: About Me

Neal Whitman spent 37 years teaching medical school faculty how to be better teachers. Thus, as s a Doctor of Education, his students were Doctors of Medicine. In hit last ten years as a medical school professor, Dr. Whitman gave special attention to demonstrating how the Arts, including literary, performing, and visual, can be used to complement Science in the education of medical students. As Neal brought poetry into the medical school classroom, he realized that there was a poet inside of him, and he began writing poetry in 2005. Neal Whitman retired from his "paid" profession in 2008 as a Professor Emeritus of the University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City and relocated with his wife Elaine to Pacific Grove, California, where he pursues his second "unpaid" profession as a poet. His personalized California auto plate is PG POET in a customized frame inscribed "Poetic LIcense."

Arts & Humanities > Poets & Poetry Book reviews: The Haiku Handbook, by William J. Higginson with Penny Harter

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"William Higginson: Western World's Basho" William Higginson's The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku is the best book on the writing of haiku for Westerners. Right off the bat, a key question: can the writing of haiku, or for that matter, any kind of poetry, be taught? Well, let me back up. In grade school, my teacher conducted poetry unit in which we children were shown how to write 3 lines of 5-7-5 syllables and told, "See, you can write haiku!" But, as adults, after reading Japanese haiku in translation, I found out that there is more to it and Higginson shows the way...

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