“Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch”
W. W. Norton & Co., 2009
If Israel had a Mount Rushmore-type memorial for poets, the late Dahlia Ravikovitch would be part of the monument. Although little known to American readers, she is admired in Israel as much, if not more, than Yehuda Amichai and viewed as a canon unto herself. Born in Ramat Gan in 1936, she published her first poem at eighteen and was a constant voice and presence in Israeli poetry and politics until her death in 2005, achieving, for many, the status of a fifth matriarch. When she received the Israel Prize in 1998, the country s highest literary honor, she was cited as a central pillar of Hebrew poetry during the fifty years of statehood.
Haunted and inspired by dreams of Ferlinghetti
Joan Gelfand
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Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1970Sam Falk / New York Times 1970
At 11:30 on Tuesday morning, my cell phone began crazily ringing with text notifications. I was in Golden Gate Park enjoying the midwinter break a sunny, 70-degree day in San Francisco.
“Larry!” one said. “Holy Ferlinghetti,” said another. “Sad about Larry” was a third. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the giant among poets worldwide, had passed at 101.
Ferlinghetti first came into my life when I was a freshman in high school. My father had just passed, and books and reading were my love and my escape. “The Coney Island of the Mind” was the first book of poetry that gave me an inkling that I, too, could commit words to paper. Free verse poems were taking their place in the literary canon. Ferlinghetti’s poems “broke open letters.”