The Artful Souls To Everyone

Presenting an original hodgepodge of creative wistfulness, humor and social inclusivity, this Tuesday’s featured PoemAlley reader, novelist/poet Esther Cohen hails from Manhattan, where she serves as Executive Director of Bread & Roses, the cultural arm of 1199/SEIU, New York’s health care union.

Esther is the author of two novels, No Charge for Looking (Schocken), a 1988 distillation of her obsession with Jews, Arabs and the city of Nazareth “and a naive American woman trying hard to understand what she sees” and Book Doctor (Counterpoint, 2005), a hilarious but tender swirl of romance, creative aspiration-channeled-through revenge, and writer’s block revolving around the conflicted life of Arlette Rosen, the titular manuscript consultant.

Two titles from 2008, God Is a Tree and Other Middle-Aged Prayers (Pleasure Boat Studio) and Don't Mind Me: And Other Jewish Lies (Hyperion), display her humor in non-narrative format, the first, a collection of poetry, the second, “the complex, but all too familiar, language of the Artful Untruth”, illustrated with New Yorker panache by Roz Chast.

Growing out of her work at Bread & Roses, Esther also edited Unseenamerica: Photos and Stories by Workers (Regan Books, 2006), based on a Pure Visionary Award-winning photography program she created wherein thousands holding assorted blue collar jobs were taught how to document in black-and-white images the poignancy and  joys of their lives, as well as--to quote program participant Sam Contreras, a building maintenance worker--the “artful souls to everyone.”

In fact, her simple response to this excerpt from “For Memory” from Adrienne Rich’s A Wild Patience has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978-1981 says everything about Esther’s fervent humanism:

Freedom. It isn’t once, to walk out

under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers

of light, the fields of dark—

freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine

remembering. Putting together, inch by inch

the starry worlds.

           

To which, Esther says, “Ditto!”

Mentioning on her website (http://esthercohen.com/) how Book Doctor “took years to write”, Esther’s dedication to the shaping of self-definition through self-expression (for her, the mystery road of the writing process and who she meets along the way), rather than through practical vocation, alone, finds sympathy in the character of Jack Bellicec, a poet frustrated by the gimmicky expectations of the “Me” Generation, played by Jeff Goldblum in Philip Kaufman’s claustrophobic Invasion of the Body Snatchers (United Artists, 1978):

In inventive opposition to the small-town intimacy of Donald Siegel’s 1956 original film (click here for more about the germinal Jack Finney novel), the setting is now switched to frenetic, jumbled San Francisco, where the price of taking for granted the seemingly autonomic urban conveniences and services provided through the work of semi-ignored cabbies, garbage collectors, telephone linemen and other stewards of the cityscape who seem to have stepped right out of Unseenamerica, is an inhuman automatonicism threatening to engulf all our lives.









You can contact Esther Cohen at bookdoctor@rcn.com.