Press Release: Adagio and Lamentation

Advance Press Release for July 1, 2010

With great pleasure, Fisher King Press presents a new il piccolo edition:

Adagio and Lamentation
Poems by
By Naomi Ruth Lowinsky
ISBN 9781926715056, 112 pages, July 2010

Naomi’s words and images meander through shadows and light, between demons and angels, yet the poetry is always accessible.  In this moving collection, she often goes back in time, to the days when her family lived in (and escaped from) Hitler’s Europe.  The journey helps inform who she is today, including the indelible scar worn by anyone whose family has borne witness to genocide.

—Stewart Florsheim, author of The Short Fall from Grace.

“(W)e are all/each other’s/raw/material” writes Naomi Ruth Lowinsky in her wise and moving book Adagio & Lamentation, the “we” born not only of others but histories and places, all of this inspiring our very human connection over time to vitality and imagination.  Lowinsky’s music is poignant and haunting, moving the listeners and readers of her poems with the miracle of arrival that is all new life and the celebration of thriving.

—Forrest Hammer, author of Call and Response, Middle Ear, and Rift.

Naomi Lowinsky’s poetry is both fierce and tender, political yet intimate; and, for her, the political is personal.  Lowinsky’s poems “voices from the ashes” and “great lake of my mother” are particularly moving. Her work is deeply lyrical and transformative.  It makes you think and feel.  It makes you wish you’d written these poems.  Adagio & Lamentation is a stunning and memorable book.

—Susan Terris, author of Contrariwise, Natural Defenses, and Fire is Favorable to the Dreamer.

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky was the first child born in the New World to a family of German Jewish refugees from the Shoah. Many in her family were lost in the death camps. It has been the subject and the gift of her poetry and prose—to write herself out of the terror, into life.

Naomi had a special tie with her only surviving grandparent, the painter Emma Hoffman, whom she called “Oma.” Oma showed her that making art can be a way to transmute grief, a way to bear the unbearable. The cover of Adagio and Lamentation is a watercolor by Emma Hoffman—an interior view of the Berkeley home where Naomi visited her often as a teenager. Oma tried her best to make a painter of her, but Naomi was no good at it. Poetry was to be her vehicle.

Adagio and Lamentation is Naomi’s offering to her ancestors, a handing back in gratitude and love. It is also her way of bringing them news of their legacy—the cycle of life has survived all they suffered—Naomi has been blessed by many grandchildren.

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky is the author of The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way and The Motherline: Every Woman’s Journey to Find Her Female Roots and numerous prose essays, many of which have been published in Psychological Perspectives and The Jung Journal. Her two poetry collections, red clay is talking (2000) and crimes of the dreamer (2005) were published by Scarlet Tanager Books. She has had poetry published in many literary magazines and anthologies, among them After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery, Weber Studies, Rattle, Atlanta Review, Tiferet and Asheville Poetry Review.

Naomi has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize three times and is the recipient of the 2009 Obama Millennium Poetry award for "Madelyn Dunham, Passing On.” Naomi is a Jungian analyst in private practice in the San Francisco Bay Area, poetry and fiction editor of Psychological Perspectives, and a grandmother many times over.

Place your order for Adagio and Lamentation here.

Phone orders welcomed, Credit Cards accepted. 1-800-228-9316 toll free in the US and Canada, International +1-831-238-7799. www.fisherkingpress.com

 

Fisher King Press / PO Box 222321 / Carmel, CA 93922

City Lights Bookstore: 7pm on April 29, 2010

You are cordially invited to attend a New Issue Release Event for the publication of: LEFT CURVE no. 3 www.leftcurve.org

With presentations/readings by
Dominic Angerame - Rebecca Bella - Michael Cooper
Agneta Falk - Susan Galleymore - Jack Hirschman
Arionó-jovan Labu - Naomi Ruth Lowinsky
Alejandro Murguia - Csaba Polony

(Program subject to change)

City Lights Bookstore www.citylights.com
261 Columbus Ave., San Francisco, CA
April 29, 2010 at 7:00 P.M.

