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?
Marion Deutsche Cohen is the author is 27 books, poetry and prose. Her latest three were published in 2016: What I’m Wearing Today (dancing girl press), Closer to Dying (WordTech Editions), and Truth and Beauty (WordTech Editions. The latter is about the interaction among students and teacher in her course Mathematics in Literature, which she developed and teaches at Arcadia University in Glenside PA.
Among her other books include Crossing the Equal Sign, and two memoirs of spousal chronic illness.
Other interests are classical piano, singing, Scrabble, thrift-shopping. She has four grown children, and two grandchildren.
Please see Marion’s website for more of her writing.
Poems read in the podcast are from her newest collection Truth and Beauty, which is available from WordTech Editions.
(My apologies for the quality of this recording. I do not know why the Skype recording quality is lower than previous interviews.)
Original music and artwork by Karl R. Powell.
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Oh, my goodness–I met Marion almost 40 years ago in Philadelphia when I was an extremely naive beginning poet and she was writing math poems, poems about loss of a child, poems about a mature life I could only imagine! (Even though she is not much older than I, she learned to be a grownup much faster than I did.) We have not crossed paths in many years, though we have mutual acquaintances in the Philadelphia area & at Arcadia. Thanks for this interview, and don’t worry about the quality of the recording. It was listenable.