Frugal Poets' Guide to Life: How to Live a Poetic Life, Even If You Aren't a Poet

(Paperback)

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Frugal Poets Guide to Life is part personal journey, part life-coaching for poets (or those whod like to live like one), part creativity guide, and part reference, with a special section on the modern history of the Chicago poetry scene, including the birth of the poetry slam. In many ways, this book is an anti-MFA guide to being a poet or any other type of creative person. As poet Robert Frost said, To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.

Some of Gallahers more personal sections of the book trace dating a well-known underground comics artist dinner at a Dennys restaurant with an Academy Award Best Actor -- seeing a UFO in central Wisconsin a night when poet and mens movement icon Robert Bly was tarred & feathered at a poetry reading -- play rehearsals at David Mamets Chicago theater featuring then-unknown actor William H. Macy how she met her poet husband, Carlos -- reflections on Gallahers family relative, artist and member of the Algonquin Round Table, Neysa McMein -- visits and stays at a variety of writers colonies around the country -- and celebrating how friend Sandra Cisneros launched an international literary career starting with a little eight-poem chapbook at a humble bookstore in a Chicago Puerto Rican neighborhood.

Author Bio

Cynthia Gallaher is a Chicago-based published poet with three full collections of poetry, Night Ribbons (Polar Bear Press), Swimmer's Prayer (Missing Spoke Press) and Earth Elegance (March Abrazo Press), and two chapbooks, Private, On Purpose (Mulberry Press) and Omnivore Odes (Finishing Line Press). The Chicago Public Library lists her among its "Top 10 Requested Chicago Poets" and Today's Chicago Woman magazine named her one of "100 Women Making a Difference." Most recently, she became a certified yoga instructor, and is completing a new manuscript of food and medicinal herb poems, Botanical Bandwidth.