Outside the Crest Theatre in Delray Beach’s Old School Square, Cara Nusinov posed for a photograph by the sculpture she designed to pay homage to poetry.

“Art makes poetry touchable,” she said as she stood by the Polka Dot Poetry Peacock, which she created for an art-in-public-spaces project in Coconut Grove. “I imagine people enjoying the poems affixed to the peacock and telling others, or going to the library and checking out books by the poets.”

Nusinov’s comments were very much in the spirit of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, which closed its eighth annual season Jan. 21 after a week of readings and workshops that attracts some of the biggest names in poetry, and its most ardent students.

This year’s special guest was Charles Wright, a renowned American poet who teaches at the University of Virginia. This year’s faculty included Kim Addonizio, Cornelius Eady, Claudia Emerson, David Kirby, Thomas Lux, Gregory Orr, Chase Twichell and Eleanor Wilner.

The festival was founded by Miles Coon, Delray Beach poet, snowbird and retired businessman.

“Poetry is a method of survival. There's something about the rhythm and concentration of language that's profoundly human,” said Coon, who came to poetry late in life. “We turn to poetry at weddings, at funerals, at times of disorder, and that's because death and love are the driving engines of most poetry."

Lux, Coon’s former professor in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College, has attended dozens of poetry festivals in his professional lifetime and the Palm Beach Festival since its inception.

“Miles has created the classiest and the best poetry festival in the country. What’s rare is that the primary focus of the festival is teaching,” Lux said. “In one week’s time, we do the equivalent of a half-semester’s worth of graduate work.”

Lux then quoted American poet Stanley Kunitz’s poem, The Layers: “Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered.”

“This event gives the tribe a chance to meet again,” says Lux.

On Saturday, the Crest Theatre auditorium was at capacity for a 2 p.m. panel discussion with the eight members of the faculty. Poets and would-be poets of every size, shape, color and age milled around discussing the art form.

They were also anticipating the evening’s lineup – a coffee house, party and performance poetry event featuring New York poet Vanessa Hidary (the Hebrew Mamacita) and Jamaal May, a two-time individual World Poetry Slam finalist.

The afternoon panel gave each poet the opportunity to choose one of his or her favorite poems to read. A discussion over whether form is restrictive or can open you up to creativity gave rise to a spontaneous discussion on ikebana, Japanese flower arranging.

Ikebana is a creative expression, but governed by strict rules. There are three elements to ikebana (heaven, earth, man), so Lux jokingly declared: “There are three elements to making a good poem – only we don’t know what they are.”

Rosella Stern, 70, of Ormond Beach, is a Yeats scholar and retired professor. She lost her poetry partner of 40 years in a tragic accident, and became motivated to write and publish a book of poetry in her honor.

A friend in California heard about the festival and called Stern. “You must go,” she ordered, and go Stern did.

She writes poetry that she calls rants. Her latest rant is titled Yanqui Pig Dog Poem (A Rant for the 99ers) in which the last line of the poem is “take off your suit and bark.”

“The festival is a rich and meaningful experience for me. It was sometimes scary, but I am grateful to have the space and privilege to pursue what I love and get support at the same time,” Stern said.

Kurt Brown, a retired professor, founder of the Aspen Writers’ Conference and the husband of poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar, has written six books of poetry.

“As someone who used to run writer’s conferences, I know a good one when I see it,” says Brown, who has served as the festival’s marketing director. “It starts at the top. Miles creates a community feeling whereby people feel safe to share their work without fear of criticism.”

“I always say, there’s no reason a conference like this should work: You fly a long distance to get here, you pay a lot of money for hotels, you bring your innermost thoughts to be criticized by total strangers, but somehow it all works.”

And there are other good reasons for that, Brown added.

“And besides all that, I like to soak up the sun and have some Key lime pie.”

Although some people viewed John Brown as a madman, his daring 1859 raid on the U.S. military arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Va., helped galvanize anti-slavery sentiment in the North.

In Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War, Tony Horwitz has written an engrossing account of Brown’s life and singular devotion to the abolition cause. With hindsight, Horwitz suggests that Harpers Ferry seems like “an al-Qaeda prequel,” with a homegrown fundamentalist consumed by hatred of the U.S. government, launching a suicidal attack on a symbol of American power.

From his days as a youth, Brown abhorred slavery. At age 12 he witnessed the beating of a slave boy with iron shovels, and later helped escaping slaves travel North on the Underground Railroad. He cited the Bible in claiming to be on a divine mission to abolish slavery.

In the 1850s Brown traveled through Northern states and Canada seeking volunteer fighters and financial backing. Potential recruits often were perplexed about Brown’s goals, in part because he seems to have changed his mind frequently about exactly what he hoped to accomplish by capturing a government arsenal.

Did Brown intend to arm slaves with thousands of guns taken from the arsenal? The specifics were never entirely clear. Before the Harpers Ferry raid, Brown convened his supporters, who drafted a constitution and declared that they wanted to form a slave-free nation.

Setting out in the middle of the night, Brown’s ragtag group of 19 fighters attacked and easily captured the lightly guarded arsenal, where 100,000 guns were stored. But within 30 hours government troops took back the arsenal, leaving most insurgents dead, dying or wounded. Brown and a few of his comrades were tried, convicted and hanged.

The attack on Harpers Ferry divided the abolition movement. Many who opposed slavery also opposed resorting to violence to end it.

During Brown’s trial, some suggested that he plead not guilty by reason of insanity, but he flatly rejected such a defense. To the end he was willing to die in the cause of abolition, while asking why it was a crime to try to free slaves.

Among Brown’s prominent supporters was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who suggested that Brown was “the new saint awaiting his martyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross.”

Horwitz places Brown’s crusade in the context of the nation’s deep division over slavery. “Harpers Ferry,” he writes, “helped propel [Abraham] Lincoln into the White House, where he would ultimately fulfill Brown’s mission. … Harpers Ferry wasn’t simply a prelude to secession and civil war. In many respects, it was a dress rehearsal.”

Lincoln was a late convert to abolition. A native of slave state Kentucky, he initially thought that slavery would fade away and that former slaves would be resettled in Africa. But three years after Harpers Ferry, with the nation mired in the Civil War inferno, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in the South.

Midnight Rising includes 70 pages of notes, a bibliography and an index, as well as portraits and maps, making this an essential work for school and public libraries.

The author deserves credit for writing an even-handed account of a complex man. It would have been easy to dismiss Brown as a crackpot, but Horwitz eschewed that approach and instead sought to get inside Brown’s mind and heart to learn as much as possible about what drove him to embark on a passionate, yet foolhardy, mission that had little chance of success.

Horwitz scoured letters, journals, speeches and books to better understand Brown and the culture that shaped him.

The result is a meticulous tour of an important slice of American history, with Horwitz weaving together vignettes of frontier hardship, the cruelties of slavery, the savagery of battle, the armory takeover, and the trials and executions of Brown and his soldiers.

Midnight Rising is historical non-fiction at its best, coming alive in the hands of a superb storyteller.

Bill Williams is a freelance writer in West Hartford, Conn., and a former editorial writer for The Hartford Courant. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War, by Tony Horwitz; Henry Holt, 365 pp., $29

Fortunately for all concerned, Stephen Sondheim’s Look, I Made a Hat is not a treatise on the art of millinery.

Instead, it is the sequel to Finishing the Hat, the pre-eminent American theater composer-lyricist’s compilation and consideration of his career, divided into two volumes and filled with nuggets of insight. Or, as he prefers to put it in his subtitle, “Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany.” Indeed.

