The poems that day are being passed around the big table at the 92nd Street Y senior poetry-writing group in Manhattan. Gusts of laughter send them on their way. Women’s laughter. The only man with a poem to read is no laughing mood. He is ill with pancreatic cancer.
I first thought of writing about seniors and poetry after reviewing two books on aging by poets: Alicia Ostriker’s The Book of Seventy and Shirley Kaufman’s Ezekiel’s Wheels. Their poems, works of perception without illusion, posed an important question: What does life get filled with as it’s being emptied?
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