[ad_1]
Fran Castan in a press photo announcing she won the award. (Credit: Peconic Landing)
Fran Castan of Greenport is no stranger to writing about grief.
Her first collection of poems, The Widows Quilt (1996), pays tribute in part to her first husband, Sam Castan, Southeast Asia correspondent for Look magazine, killed while on a mission during the Vietnam War. . Today she received the UK Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine for her poem Voice Mail, on the loss of one of her closest friends to cancer.
He was a remarkable person. She was a composer, renowned poet, sculptor, painter, novelist, screenwriter she did all of these things. And they didn’t just stay in a room… they were really there, Ms Castan said of her friend, Siv Cedering from Sagaponack.
Ms. Cedering immigrated from Sweden to the west coast of the United States as a teenager. Allen Ginsberg even found her and thought she was amazing at the time, Ms Castan said. She never got the full recognition that her work deserved.
Ms Castan visited Ms Cedering several times a week during the last year of her life to help her prepare her latest book. Then I would go home and be so sad, or in awe, or whatever I was feeling, you know, that I needed to do my job, she said. Thus, Voice Mail was created.
The poem is written in two sections, close to sonnets a little more formal than the usual style of Mme Castans. The first, a voicemail from his friends’ point of view, gently announces the news of the cancer return. But have fun, said her friend. Look for orioles. / I hear them everywhere.
It’s a change Ms Castan, who lives in Peconic Landing, where she teaches a poetry appreciation class, has made since she first wrote the poem 14 years ago. Mrs. Cedering first told him to listen to the frogs. And I have versions with that, but I prefer birds, she said.
The second section informs the writer, Ms. Castan, that the previous message / is about to expire. press nine to save.
If only I could press the / A button to save you, she wrote. But all I can save is your voice.
Ms Castan does not publish enough, she has written enough poetry for at least five collections, but she has only published two books, so as one, she made a deal with herself to send more poetry over the course of the new Year. When she stumbled upon the Hippocrates Prize, she thought of voicemail.
She had written another more humorous poem about shingles in the Hippocrates competition two years ago, and it earned her a commendation. Shes also won several other accolades, including Long Island Poet of the Year in 2013. His first award this year, however, came as a surprise.
It’s a COVID year and the poem doesn’t talk about COVID so I never thought he would win, she said.
Ms Castan didn’t start earning a salary for her writing until after her first husband died in 1966. At the time, she was living in Hong Kong with her one-year-old baby and thought to herself, “ Well, I better buy a magazine. job.
She ended up in the New Yorker typing pool, where she learned a lot. She was eventually promoted to editorial assistant to the editor of magazine poetry in the late 1960s. Her first article was published in 1970. She loved her job, but she still didn’t write poetry herself. .
It came to him later in life. Although Ms. Castan had always loved the genre, she didn’t often see herself reflected in the work she read.
When I liked poetry, it was mostly dead white men that I read less than women, she says.
She began to write her own poetry in 1978, 12 years after the death of her first husband. At that point, I thought I should learn about it, she said.
She received an MA in Creative Writing from New York University in 1987, completing a BA in English from Brooklyn College in 1959 and an MA in Languages, Literature, and Communication from Columbia University in 1980.
Since then, in addition to The Widows Quilt, she has also published a volume of poems titled Venice: City that paints (2010), artfully illustrated by her second husband, the late Lewis Zacks. His poems have also appeared in several anthologies and magazines.
[ad_2]
picture credit