Robert C. Basner - Autumnal / by Sharon Israel

LISTEN to my March 30th, 2021 show with guest co--host, the erudite poet and novelist, Lee Slonimsky. Lee interviews poet and eminent physician Robert Charles Basner to read and discuss his evocative and original poetry.

Robert Charles Basner, heir to the farming and fielding of a place that has slipped shyly, slowly, southwesterly off the main Catskill Mountains, holds the titles of Professor Emeritus of Medicine, Columbia University, and Special Lecturer in Medicine, Columbia University Irving Medical Center. He is an internationally recognized physician and biomedical researcher, author, editor, editorialist, and educator. A former faculty member of the Harvard Medical School and current faculty member of his alma mater, the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, he is a laureate of an NIH Academic Career Award of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and of the Sidney Zolot Music Award of the City College of New York. He has published poetry in numerous journals including the Columbia Review, Promethean, and Chronogram, and is working on a first collection of verse, “Ancient, Autumnal” as well as a sequence of musical settings for voice and viola.

Lee Slonimsky has published nine full-length volumes of poetry. His third book, Pythagoras in Love, has been translated into French by Elizabeth J. Coleman, Greek by Stamatis Polenakis, and most recently into Polish by Henryk Cierniak. With his wife, Hammett and Mary Higgins Clark award winning mystery writer Carol Goodman, under the pen name Lee Carroll, Lee has co-written the Black Swan Rising trilogy featuring vampire hedge fund manager and poet Will Hughes.