Poetry by Robert David Cohen: The cast of characters

“The cast of characters includes a Tyrannosaurus Rex, a cheerleading peanut and a banana.” – Cartoon Network press release about the debut of The Amazing World of Gumball, March 17, 2011

For the life of me
Here I stand

Avenue of the Americas

Central Park South

Looking up
At San Martin's statue
Libertador de Argentina, Chile y Peru

The cast of characters

Surely I am the only one in the world

Who at 10:15 in the morning

On this very day

Standing in San Martin’s shadow

Is taken into custody

By this joyful recollection:

Street musicians in Buenos Aires

In their 70s, maybe older

Worse for wear, hungover and drenched
In the Plaza de Mayo

The happiest and freest 4 humans alive

I walk into the park

I embrace

One by one

The Tyrannosaurus Rex

The cheerleading peanut

And the banana

What a cast of characters!

-- New York, March 23, 2011

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)

The cast of characters

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