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Barbara Blatner

Goodreads Author

Website

http://www.BarbaraBlatner.com

Twitter

BarbaraBlatner

Genre

Poetry, Contemporary

Influences

Richard Bach, George Oppen, Sharon Olds, Ellen Hopkins, W.B. Yeats ...more

Member Since

September 2011

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Barbara Blatner is a playwright, poet and composer. In Fall 2010, New York Quarterly Books published her verse memoir about her mother's death, The Still Position, and in 2012 brought out a second full-length poetry collection, Living with You. Her play Years of Sky will be produced at 59E59 Theatres in New York City in the summer of 2013 by Scripts Up!, supported by a grant from the Driehaus Foundation.

Barbara’s verse play for Epiphany, No Star Shines Sharper, was produced for stage and radio by the Mystic Theatre Company in 2004, published by Baker’s Plays in 1990, aired repeatedly on National Public Radio stations and acquired by New York’s Museum of Television and Radio. Grassy Knoll was produced in the First Annual Boston Theatre Marat Barbara Blatner is a playwright, poet and composer. In Fall 2010, New York Quarterly Books published her verse memoir about her mother's death, The Still Position, and in 2012 brought out a second full-length poetry collection, Living with You. Her play Years of Sky will be produced at 59E59 Theatres in New York City in the summer of 2013 by Scripts Up!, supported by a grant from the Driehaus Foundation.

Barbara’s verse play for Epiphany, No Star Shines Sharper, was produced for stage and radio by the Mystic Theatre Company in 2004, published by Baker’s Plays in 1990, aired repeatedly on National Public Radio stations and acquired by New York’s Museum of Television and Radio. Grassy Knoll was produced in the First Annual Boston Theatre Marathon (1999) and appeared in Baker’s Plays anthology of plays selected from that event, and in New York’s Turnip Theatre Short Play Festival (1997). Shadow Play received a workshop production in the Cleveland Public Theatre’s 1993 New Plays Festival. Barbara’s adaptation of Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen was commissioned by New Voices and staged at the Boston Public Library. The Choice, a video about childbearing written and produced with Diane Woodbrown, was shown in the 1991 International Women’s Video Festival.

Work staged in Boston’s New Theatre’s NeWorks series includes Years of Sky (ten-minute version, Honorable Mention, Nina Shengold’s Actors and Writers Short Play Contest), Betty and Mortie (a musical), and Marilyn Monroe in the Desert. Clearing and White Ashes were finalists in the O’Neill International Playwrights contest, Postures was staged by the Capital Repertory Company, and The Fair was produced by the Albany Playwrights' Workshop which Ms. Blatner founded and where she worked as director, writer and composer under a CETA grant for four seasons. Compositions include songs for the 1989 Boston Shakespeare Company’s Irish Plays season, a score for the Merrimack Repertory Company’s Young Artists at Play Alice in Wonderland, and an instrumental score for New Theatre’s 1996 premiere of Rosanna Alfaro’s Pablo and Cleopatra.

Barbara’s chapbook of poems, The Pope in Space, was published by Intertext Press in 1986; poems, fiction and reviews have appeared in Beloved on this Earth (anthology), Heliotrope, House Organ, Poetry Northwest, The New York Quarterly, Lift, Apalachee Quarterly, 13th Moon, and others.

Ms. Blatner has taught Creative Writing and Composition at Yeshiva University since 2002. She received a Doctor of Arts in English from the SUNY-Albany, an M.A. in Creative Writing from Boston University, and a B.A. in Music Composition from Vassar College. ...more

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Barbara Blatner's Blog

a poem to return to/that returns you

The poem below is one I return to; it turns me toward what I love, toward the essence, the joy and the terror, the career and the crater of life.

When I read this poem, I hear the snakes moving in the garden. They are moving not only through the shrubbery of his garden - they are moving through the written lines, sleek and quick and sure.

