Robert Sward's Blog
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Jan.03.2010
I suppose my interest in autobiography began in Cambridge, MA, following a car accident in 1968, in which I was run over and then woke in the backseat of someone’s MG bleeding and unable to remember anything.
Nothing like losing your memory for a couple days to stimulate an interest in...
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Dec.28.2009
Esalen Institute, Big Sur, Weekend of April 9-11, 2010
Autobiography for Poets, Fiction and Non-fiction Writers
Robert Sward
"If someone asked you to sum up the story of your life in one sentence, what would it be?" asks Robert Sward. "If you had to choose just half a dozen family...
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Dec.27.2009
Blog is an extension of what I used to transcribe pen and ink into a hardcopy journal and/or writer's scrapbook. Blog is better, in part because it makes it easier to retrieve pastings from days, weeks, months, years ago... stories, images and info I may need later and need quickly... so what I...
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Dec.26.2009
"Do you wish it were otherwise?" my wife asks. "I mean, you know, that you were born an insider?"
"No, not at all," I say. Response is automatic and I trust it.
Apart from Christmas, I think of Von Steuben High School in Chicago where my baseball buddies created a...
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Dec.23.2009
--Can a tall, thin, 58-year-old Jewish man achieve fulfillment as a Rent-A-Santa?
A buxom aspiring female Santa Claus in a quilted down jacket swaggers out of room C1 in the Civic Center.
I'm next in line for my "Rent-A-Santa" interview....
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Dec.17.2009
North Bay Bohemian (Dec. 16 - 23) out today with my little Santa feature, Succeeding at Santa... subtitle: "Can a skinny, middle-aged Jewish man achieve fulfillment as a Rent-A-Claus?" See cover image and the editor's provocative phrase, "Goy to the World." The story of this...
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Dec.14.2009
Poetry. Marianne Moore has that wonderful opening line--to a poem called "Poetry"--, "I too dislike it..." Yet now and then people read it, and the spontaneous non-literary responses, especially, warm the heart, send one back... to writing... "Your poetry, especially as...
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Dec.04.2009
New Bloomsbury Review arrives with my interview with Ellen Bass, cover "Holding the Human Line, A Conversation With Ellen Bass." Sample:
RS - Do you feel you've created a persona? There is an authenticity to the poems in both Mules of Love and The Human Line, and I personally feel I am...
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Nov.29.2009
Fascinated, I've begun researching and documenting the history of poetry in Santa Cruz County. Historian Sandy Lydon has suggested I include poems like Santa Cruz Has Everything - But You and, in fact, plan to publish it soon in Santa Cruz Weekly's "Local Poets, Local Inspiration" feature...
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Nov.26.2009
I'm gearing up again as editor of Writers Friendship. For more, please see "on the nature of literary friendship." The series goes back many years and is now appearing online in a new format. General introduction to the series follows. Comments welcome!
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Introduction
“How...
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Nov.18.2009
Arne Christiansen now running the seven or so posts that make up Earthquake Collage on his blog (
Remembering the Loma Prieta Earthquake Collecting stories about the great quake of ‘89
which focuses on first person stories of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Postings appearing one a day, Day 1,...
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Nov.14.2009
Putting together notes for my April 9 – 11, 2010 Autobiography workshop (Esalen). I’m in that “Gathering” stage, reading, sifting, transcribing material from a wide range of sources… some will go into the outline which I plan to share with those attending… other material will be discarded or simply...
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Nov.11.2009
In a piece, a prose poem titled "The Library," Morton Marcus writes, "When I die I will be a book on a shelf in the library, and this notion doesn't bother me. I look forward to leaning against Melville and Montagine, and I can't wait to stand in the ranks..."
Saturday we...
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Nov.05.2009
Because poet Mort Marcus was a friend and ally, someone I've known since I moved to Santa Cruz in 1985, this Santa Cruz Sentinel article by Wallace Baine has special meaning. Most of what I post is original, but now and then something special comes along that I'd like to share... and it touches on...
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Oct.30.2009
Poet Mort Marcus phoned a few days ago fully conscious, fully present... and it was one of those brief, but complete... well, a goodbye conversation, exemplary... actually, Mort did most of the speaking... for my part, all I could think to say was, "O Mort, O Mort!
And then those last few...
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These are such, sad, generous poems--peopled with characters it's impossible not to love, especially Robert's podiatrist-Jewish-Rosicrucian father with his wisdom that bridges dualities expounding on the feet and the soul, sex and death, the broken and the whole. In one poem, Robert asserts, In a world of 'No, dogs are a Yes.' And in the world of poetry, this book is a resounding Yes. Read it when you're happy, but especially read it when you're depressed. You'll find yourself joining in with the many dogs in these poems, saying, 'Woof, woof f----in' woof!”
—Poet Ellen Bass
About Robert
Guggenheim Fellow, chosen by Lucille Clifton for a Villa Montalvo Literary Arts Award, author of more than 20 books, including Four Incarnations (Coffee House Press), Heavenly Sex, God is in the Cracks and The Collected Poems (now in its 2nd printing),...
Connections
Causes Robert Sward Supports
Audubon Society, National Geographic, "Green," the Environment, SPCA...
Robert’s Favorite Books
Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Saul Bellow's Adventures of Augie March, Ezra Pound's Make It New, T.S. Eliot's Collected Poems, The Autobiography of Benjamin...
Robert is a fan of
