Happy 103rd birthday to Naomi Replansky!

From "The Oasis"

 

I thought I held a fruit cupped in my hand.

Its sweetness burst

And loosed its juice. After long traveling,

After so long a thirst,

     I asked myself: Is this a drought-born dream?

     It was no dream.....

 

Naomi's Collected Works will soon be re-issued with a new cover!

Watch here for future announcements.

Naomi Replansky on the Women's Right to Vote

11 Female Voices, From Age 13 to 110, on Why the Vote Matters

“Your right.” “A duty.” “A very sacred act.” A century after suffrage, women reflect on what it means to them.

....When I was 10, in 1928, the campaign of Al Smith (then New York State governor) for president, against Herbert Hoover, was fierce. In my neighborhood, the East Bronx of New York, with a mixed population of Italians and Jews, mostly immigrants, all the kids were for Al Smith. Probably so were their parents. Election propaganda was chalk writings on the walls: “Hoover stinks on ice” was a popular slogan for us kids. Al Smith lost. Later, I learned that one of the main reasons he lost was because he was Catholic. That bigotry stuck in my puzzled, childish mind....

To read the full article, featuring poet Naomi Replansky at 102, former Secretary of State Madelaine Albright, actresses Betty White and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, tennis player Billie Jean King, Cindy McCain, activists, authors, and more, see New York Times 8/28/20.

Naomi Replansky is the author of Ring Song, a National Book Award finalist. Her Collected Poems is available from publisher Black Sparrow Press, an imprint of David Godine, or from your local or online bookstore.

Naomi Replansky’s poetry rings with reality and wisdom, and it is always song. Her observant, political wit and gravity are as piercing and as necessary now as ever – and I would say more so . . . her voice and her way of reading are among the very best we have.
—Jean Valentine

Naomi Replansky 102nd Birthday

Poet Naomi Replansky turned 102 this May. Here's a poem in honor of this event:

Trying to Paint Clouds

Trying to paint clouds,
I fix my feet to the ground.

O white travelers
with your umber bellies
rushing through
that blue neighborhood!
So much speed up above, I spin backwards down below.
So much change up above,
my brush is outraced
every swirling second.

From The Dangerous World, 1994

Naomi Replansky 100th Birthday Reading at Poets House

 

Naomi Replansky 100th Birthday Reading, May 23, 2018 - 7:00PM at the Poets House.

Naomi Replansky has been praised by Philip Levine as a “warrior for social justice” and B.H. Fairchild as “the master of a Blakean music radically unfashionable in its devotion to songlike meters and the reality and politics of working-class experience.”

Replansky was born in 1918 in New York City and is author of Ring Song (1952), a nominee for the National Book Award; Twenty-One Poems, Old and New; and The Dangerous World: New and Selected Poems, 1934–1994. Replansky's Collected Poems was published by David R. Godine in 2011. Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies including No More Masks!, Against Infinity: An Anthology of Contemporary Mathematical Poetry, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust; Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies; and Poets of the Non-Existent City: Los Angeles in the McCarthy Era.

 May 23, 2018 - 7:00PM at the Poets House Elizabeth Kray Hall.
$10, $7 for students and seniors, free to Poets House members

The Poets House is located at 10 River Terrace, New York City, (212) 431-7920.

Naomi Replansky Receives William Carlos Williams Award

From Black Sparrow Press:

"We're thrilled to announce that Naomi Replansky's "Collected Poems" has won the 2013 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America! Congratulations, Naomi!"

Also, read this article at the Huffington Post about Naomi's work.

The Dangerous World

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The Dangerous World collects seventy-some poems of Naomi Replansky's written between 1934 and 1994, some previously published in Ring Song. Published by Another Chicago Press, it is unfortunately now out of print. Selected poems are posted below on this blog.