Ombudsman working in nursing homes. An Australian who now lives in Somerville, Massachusetts he is active in his community.