As Sondheim’s legions of fans -- of which I unabashedly count myself -- could explain to the puzzled, Finishing the Hat is a central musical number in his 1985 Pulitzer Prize winner, Sunday in the Park with George, a statement in song by post-impressionist pointillist painter George Seurat of his obsessive creative process. Painstakingly, he applies dots of paint to canvas until the eye perceives it as a chapeau, Hence, the song’s concluding line and the book sequel’s title, “Look, I made a hat.”

Sondheim divides his career more for ease of lifting the individual volumes instead of inducing hernias with one heavy tome. But there was a distinct tonal shift for him in 1981, caused primarily by the extended suspension of his collaboration with director Harold Prince (Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd and the contentious, quick-folding Merrily We Roll Along) and his embarking on a very different professional partnership with librettist-director James Lapine (Sunday in the Park…, Into the Woods, Passion).

True, Sondheim has more shows to his credit in the first “half” of his career (the briefer 1954-1981), so he pads the second volume -- still fascinating, mind you -- with such miscellany as his movie work (a brothel madam’s solo from The Seven Percent Solution, the score for Dick Tracy, which netted him an Oscar for the languorous Sooner or Later, two barely used numbers for The Birdcage and several intricately conceived songs for the lamentably unproduced Singing Out Loud, which was to be directed by Rob Reiner).

Other included footnotes to his career include Sondheim’s work for television, the most major of which is the hourlong musical Evening Primrose, the tale of a man who escapes from the world to a new life inside a department store. From it comes such cabaret fixtures as I Remember and Take Me to the World. Hailing from 1966, it is out of place chronologically, but since it did not make the cut into the first volume, we will take it -- and Sondheim’s recollections of the program’s genesis -- any way we can get them.

It would be sufficient if Sondheim had merely collected and published his lyrics, the final scores plus the various interim versions and numbers deleted along the precarious road to Broadway. But as he did previously, he pauses, often mid-song, to emphasize a creative impulse, explain a word choice, underline a hair-splitting intention or otherwise muse on recalled anguish as he wrote. The result is again a highly personal tutorial on the history of the musical theater of the past almost 60 years.

But before the reader can get to class, there are the inside covers of the book, which contain Sondheim’s three deceptively simple guiding principles:

Less Is More

Content Dictates Form

God Is in the Details

As we will learn, had he only followed those three tenets more carefully on his most recent narrative musical, Road Show (and its precursors, Wise Guys, Gold! and Bounce), he could have saved himself a lot of grief and certainly some of the 14 years of his life going through three directors, three out-of-town tryouts and six actors in the two leading roles for a show -- about the Mizner brothers of Palm Beach -- that never opened on Broadway. Or at least, hasn’t yet.

One needs to dive headfirst into the text notes amid the lyrics, but here are a choice nuggets (of trivia) to be found there:

* Once per show, Sondheim says he cries at his own work “and Animal Planet, often.”

* Into the Woods, a musical based on scrambling several Grimm fairy tales and considering the consequences of “happily ever after,” began instead with an idea of scrambling television shows.

* The song I Guess This Is Goodbye that Jack sings to his pet cow in Into the Woods is, according to Sondheim, the only song he has written without any rhyme at all.

* In the midst of the discussion of Assassins, he writes, “Audacious is an inch away from smart ass, as Anyone Can Whistle proved.” Doctoral theses have been based on less.

* The show that Sondheim says comes the closest to his expectations for it is … Assassins.

* Sondheim almost wrote a musical of Sunset Boulevard, until the film’s writer-director Billy Wilder casually mentioned that the subject matter required kit to be an opera (an art form Sondheim never warmed to). Then, he adds, “someone eventually wrote it” and Wilder was proven right.

* When Sondheim and John Weidman wrote Road Show/Bounce/Gold!/etc., it saved him from dealing with Weidman’s idea of a musical about the League of Nations. Oy.

Also sprinkled throughout the book are sidebar essays on such topics as reviewers (he is dismissive, but reasonably dispassionately so), awards (he finds them fairly useless unless they come attached to cash) and revivals (most notably a revelatory production of Passion that changed the show’s focus because of one startling performance). And while he promises early on some comments about other lyricists that should “generate enough irritation to go around” -- as certain opinions in the first volume did -- either he is in a much more mellow mood this time or he is withholding his more disdainful views.

As much as I treasure the glimpse into Sondheim’s mind that these two books represent, they also signify to me a large amount of time that might have been better spent writing another musical.

In Look, I Made a Hat, he ruminates over whether he is running out of inventive steam at the age of 80-plus. In his epilogue, he commends to his readers with a creative impulse Phyllis McGinley’s poem, Love Note to a Playwright, calling it “as important a piece of advice as you’ll ever get,” adding “if I’d listened to it the way I think every artist should, I wouldn’t have written these books, I’d have written a couple of musicals instead.”

At least his final words here are the heartening, “Time to start another hat.”

Look, I Made a Hat, by Stephen Sondheim. Knopf, 453 pages, $45.

As medical director of Dean Ornish’s Preventive Medicine Research Institute in California, Lee Lipsenthal regularly helped patients overcome their fear of pain and death. But just short of his 52^nd birthday in 2009, Lipsenthal was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and told he had at most only a few years to live.

Enjoy Every Sandwich is the author’s upbeat account of how he used meditation and mindfulness to find pleasure in each moment of his remaining time.

Lipsenthal died Sept. 20, just before his book was published.

After his grim diagnosis, the author decided to use a combination of traditional medicine, as well as supplements such as meditation, which he calls “my most powerful drug.”

Lipsenthal describes the Buddhist-based practice of living fully in each moment, without control or attachment to a particular outcome. But along the way he veers into controversial New Age concepts that might puzzle some readers. He describes strange coincidences, as well as his own reincarnation, and remembers having lived in France, Germany and ancient Greece in previous lives. He concedes there is no rational explanation for any of this.

Lipsenthal’s unusual spiritual journey puzzled and at times angered his wife, Kathy, who also is a physician. She protested that he seemed resigned to dying. But Lipsenthal makes an important distinction between giving up the fight and simply refusing to waste time trying to control everything, including the course of his cancer.

Over the years, the author had witnessed the health benefits of regular meditation, which he taught to his patients.

“I knew intuitively,” he says, “that the best therapy for me was to quiet down, stop being busy, meditate an hour or more daily, hike, and choose what treatments, either conventional or complementary, would maximize my healing capacity.”

He also found strength and joy by cultivating gratitude. He kept a journal by his bedside and each night listed three things he was grateful for that day.

As a medical doctor, Lipsenthal says he initially was skeptical of practices and beliefs that have no scientific basis. Although his skepticism remained, he concluded there is a spiritual reality beyond the known physical world – a reality that scientists cannot explain.

“I have come to believe,” he says, “that there probably is a higher power, a God or Spirit that affects human behavior. I have seen too much data in my life that could not be explained any other way, but the scientist in me also sees the possibility that God is simply a creation of the human imagination.”

Lipsenthal says that fear of aging, illness and death produces stress hormones that wear down the immune system’s ability to fight cancer.

“Instead of worrying about when I might die and adding anxiety to each day I had left, I decided to enjoy the time I had with good music, good food, lots of love, and the quiet time that my soul and immune system needed.”

The book’s title comes from the singer/songwriter Warren Zevon, who had terminal cancer and was asked what he had learned in the process of dying. He replied, “I learned to enjoy every sandwich.”

Lipsenthal advises readers, “Pay attention to the good stuff that happens every day and enjoy what is, not what should have been or what might be.”

This poignant and occasionally inspiring book ends too abruptly, with no mention of the author’s final days. Because the text is so focused on Lipsenthal and his coping strategies, we learn little about the impact of the author’s illness and death on his wife and their grown son and daughter.

It would have been a welcome addition if one of them had written a concluding chapter or afterward to bring the story to closure.