“Soul’s Tongue: A Poetry Reading with Cello and Conversation”

Bridge Crossings---Conversations in Poetry 2010
A SUNDAY AFTERNOON SERIES
February 7, May 16, September 26, November 7

Jung Institute of San Francisco
2040 Gough Street, San Francisco
(415) 771-8055

February 7th brought us the first afternoon of a series of poems and conversations by poets addressing a common theme, accompanied by music and visual images. The impetus for these conversations arose from the notion that poetry is a “crossing” over varying psychic territories that touch our lives, our practices, and our humanity with both a feeling of recognition and surprise.

A Freudian and a Jungian, both analysts, both poets, Naomi Ruth Lowinsky and Forrest Hamer read and conversed; cellist Chris Evan provided musical accompaniment.

All shared the medium of language and engaged in the work of translation—from image, affect and memory into words.

• Does soul speak to each in the same tongue?

• If the poet is also an analyst, does one discipline support the other? Or are they conflicting practices?

FORREST HAMER is a widely published poet. He is the winner of the Beatrice Hawley award for his collection “Call and Response” and the Northern California Book Award for his collection “Middle Ear.” His most recent book of poems is called “Rift.” Poems of his have been published in “The Best American Poetry.” Forrest Hamer also works as an analyst and comes from the Psychoanalytic tradition.

NAOMI RUTH LOWINSKY has published her work in many literary magazines. Her poetry collections are “red clay is talking” and “crimes of the dreamer.” Her memoir on creativity, “The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way,” was recently published. Naomi also works as an analyst and comes from the Jungian tradition.

CHRIS EVANS has performed classical music in the Bay Area and France. She has played in the orchestras at San Francisco State, UC Davis, and UC Berkeley. Lately she has become interested in improvisation and composition.

“The Word Made Flesh: The Living Symbol - San Francisco Jung Institute

Oct. 10th, “The Word Made Flesh” a presentation at the San Francisco Jung Institute Conference on The Living Symbol.

CONFERENCE:
The Living Symbol In and Out of the Consulting Room - Maria Chiaia, Naomi Lowinsky, Richard Stein, Bryan Wittine, Suzanne Wagner
Saturday and Sunday, October 10 & 11, 2009
9:30 am – 3:30 pm

Reserve for this event at San Francisco Jung Institute"Symbols act as transformers"
- C.G. Jung (CW Vol. 5: 232)
Living symbols are messages from the depths of our being to our conscious "I", messages that reveal mysterious things about ourselves and our lives. Psychotherapists across traditions have found that symbolic images open the way to the creative possibilities of the unconscious. We discover these images through free association, dreams, fantasies, creative productions, and within the relational field between analyst and analysand. They evoke fascination, awe, fear, joy, upset, disorientation, but are inevitably transformative when we approach them with respect and attend to them in a contemplative way.

In this conference five Jungian analysts with different approaches will speak to their experience of living, transforming symbols in their lives and clinical work. What does the living symbol look like in clinical practice and in life? How does the symbol enter our psyche, and what does it do once it becomes known? What are the spiritual implications of symbols? Through lectures that include theory, art, poetry, and clinical material, the speakers will offer their unique perspectives on the ways symbols guide processes of growth in and out of the consulting room.


The Word Made Flesh - Naomi Ruth Lowinsky
It is as if the poet could still sense, beneath the words of contemporary speech and in the images that crowd in upon his imagination, the ghostly presence of bygone spiritual worlds, and possessed the capacity to make them come alive again. As Gerhart Hauptmann says: "Poetry is the art of letting the primordial word resound through the common word." - Jung, (CW 5 p. 303)
Our medium, in analysis, is language: the spoken word. Like poets we seek the "primordial word." We are engaged in the Promethean art of bringing life, fire, libido back to our analysand's word: so the word is made flesh; the symbol comes to life; the God is renewed.

