After surviving a major cardiac arrest at 75 and multiple earlier health crises, journalist and author Bruce Frankel has returned to his first love: poetry. In this conversation, Bruce shares how brushes with death, a long reporting career, and a late-life immersion in poetry have shaped a renewing, spiritually grounded creative life in his 70s. He and host Dori Mincer explore what it means to say “yes” to life after illness, loss, and transition, and how attention, curiosity, and creativity can become daily practices of reverence as we age.

Bruce traces his “nine lives,” from a cancer diagnosis at 42 through early heart events to his 2024 cardiac arrest on the treadmill. As Bruce re-immerses himself in poetry after two decades away, he reflects on how aging has shifted his perspective from youthful romanticism to a more grounded, reverent love of the world. He shares how re‑reading mentors and contemporaries, many of whom are now gone, has revealed how much the poetry landscape has changed, especially in terms of voice, diversity, and themes of sickness, death, and loss. At the same time, he describes his own new project as being about renewal rather than decline, shaped by the ecosystem right outside his window: a vernal pool behind his house in Massachusetts and the “fairy shrimp” that lie dormant in the muck for years before emerging again.

The vernal pool becomes both metaphor and teacher as Bruce talks about curiosity, attention, and the invisible life that was happening in his backyard all along. He explains how learning about the brief, intense lives of fairy shrimp and their long-hidden eggs mirrors his experience of late‑life rebirth, and how showing up to write daily has invited the “muse” back into his life. Along the way, he and Dori explore the impact of near‑death experiences—for both of them—on how real and precious life feels, the spiritual dimension of attention (drawing on Simone Weil’s idea of attention as a form of prayer), and the ongoing challenge of discerning when to say “yes” to roles and responsibilities and when to step back to honor one’s creative and inner life.

Connect with Bruce Frankel

• Books:
  • What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life?
  • World War II: History’s Greatest Conflict (co-author)

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