Celebrating Elvis Presley's Birthday in Poetry and Song

Elvis reading

Expressing Elvis: Celebrating Elvis Presley's Birthday in Poetry and Song is an event in Ridgewood, NJ on January 8, 2011.

"Elvis Presley is Alive and Well on Lincoln Avenue in Fair Lawn, New Jersey...." So reads the title of a poem by Maria Mazziotti Gillan.

On that same road but a little farther north -- in Ridgewood -- Elvis will be coming back. He will be alive and well -- in poetry and song.

It seems like every poet has an Elvis poem or two. In honor of Elvis Presley's birthday, join poets Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Laura Boss, James Gwyn, and others as they share their Elvis poems.

January 8, 2011, from 1-4 pm at Ridgewood Christian Reformed Church, 271 Lincoln Avenue, Ridgewood, NJ. Plenty of free parking. A large space to accommodate all manner of bards and balladeers. Express Elvis in verse or in any variety of expression. Come on out to listen or to participate. Tune up your guitar. Dust off your jumpsuit. It will be a memorable afternoon. It's free. All are welcome.

Note to Poets: If you'd like to participate, please submit your intent to James Gwyn at ERGO.therefore@gmail.com by Dec. 31st so he can get a reading list together. RSVP

Note to Singers: Acoustic, please. There are some mics, but best to bring your own. RSVP

Caring Communication Heals - Bringing Caregivers Closer

The Victor A. Bressler Humanities in Medicine Retreat

Caring Communication Heals - Bringing Caregivers Closer

The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey • Carnegie Library • Atlantic City, NJ

Friday, December 10, 2010

Featuring Keynote Speakers: John L. Coulehan, MD, MPH, FACP and poet on “Gentle and Humane Temper: Empathy and Engagement in Clinical Practice,” and Jon Nussbaum, PhD, speaking on “The Challenge of Effective Intergenerational Communicatio."


Caregivers attending the 20th Annual “Bringing Caregivers Closer” will explore the role of ethical healthcare communication inspired by the arts and humanities which are vital to the healing process.

Panelists and breakout leaders include poets and writers, Renee Ashley, Barbara Daniels, Douglas Goetsch, Kenneth Hart, Penny Harter, Diane Kaufman & J.C. Todd. Facilitated by Peter E. Murphy.

Breakout sessions involve reading, discussing and writing poetry and short prose pieces.

7:45 a.m. - 8:15 a.m. Registration & Continental Breakfast
8:30 a.m. - 4:15 p.m. Presentations

$20 to offset cost of meals (Includes continental breakfast & lunch)

CME's available for Physicians, Nurses, Social Workers, Marriage and Family Therapists, Licensed Professional Counselors and NJ Public Health Professionals.

Pre-registration required

Target Audience: Physicians, Residents, Nurses, Physician Assistants, Nurse Practitioners, Multi-Disciplinary Allied and Mental Health Professionals, Physical/Occupational Therapists, First Responders, Poets, Writers, Students of the Humanities and Public Health.

• Utilize a variety of approaches, including lecture, panel, small group discussion, review of literature
and personal writing to explore barriers and solutions in healthcare communication.
• Analyze poems, short fiction, non-fiction and personal writing to recognize their personal choice and responsibility to communicate ethically to foster healing communication.


Information and registration link, or call 1-888-569-1000

This Is Your Brain on Metaphors

"This Is Your Brain on Metaphors" is an essay by Robert Sapolsky that I read on The New York Times’s website. Sapolsky is a professor of Biology, Neurology and Neurosurgery at Stanford University, and is a research associate at the Institute of Primate Research, National Museums of Kenya.

It doesn't sound like the CV for someone to discuss metaphors.

He starts by talking about why humans beat out gophers and fruit flies even though
under a microscope they look the same. Neurons are the same basic building blocks in both species.

So where’s the difference? It’s numbers — humans have roughly one million neurons for each one in a fly. And out of a human’s 100 billion neurons emerge some pretty remarkable things. With enough quantity, you generate quality.

So, we can understand symbols, metaphors, analogies, parables, synecdoche, figures of speech and all the stuff of poetry.

We understand that a captain wants more than just hands when he orders all of them on deck. We understand that Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” isn’t really about a cockroach. If we are of a certain theological ilk, we see bread and wine intertwined with body and blood. We grasp that the right piece of cloth can represent a nation and its values, and that setting fire to such a flag is a highly charged act. We can learn that a certain combination of sounds put together by Tchaikovsky represents Napoleon getting his butt kicked just outside Moscow. And that the name “Napoleon,” in this case, represents thousands and thousands of soldiers dying cold and hungry, far from home.

He cites a number of studies. I like this example of how the brain links the literal and the metaphorical. It was a study by Lawrence Williams and John Bargh where volunteers would meet one of the experimenters, believing that they would be starting the experiment shortly. Actually, the meeting itself was the experiment. They asked the volunteer to briefly hold their coffee cup - a cup that was hot or iced. The subjects then read a description of some individual, and those who had held the warmer cup tended to rate the individual as having a warmer personality, with no change in ratings of other attributes.

I'm not sure how all this science will help you finish that poem that you last started, but maybe...

Books by Robert Sapolsky

• Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers
• Monkeyluv: And Other Essays 
• A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons
• Our Lives as Animals
• The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays On The Biology Of The Human Predicament
• Junk Food Monkeys and Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament
• Stress, the Aging Brain, and the Mechanisms of Neuron Death

Kim Dower:Joan Didion meets Tinker Bell

I had not heard of poet Kim Dower until I read an article about her "return" to poetry. For several decades, she had turned her back on the poet's life she was leading in Boston for a literary publicist's career in Los Angeles.

"Poetry came back to me," Dower says. "I never decided I'm going to start writing again. The truth is I was watching The O.C. with my son, who was at that point a senior in high school, and that was one of the few things we continued to do together. And I got up during a commercial break and I wrote a poem."

Maybe it's an inspiring story for those of us who feel some writer's block.

That was a few years ago and the spark must have caught fire because she has a collection out now titled Air Kissing On Mars from Red Hen Press.

Some samplings:

She can’t work

if the chair is there
she can’t think
if the clothes are dirty

She wrote at home, on nights and weekends after work for clients and traveled to poetry festivals and workshops in Florida and every summer for three years, she took 10 days at a nondescript hotel to write as the traffic rushed past on Pacific Coast Highway.

The Nudists Are Getting Ready to Pack

How do the nudists get ready to pack?
Do they pack in the nude
or do they dress to get in the mood?
What will the nudists pack
when the nudists are ready to pack?

These poems start from such normal places -

She’s awakened by a hair in her mouth.
It’s not enough to kill her, no
that would take a locomotive crashing
through her window, a train way off track

thundering through her bedroom,
the moon on its back,
simply a hair
stuck to the roof of her mouth,

and

They took the mailbox away

on Cahuenga and Clinton.
I know because I wasn’t feeling right,
decided to take a walk, figure things out,
remember why I love the clouds.
Found my rent check still in my purse,
gave me a goal, a project I could complete.
But when I got to the corner it was gone,
just space in the place where the box had been...

When she was told that her poems are like "Joan Didion meets Tinker Bell," she agreed that she has a "California sensibility – poems about driving, poems about L.A. and the quirkiness and desperation.. and the Tinker Bell element, I think I'm very whimsical."

The poems are accessible and often funny. Those are qualities that often don't serve poets well with critics. Think of the early success of Billy Collins. But deeper reading of many of the poems reveals deeper meanings.



Dower reads some true stories from her book in a noisy outdoor setting.