When a person stumbles into analysis, she is typically split off from the surge of her libido, cut off from the meaning of her words, severed from her authenticity and from her Gods. She is incarcerated in taboos and constrictions that block her feeling, steal her breath, smother her fire.
If the analysis goes well she will find her way back, through the circumambulations and meanderings of the analytic conversation, to her own primordial word. She and her analyst will create a private language, a personal Tarot deck of living symbols, born of their shared wanderings in her internal landscape: her Gods and demons, dreams, memories, wounds, and longings. This is the stuff of her soul. Together they come to know what moves her, what excites her, how her words become flesh. Perhaps she will find a creative form in which to manifest the power of her personal symbols.

I propose to tell the story of such an analysis, the one I know best – my own – and to reflect on how language and poetry expresses the living symbol: the word made flesh. A series of poems about my analytic experience will structure the talk.

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, PhD, is an analyst member of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco and a widely published poet. Her book on creativity, The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way, has just been published by Fisher King Press. She has published a collection of poems about the analytic experience, crimes of the dreamer. She is the poetry editor of Psychological Perspectives, teaches writing classes in many settings, and is in private practice in Berkeley.

San Francisco Jung Institute Monthly Writing Group

Once a month writing group at the SF Jung Institute.

Deep River: Writing as a Spiritual Practice - Naomi Lowinsky
Saturday October 17, 2009 and 7 Subsequent Second Saturdays
1 – 5 pm

I listened to the earth-talk
- Mary Oliver

Poetry of the natural world is a deep river in American literature. From Walt Whitman to Mary Oliver, American poets have heard the spirit of the earth and its creatures, have spoken for forest and mountain lake, gray whale and marsh hawk. threatened habitat and lost wetlands. Theirs is the prophetic function of giving voice to our fear and our grief. Theirs is the shamanic function of re-imagining our place in nature.

This coming year in the Deep River Writing Circle we will track our own relationship to the natural world. We will read Whitman, Oliver, Gary Snyder, W.S. Merwin, Patiann Rogers and others, and write under their influence.

The Deep River writing circle is a place to find your own voice, to develop your writing practice, to participate in a small community of writers, to study great poems, to make your own connection to the deep river of nature writing. New members welcome, space allowing. Our first meeting will be on Saturday, October 17th from 1-5 in the Institute Library. After that we will meet on second Saturdays, November 2009 through May 2010. Limited to 12 participants.

A Day with Noami Lowinsky and The Muse

"A Day with Your Muse"
Presented by: Naomi Ruth Lowinsky
Saturday, June 13th, 2009 at the
C.G. Jung Institute San Francisco

"A Day with Your Muse" is a day-long workshop in which Naomi Lowinsky will present material from her book, and lead a writing workshop to help people get in touch with their inner "Sister from Below."

The "Sister from Below" is a fierce inner figure. She emerges out of reverie, dream, a fleeting memory, a difficult emotion—she is the moment of inspiration—the muse.

This Sister is not about the ordinary business of life: work, shopping, making dinner. She speaks from other realms. If you'll allow, She'll whisper in your ear, lead your thoughts astray, fill you with strange yearnings, get you hot and bothered, send you off on some wild goose chase of a daydream, eat up hours of your time. She's a siren, a seductress, a shape-shifter . . . Why listen to such a troublemaker? Because She is essential to the creative process: She holds the keys to the doors of our imaginations and deeper life—the evolution of Soul.

Naomi Lowinsky, MFT, is an analyst member of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. She is the recent recipient of the Obama Millennium Poetry awarded for "Madelyn Dunham, Passing On.” Her most recent publication, The Sister From Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way (ISBN 9780981034423) has just been published by Fisher King Press. A reprinted edition of The Motherline: Every Woman's Journey to Find Her Female Roots (ISBN 9780981034461) has also just been published by Fisher King Press. She has had poetry published in many literary magazines and anthologies in addition to her two poetry collections, red clay is talking (2000) and crimes of the dreamer (2005). She has a private practice in Berkeley.

Saturday, June 13, 2009
10 AM - 4 PM
$125
CE Credit:$ 15
CE Hours: 6 Approved for MD, PHD, MFT, LCSW, RN

Location:
C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco
2040 Gough Street
San Francisco, CA 94109
415/771-8055 (phone)
415/771-8926 (fax)
jungmail@sfjung.org

Reserve for this event