Writing Journey: A lifeline in poetry
From childhood I relished being read poems aloud by my mother. On Saturday mornings, she took us to visit her father and he—ever the high school English teacher—often gave my brother and me a poem to learn by heart and recite. In high school, my beloved drama teacher from Wales introduced me to the poems of Dylan Thomas and we spent hours after rehearsal listening to gravelly recordings of Thomas reading: “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/drives my green age.”
My green age began at 50 when I started to write about memories of my mother. I first tried prose, but the words paled in relation to the emotional colors. Then the poems began, spilling onto the page, intense in their tumbling out.
When I published my chapbook, Point of Attachment, it had been 40 years since I lost my mother. In Jewish tradition, the people of Israel wandered in the desert for four decades. For me writing poetry is like having a pocket compass while wandering in a dry liminal space, and to complete a poem is to reach a small oasis—not the Promised Land, but a degree of emotional clarity. But the feeling of reaching water is temporary: there is always the next stretch of desert, unquenchable thirst.
Poetry is a journey, demanding and unpredictable: please join me on the expedition.
Bio
Ann Bookman is a poet, anthropologist and social justice advocate. She has been studying poetry for twenty years with Boston area poets and in residential workshops at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. Her poems have been published in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose, Chronogram, Larcom Review, and Soul-Lit: A Journal of Spiritual Poetry, among others. In 2012 she published a chapbook, Point of Attachment, with Finishing Line Press. Her first full collection, Blood Lines, was published by Kelsay Books in 2022.
Bookman’s forty year career in academia has been bookended by positions focused on women’s creativity, potential and power. Early in her career she served as Associate Director of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College working with an interdisciplinary group of women scholars, writers and artists and curating a group art exhibition for the Institute’s 25th anniversary. From 2013 through 2018, she was Director of the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy at UMass Boston, training women for public service and weaving an intersectional feminist perspective into her teaching, research and activism.
Bookman holds a BA from Barnard College and a PhD in social anthropology from Harvard University. She held several research and teaching positions in the academy, including Brandeis University, MIT and the College of the Holy Cross. A nationally known scholar and policy expert in women’s issues, work/family balance and community engagement, she has published widely in scholarly journals and is the co-author with Sandra Morgen of Women and the Politics of Empowerment (Temple University Press) and the author of Starting in Our Own Backyards: How working families can build community and survive the new economy (Routledge)
She also worked in government as a presidential appointee during the Clinton administration, serving as Policy and Research Director of the Women’s Bureau at the US Department of Labor and Executive Director of the bipartisan Commission on Leave assessing the impact of the FMLA on employees and employers.
Bookman is a Senior Fellow at the McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies of UMass Boston. She serves on the Board of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and is a National Council member of Graywolf Press. As a volunteer with 826 Boston, Bookman serves as Poet-in-Residence at the John O’Bryant School in Roxbury, nurturing the creative writing skills of students in grades 7-12 and helping to publish the student literary magazine, RUBIX. Born and raised in Manhattan, she lives in Boston and Columbia County, NY with her husband, Eric Buehrens.