This Choice is Who You Are has been my mantra these past years: a mantra for becoming the person I want to be. I believe that choosing to live with the attention that poetry demands is a good start.
In the Podcasts, I look to other artists to learn from their experiences.
I ask poets how their work with poetry influences the choices they make in their daily lives, and how these, in turn, affect their sense of self and their relationships.
How are they using the experience of art to shape The Good Life for themselves?
Richard M. Berlin is a physician and poet who received his undergraduate and medical education at Northwestern University. The winner of numerous poetry awards, his first collection of poems How JFK Killed My Father won the Pearl Poetry Prize and was published by Pearl Editions. His second collection of poetry, Secret Wounds won the 2010 John Ciardi Poetry Prize from the University of Missouri – Kansas City and was published by BkMk Press. In addition, Secret Wounds was chosen as the best poetry book of 2011 in the USA Book News Awards. His third collection of poetry Practice was published in 2015. He is also the author of two poetry chapbooks, Code Blue and The Prophecy. Berlin’s poetry has been published in a broad array of literary journals, medical journals and anthologies including the 2015 release of Liberation: New Works on Freedom from Internationally Renowned Poets. His column “Poetry of the Times” has been featured monthly for sixteen years in Psychiatric Times. He has also established a creative writing prize in honor of his father for medical students, nursing students, and resident physicians at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. A Senior Affiliate of Psychiatry at the medical school, he is the author of more than sixty scientific papers and has edited Sleep Disorders in Psychiatric Practice and Poets on Prozac: Mental Illness, Treatment, and the Creative Process. He practices psychiatry in a small town in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts.
Poems read or referred to in the podcast:
Stephen Dunn’s “Tenderness“.
Alfred Noyes’ “The Highwayman“.
“If You Ask Me My Name” by Richard M. Berlin.
“A Headlong Act of Love” by Richard M. Berlin
“The Fisherman” by Richard M. Berlin, published in the Liberation anthology, edited by Mark Ludwig and published by Beacon Press.
Original music and artwork by Karl R. Powell.
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