Geri Rosenzweig reading at riverrun

photo by Dan Wilcox
May 18, 1986



I wasn't at this reading. My youngest daughter had just been born. I'm sorry I missed it though.
All these years later, my daughter is 23 now and I've just begun to read Rosenzweig's poetry. I love it.

People who know more about this kind of thing will have smarter things to say about poetry, but this is what I think.

Prose is designed for broadcast. People with a wide range of experience and thinking patterns can connect with something written in prose. Poetry is tighter, like a laser, or more romantically, like an arrow. The poems responder-audience is far narrower. Sometimes poems that resonate brilliantly with one person entirely miss another.
Between the right kind of person and their right kind of poetry, the poem penetrates deeper. The arrow goes right to the heart.

I'm on target for Rosenzweig's poetry. Right to my heart.


As always, Dan Wilcox's poetry blog is a treat.

more resources for Geri Rosenzweig:

G. R.'s introduction, The Music of What Happens, to her book Under the Jasmine Moon
Two Poems
The Cortland Review
The Youngest Daughter published in Barnwood
Barnwood Rosenzweig bio
from the Annals of Modern Medicine
some poems