Judith Baumel

Judith Baumel Poems

Judith Baumel Biography

She grew up in New York City, attending the Bronx High School of Science. She graduated from Radcliffe College, magna cum laude, studying with Robert Lowell, Robert Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Shaw, James Richardson, and Jane Shore. She graduated from Johns Hopkins University, where she studied with Richard Howard, Cynthia Macdonald and David St. John. She taught at Boston University, and Harvard University. In 1985, she married the poet and journalist David Ghitelman an early editor AGNI (magazine). They divorced in 1999. Her current partner is Philip Alcabes, professor of Public Health at Hunter College, City University of New York, and author of Dread: How Fear and Fantasy Have Fueled Epidemics from The Black Death to Avian Flue (Public Affairs 2009) https://www.philipalcabes.com She was director of the Poetry Society of America from 1985 to 1988. Her work has appeared in The Nation, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Yale Review, AGNI Review, The New York Times,[4] and The New Yorker. She lives in New York City and teaches at Adelphi University, and City College of New York. Her blog is at https://www.judithbaumel.com)

The Best Poem Of Judith Baumel

The Influence Of Peers

I don’t want to hear that kind of language in this house
Try shoot shucks sugar
sheleileigh Shalala,
anything but the vowel
which hits the iffy one
and comes too close.
I’m an idiot has taken over,
though not for long.
I’ve ceded ground on butt,
the lost tuchas, tush, tushy
having had the double virtues of ethnic
reminder and gentle enjoyment
of the soft yielding place
from which I wiped with care
that which I wish to hear
called only by cuteness, or evoked.
Well, what could he do,
my muscular ball of opposition,
that whirl of destruction,
wielding Hrunting,
tossing chairs and books
and punching out the wind
behind him screaming
beep you beep you beep you beep.

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