They are the erratic beat of the poet's hours among the flow Read more of this blog post »

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Published on December 02, 2012 20:23 • Tags: kunitz, revelation, the-snakes-of-september

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Barbara Blatner’s books

Average rating: 3.17 · 6 ratings · 4 reviews · 5 distinct works

	The Still Position: A Verse Memoir of My Mother's Death 3.17 avg rating — 6 ratings — published 2010	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Pope in Space 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings — published 1986	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	LIVING WITH YOU 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings — published 2012	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	No star shines sharper: A verse play for Epiphany 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Grassy Knoll 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Quotes by Barbara Blatner (?)

“I could simply
kill you now,
get it over with,
who would
know the difference?
I could easily
kick you in, stove you
under, for all those times,
mean on gin,
you rammed words
into my belly. (p. 52)”
― Barbara Blatner

“oh.
she heard it
too-no waters
coursing, canyon
empty, sun
soundless-
and the beast
your life
nowhere
hiding (p. 103)”
― Barbara Blatner, The Still Position: A Verse Memoir of My Mother's Death

“...gripping the
rim of the sink
you claw your
way to stand
and cling there,
quaking with
will, on
heron legs,
and still the hot
muck pours
out of you. (p. 27)”
― Barbara Blatner, The Still Position: A Verse Memoir of My Mother's Death

See all Barbara Blatner's quotes »

Barbara’s Quotes

“once ruffle-skirted
vanity table where I primped
at thirteen, opening
drawers to a private
chaos of eyeshadows
lavender teal sky-blue,
swarms of hair pins
pony tail fasteners,
stashes of powders,
colonies of tiny
lipsticks (p.39)”
― Barbara Blatner, The Still Position: A Verse Memoir of My Mother's Death

tags: cancer, colon-cancer, death, death-and-dying, death-and-sickness, death-at-home, death-of-a-loved-one, memoir, mother, mother-and-child, mother-and-daughter, mother-and-son, poetry, poetry-quotes, verse

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“blue-gold sky, fresh cloud,
emerald-black mountain, trees
on rocky ledges,

on the summit, the tiny pin
of a telephone tower-all

brilliantly clear,
in shadow and out.

and on and through
everything
everywhere
the sun shines
without reservation (p. 97)”
― Barbara Blatner, The Still Position: A Verse Memoir of My Mother's Death

More of Barbara’s quotes…

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Barbara’s Groups

¡ POETRY ! — 22423 members — last activity 57 minutes ago
No pretensions: just poetry. Stop by, recommend books, offer up poems (excerpted), tempt us, taunt us, tell us what to read and where to go (to read No pretensions: just poetry. Stop by, recommend books, offer up poems (excerpted), tempt us, taunt us, tell us what to read and where to go (to read it!) Goodreads honors wordsmiths: poets and poetry promoted and prompted here. ~~~ "Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits." -- Carl Sandburg “God has a brown voice, as soft and full as beer.” —Anne Sexton On Clouds – “…what primitive tastes the ancients must have had if their poets were inspired by those absurd, untidy clumps of mist, idiotically jostling one another about…” —Yevgeny Zamyatin “If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn’t wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.” —Donald Hall “Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation’s tears in shoulder blades.” —Boris Pasternak “Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.” —Charles Simic “Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.” —Gustave Flaubert “Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.” —Allen Ginsberg. ~~~~~ Amy King, Moderator Amy King is the recipient of the 2015 Winner of the WNBA Award (Women’s National Book Association). Her latest collection, The Missing Museum, is a winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. She serves on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and is co-editing with Heidi Lynn Staples the anthology, Big Energy Poets of the Anthropocene: When Ecopoets Think Climate Change. She is also co-editing the anthology, Bettering American Poetry 2015, and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College. ...more

Goodreads Librarians Group — 292662 members — last activity 1 minute ago
Goodreads Librarians are volunteers who help ensure the accuracy of information about books and authors in the Goodreads' catalog. The Goodreads Libra ...more

NYQ Books — 21 members — last activity Jul 11, 2016 07:14AM
NYQ Books is an imprint of The New York Quarterly Foundation, Inc., a 501c3 non-profit dedicated to bringing poetry to the forefront of society.