What It Means To Be Happy Poems

In What It Means To Be Happy, his ninth book of poetry, award-winning poet and psychologist, Gary Margolis, invites us to consider how it is we come to a meaningful happiness, with all the shades of experience in our joyful and grieving  lives. If not happiness exactly, then some kind of meaningful awareness to the nature, the emotional reality of living in vivid, day-to-day life. With its hopes and memories. With its pleasure and pain. In our whole and divided country. In this world of sickness and war. In the otherworldliness of our arts and sciences. In poems that are both clear and mysterious, he seeks to let language and image trace their own paths. Come to conclusions that are open and seemingly inevitable. With always the sense and feeling that each poem is speaking to a known and unknown reader. To a happiness whose meaning now is yet to be found. A next page to be written.

Gary Margolis is Emeritus Executive Director of College Mental Health Services and Associate Professor of English (part-time) at Middlebury College. He was a Robert Frost and Arthur Vining Davis Fellow and has taught at the University of Tennessee, Vermont and Bread Loaf and Green Mountain Writers’ Conferences. His third book, Fire in the Orchard was nominated for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, as well as Raking the Winter Leaves: New and Selected Poems in 2010. His poem, “ The Interview” was featured on National Public Radio’ s “ The Story” and Boston’ s ABC Channel 5 interviewed him on the Middlebury campus reading his poem, “ Winning the Lunar Eclipse,” after the 2004 World Series. Dr. Margolis was awarded the first Sam Dietzel Award for Mental Health Practice in Vermont by the Clinical Psychology Department of Saint Michaels College and the Covey Community Award of the Counseling Service of Addison County in Middlebury, Vermont. His clinical articles have appeared in the Journal of American College Health Association, Adolescence, the Ladies Home Journal and Runner’ s World Magazine. He has been interviewed on his work with college students by Time Magazine, ABC and CBS News. His memoir is Seeing the Songs: A Poet’ s Journey to the Shamans in Ecuador. His recent books of poems are Time Inside (GWP 2018) and Museum of Islands: New and Selected Poems.