‘Saying Hello’ to Donald Lasko in the Kelsey Review

lasko-reading

Editor’s note: last October we celebrated Donald Lasko’s poem “Saying Goodbye.” This same poem was read at his memorial service today (February 10, 2016). We are all so sad that he is no longer here to teach and write. Here is the entry from October, 2016. 

“Saying Goodbye,” a poem by Donald Lasko has just been published in MCCC’s the literary journal Kelsey Review, a 30-year-old publication that has just gone digital. To read the poem, click here. 

At left, Don reads his poetry at MCCC, but PUMC members recognize him as a member of Chancel Choir; he also sings with Pro Musica. A retired public high school English teacher (married to Kate, who also teaches English), Don graduated from Oberlin College and has an MA with additional doctoral studies in English at SUNY Stony Brook. He received an NEH grant to study with Galway Kinnell and Sharon Olds from NYU School of Creative Writing and taught creative writing and poetry for many years at Summer Institute for the Gifted on numerous college campuses. For more than 50 years he has had numerous poems published in “little” magazines and is a co-editor of a two-volume anthology This Is Just To Say: An Anthology Of Reading For Writers for use at the high school level.

 

Here is more poetry by Don. “This is” was published in U.S. 1 Newspaper in July, 2015. 

 

Here is the published obituary: 

This page can link to more of Don’s work; just email communications@PrincetonUMC.org. 

The most recent poem published in U.S. 1 was “Note to Myself” last July. In part, it is a hymn to his baby granddaughter. The final lines:

that this ever came to be is still a mystery we stand before

unknowing, swaddled as we all are from the beginning

in the arms of what some call God. Just sing!