Marian Shapiro Reflects on the Experiment of Life, Quaker Worship, and Poetry
and Publishes A New Book of Experimental Poems
Marian writes: Life seems to me to be a Great Experiment, one in which the result is often the surprise I never expected, but always the surprise I needed. Finding the Quaker path, after attending a small NC meeting with my daughter-in-law in 1998, was such a surprise, and every Meeting thereafter another one. Like dreams, my inner life announces itself unbidden, sometimes in spoken messages, sometimes in poems. They arrive, like Spirit, during Meeting, between appointments, during walks, while driving….All my poems are experiments, the most recent in the visual mode; these are appearing in my next book, At The Edge Of The Cliff (Plain View Press), scheduled to debut in January 2021.
Hillel famously asked, “If not now, when?” At 81, I am definitely at WHEN! Actually, we are all at ‘when,’ when we realize it. That is my edge of the cliff. The view is truly great from here.
