Poetry by Robert David Cohen: Sam wants to be my friend

Sam who was born

At least once

Sam who

Is 4% Neanderthal

Sam who is pulsing like a firefly

In the buzzing evening

Sam who is happy like a worm in an apricot

Sam with a single love song like a finch

Sam who almost died and said

Fuck death

Like Leon Golub

Sam who is steeling and melting himself

Sam who is up and down to monkey business

Honey in his right ear

Shit in his left

A particle and a wave

Sam who inhabits svaha, the space between lightning and thunder

Sam who is rolling out dough on the powdered marble slab of his young life

Sam spiraling on a thermal

Sam wants to be

My friend

In the crime scene of the world!

-- New York, June 6, 2010

ABOUT ME

Poetry was a huge part of my life in the 60s. I wrote like a madman, published a bit, gave readings and was generally active in the New York poetry scene. Then I moved to Mexico -- where I co-edited El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn with Margaret Randall in 1968-69 -- and then to Cuba (1969-76), a period in which journalism and politics took center stage.

I returned to the US in 1976 and worked as a journalist at the UN and in Washington until 1990, when I joined UNICEF as speech writer (NY) and then communication officer (Mexico DF, Geneva and Panama City). Retired from UNICEF in 2008 and set up a New York and Pretoria-based communication consulting company with another former UN information officer, Paul Hoeffel.

I continued writing poetry over the years, published a chapbook but not much else. This blog gathers some of the poems written across the decades. I've indicated where some of them were published; most are seeing the light of day only here. I'll be adding poems -- old and new -- little by little.

Given how easy it is to edit texts on a blog, I probably won't be able to resist the impulse to tweak, so some of the poems just might continue to evolve before your very eyes.

Enjoy, comment, criticize!

PUBLICATIONS AND AWARDS

· Rebelion en Estados Unidos, Antologia Documental (Siglo XXI Editores, Mexico DF 1969)

· The New Yorker Book of Poems (Morrow Paperback Editions, New York, 1974)

· There is a Country, Poems 1969-1977 (West End Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1979)

Poems published in The New Yorker, Poetry magazine, Paris Review, Promethean, Angel Hair, Casa de las Americas, El Corno Emplumado, etc.

Awards: Discovery 65 (The Poetry Center); Book of the Month Club Young Writers' Fellowship (1967)

Sam wants to be my friend

No comments: