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An Interview with Alan Cohen

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Alan Cohen had his first poem published in the PTA Newsletter at the age of ten. He graduated from Farmingdale High School (where he was Poetry Editor of The Bard), Vassar College (with a BA in English), and UC at Davis Medical School. He was then a Primary Care physician, teacher, and Chief of Primary Care at the VA. He has over the years had letters to the editor in Poetry and The New Yorker and articles in the American and New England Journals of Medicine, and has had 178 poems published in ninety venues over the past three years. He’s been married to his wife, Anita, for forty-two years, and they’ve been living in Eugene, OR, these past twelve.



Tell us the story of your book’s title. Was it easy to find, or did it take forever?

I have by now chosen titles for many articles, books, and on one occasion even for a widely used computer report. It never gets easier. In general I begin with an acting title just so I can distinguish its computer file from neighboring files. At some point in the writing, I usually think of a better title and begin a list. From experience, I recognize that the first titles are unlikely to be the best—that is, I try to avoid what I call “premature closure.” My lists tend to grow to twenty or more options. I don’t think I have ever found the final title while I was still writing, but the titles I have listed help to generate others.

When it is time to finalize, I generally focus on the issue on and off all day, often for many days. The title I am still most pleased with is The Beast in a Cage of Words; that one, for a book of poems about nuclear weapons, took me a month to find.

For Easy in Harness, I had fifty-eight titles on my list. So that you can envision the process, here are a few of them:

Secret Ingredient, An Escalator to Prosperity, Rocketing to Prosperity, Escaping Occupational Gravity, Escaping Managerial Gravity, A New Door Opens, New Worlds to Gain, Opening the Door to…, A New Lease on Life, Suspending Natural Law, Transcending Natural Law, Something Extra, The Magic of Empowerment, Foundation and Empire, From Empowerment to Empire, Empowering Empire, Open Season, An Economic Thirst, Giving Myself to Work, We Can’t Wait to Get to Work, The Thrill of Work, Eager to Get to Work, In Love with Work, Having a Crush on Work, Dedicated to Work, Saving Myself for Work, Taking a Chance on Work, Work Grows Wings

However, though most had a logic and appropriateness about them, until I found Easy in Harness none of them evoked the combination of pertinence and resolution I was seeking. Even then, I felt the want of a post-colon subtitle to make the subject of the book clear, and originally that was A Constitutional Approach to Hiring a Good Manager. That would have been a good name for a book of poetry because “Constitutional” has at least three relevant meanings and creates a fruitful ambiguity. However. in the title of a nonfiction work. it would likely be confusing or off-putting and so, a long time later, I changed it to A Productive Approach, which I think is better suited to my prospective readers.

How did it feel when you first saw your book cover? Or when you first held your book in your hands?

Many years ago a friend had written a book of poetry and wanted to use as a cover a painting by my wife Anita. Her publisher said that the cover was at their discretion, and they did not even want to see the proposed work of art. I, on the other hand, have had the good fortune with Atmosphere Press to have the opportunity to propose images for the expert designers to use. We sent five of my wife’s paintings and, as I said at the time, we would have liked to choose all five of the covers they developed. Of course we chose the one we thought best.

When the sample book arrived, I sat it on my desk and looked at it twenty times a day and smiled every time. It was the beauty of the cover that I found cheering, and I was pleased that others would have the opportunity to be cheered by her work as well. It made my day for many days; still does.

Who/what made you want to write? Was there a particular person, or particular writers/works/art forms that influenced you?

I started writing poetry when I was seven years old. I suspect that may have had something to do with the Arbuthnot Anthology, from which my parents read to me early on, but that is only speculation. It feels inside me as if I simply had the urge to write and have gone on doing so. Since then, writing has seemed to be second nature. By the time I was eleven, I was reading and modeling my writing on Charles Dickens, which unfortunately made me long-winded and pedantic in prose. For a while I memorized poetry I particularly liked—I didn’t look up or come across Easy in Harness—I remembered it. I read all extant poems by people whose poems I particularly liked: John Keats, W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens. Early on I wrote with rhyme and rhythm. Then I found my way into Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Elizabeth Bishop, and later I discovered Dave Smith, A.R. Ammons, and Jorie Graham. I also read widely in fiction and nonfiction books, The New Yorker for some thirty years cover to cover, but I can’t say that my nonfiction was influenced by anyone specific since Dickens.

I wrote Easy in Harness because I saw so much suffering in the workplace and hoped to diminish that suffering. Before I had been a manager, my ideas were just concepts but once I had had the opportunity to watch them succeed, I felt strongly that it was a responsibility to share them with others.

What other professions have you worked in? What’s something about you that your readers wouldn’t know?

I was in the field of medicine full-time from age twenty-two when I started medical school to age sixty-two when I retired. From the time I started elementary school until I retired, my longest break was three months, mostly summer vacations from school—and during those I went to summer camp, became a camp counselor, did manual labor, was an ice cream man (was, that is, in some sort of organized activity) which filled most of that time. I spent six months of my fourth year of medical school in Liverpool, Edinburgh, and London, did my internship in Boston and my residency in Hawaii, and used time off to explore. One six-week honeymoon trip to France and Switzerland was the longest freewheeling interval; we would decide in the morning it was time to move on, call for a reservation in the next town of interest, from Avignon for example to Arles, and hop in our leased car and go. But we were far more organized otherwise, and many planned vacations were canceled by job changes.

In an interview like this it is not really possible to summarize a life in medicine, but I’ll mention some highlights. I took care of thousands of patients. I represented seventy physicians with administration in Chicopee, Massachusetts, where I saw an average of twenty patients a day and was on call for 70,000 three or four times a month. I taught students and residents at Yale. I managed resident training in Champaign and Danville, Illinois. Easy in Harness began with my management of Primary Care at the Fresno, VA. Each of these activities took place in a separate and unique world, with its own rules, character, and impact. I had colleagues, mentors, mentees, responsibilities, things to learn, and things to teach in each. And perhaps that’s a good place to stop.

What was the most rewarding/meaningful part of publishing your book?

Based on my previous answers, I don’t suppose it will surprise you if I say that having people read my book, like it, and take it to heart is the most rewarding part of publishing. That is why I wrote it—to have it read and applied. So far all feedback has been positive. I would love to have it spread more widely, but what has already happened is enough to have made the entire enterprise worthwhile.

What new writing projects are you currently working on? Or, other projects that are not writing?

I have a database I have been working on with my brother for decades. It includes ratings, short reviews, release, copyright, country (s) of origin, genres, length, availability, color, black and white or both, time and place of filming and story, personnel involved, actor billing, etc. It was an Internet Movie Database before the Internet, but with only two critics and lots of information, particularly genres, that the database doesn’t have—and it is for the most part independently sourced. We now have more than 12,000 movies represented. My wife and I have seen more than 11,300 ourselves.


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