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Samuel Menashe: A Poet Gets His Due

For 50 years, New York poet Samuel Menashe toiled away at his art in relative obscurity. He lived in a Greenwich Village walk-up with a bathtub in the kitchen, and eked out a living as French tutor. Then one day, fate intervened. The Chicago-based Poetry Foundation decided to honor him with its first Neglected Masters Award, a prize that came with a $50,000 check.

"I never intended to be a poet or wanted to be a poet," Menashe says.

Early in his career, he wrote prose attached to his experiences an infantryman in Europe.

"One night, I woke up in the middle of the night and a poem started," he says.

His first published poem appeared in 1956, in the Yale Review. A London publisher accepted his first book, but it took Menashe 10 years to get an American publisher.

"I have been out of the network of poet-professors who've been all over the country. By the kind of poetry I write and not being a part of the establishment, I've paid a price for that, I guess," Menashe says.

Now, invitations to give readings flow in, and he's the toast of the New York literary parties where he once was snubbed.

Menashe's pithy poems are like tiny Zen meditations. Short? He prefers to call them "concise."

At 81, Menashe still lives in a fifth-floor walk-up. If he had it all to do again, he says, he would have started a family instead of remaining a bachelor.

He writes every day from a desk at a window that catches the sunlight.

"They're obviously the last poems of my long life, which I hope will continue for a year or two, or maybe five," he says.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Judy Valente

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SOMOS CONNECTICUT es una iniciativa de Connecticut Public, la emisora local de NPR y PBS del estado, que busca elevar nuestras historias latinas y expandir programación que alza y informa nuestras comunidades latinas locales. Visita CTPublic.org/latino para más reportajes y recursos. Para noticias, suscríbase a nuestro boletín informativo en ctpublic.org/newsletters.

The independent journalism and non-commercial programming you rely on every day is in danger.

If you’re reading this, you believe in trusted journalism and in learning without paywalls. You value access to educational content kids love and enriching cultural programming.

Now all of that is at risk.

Federal funding for public media is under threat and if it goes, the impact to our communities will be devastating.

Together, we can defend it. It’s time to protect what matters.

Your voice has protected public media before. Now, it’s needed again. Learn how you can protect the news and programming you depend on.