Frederick Feirstein: Blog

After I wrote the short dramatic monologues in Survivors, and the long dramatic monologue, Manhattan Carnival, I thought I would write a sequence of interlocking dramatic monologues that would also be a verse play: The Psychiatrist At The Cocktail Party. It was also produced in a theater in NYC. At the time I wrote it, I was writing musical movies for the producer of FAME. Then, I was forty and my autobiography at that age was published in the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series (vol. 11, by Gale Research Inc.). 

  You can read The Psychiatrist At the Cocktail Party by clicking on this link.

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My best known poem is the dramatic monologue/verse play, Manhattan Carnival, which was performed onstage in NYC, LA, and Cambridge. I wrote it when I was 33, and it was published 8 years later by a small press. It was one of two books that were Pultizer Prize finalists.  My publisher was told that it didn't win because the Pultizer committee wanted to give the prize to a big press book.  Wade Newman and other have written that it started the Expansive Poetry/New Formalism movement.  Most of it was published in the Kenyon Review, under Frederick Turner's editorship.  All of can be found at this link.

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My eighth book of poems, FALLOUT, was published in 2009 by Word Press. It can be ordered from wordtechcomminications.com or by snail mail at P.O,. Box 541106, Cincinannati, OH 45254-1106.Check their website for the price which should be $18 plus shippping charges. It will be on Amazon as well. What follows is the cover:(Click on the picture for a larger version)

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These are new poems from my forthcoming book. They've previously been published
in Poetry, Partisan Review, Quarterly Review of Literature, Ontario Review, and Pivot.

WHAT HAPPENED

What happened to Mozart who sang like a bird

More golden than Yeats’ imagination wrought,

Where is Shakespeare’s passionate thought,

Does his ghost pace on Hamlet’s stage?

And what of Dante who consigned to Hell

His former friends who did not treat him well?

Where is Sophocles whose simple myth

Became the basis of psychoanalysis.

And Freud who smoked his mouth to death,

What happened to him, to his depth

Of soul – is it lying like a clay shard

In an earthen hole, and poor Dylan Thomas

Who ranted “Death shall have no dominion,”

Knowing he lied, or the Brothers Grimm,

What became of them, dust in sunlight

Turned like a clock – watch it long enough

And you’ll go mad, or Paganini

Whose fingers danced and women swooned,

Or Gower, or Chaucer who made

Such exquisite mixes of English and French
The birds that slepen al with open eye

Would weep to hear the Earth took him?

What happened to Donne who would have us listen

To sermons...

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