Enjoy Every Sandwich: Living Each Day As If It Were Your Last, by Lee Lipsenthal; Crown Archetype; 195 pp.; $22

Bill Williams is a free-lance writer in West Hartford, Conn., and a former editorial writer for The Hartford Courant. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Three years ago, Thomas L. Friedman sounded alarm bells about global warming in his best-selling book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, but predicted that America would wake up before it was too late.

Now Friedman and co-author Michael Mandelbaum in their new book, That Used To Be Us, say they are frustrated, but still optimistic, about a range of issues, including global warming, galloping national debt, and lack of investment in education and infrastructure.

New York Times columnist Friedman and Johns Hopkins University professor Mandelbaum characterize the nation’s political and social paralysis as posing “a greater threat to our national security and well-being than al-Qaeda.”

The authors like lists. They cite the “big four” challenges: globalization, the information technology revolution, huge budget deficits, and soaring energy demands. Later, they describe the “five pillars of prosperity” and the “six things” needed to improve student performance.

Some recommendations are obvious, such as the cliché that schools need better teachers, plus parents who demand more from their children.

Throughout, the authors include inspiring examples to support their theses. Williams College in Massachusetts asks its graduating seniors to nominate a high school teacher who had the biggest impact on their lives. Four winners are then selected and honored at the Williams graduation as a way to celebrate the crucial role of inspirational teachers.

The book cites the extraordinary achievements of foreign and foreign-born students, and suggests that we have much to learn from them. In a recent college computer competition dubbed “Battle of the Brains,” only one of the 12 winning teams was from the United States. Or consider this nugget: A generation ago, the United States had the highest proportion of college graduates in the world. Today eight other nations rank ahead of America.

That Used To Be Us reads like an extension of Hot, Flat, and Crowded, in which Friedman asserted that America still had time to lead a “Green Revolution” on energy efficiency if it began immediately. Despite his warnings, there has been little progress.

If anything, the problems Friedman and Mandelbaum describe seem to have grown more urgent. A divided Congress cannot agree on a plan to reduce federal debt or steer the nation away from reliance on dirty fossil fuels, which contribute to global warming. The authors say Democrats and Republicans act “more like hostile tribes than colleagues with different political views but common goals.”

The book prescribes tough medicine: Congress must raise taxes, cut spending on defense, Social Security and Medicare, and invest in research and education.

Friedman and Mandelbaum say they have given up on the two-party system, which is “under the sway of powerful special interests.” They recommend formation of a new third party, which they concede could not likely win the presidency, but might force the major parties to embrace steps to restore America to its role as No. 1 world leader.

Like the previous book, this one contends that if America does not find a new source of clean energy, it runs “the risk of burning up, choking up, heating up, and smoking up our planet far faster than even Al Gore predicted.”

After reading this sober account of what ails America, readers may feel more pessimism than optimism, in part because no politician in either major party is promoting the agenda the authors have identified. Liberals resist cuts to entitlement programs, and conservatives are dead set against tax increases. The result is ballooning federal budget deficits and long-term debt.

That Used To Be Us is a well-written, thoroughly researched, and persuasive account of what ails America. It celebrates the social and economic virtues that turned the United States into a world leader, but warns that America has become flabby.

Friedman and Mandelbaum believe that people will have to “save more, consume less, study longer and work harder.”

“We need to reconnect with the values and ideals,” they write, “that made the American dream so compelling for so many generations of Americans, as well as for so many millions of people across the globe.” Despite the evidence of passivity and lack of leadership in both political parties, the authors remain optimistic, saying the nation has rarely failed to meet a major challenge.

Friedman and Mandelbaum say the present course, marked by Washington deadlock, cannot continue if America is to “come back,” in the words of the book’s subtitle. We can only hope that policymakers in Congress and the White House embrace the message in this important book.

Bill Williams is a freelance writer in West Hartford, Conn., and a former editorial writer for The Hartford Courant. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, by Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum; Farrar Straus & Giroux; 380 pp.; $28