Helen Chasin was born and raised in Brooklyn in 1938. She graduated from Radcliffe College, and later studied poetry with Robert Fitzgerald, Robert Lowell, and John F. Nims. She served as a Bread Loaf Scholar in Poetry in 1965, and as a fellow at the Bunting Institute from 1968-1970.
Chasin's poetry is concerned primarily with the turbulence of America in the 1960s, dealing with such things as sex, supermarkets, addiction, civil rights, hippies, the Vietnam War, drugs and much else of importance to that era. These public issues are always seen in their relation to private concerns, and therefore trace the connections between the public world and an individual's personal experience.
Dudley Fitts has written of her work that her "most pervasive qualities" are "warmth...; clarity; a true and delicate run of the line; and, most characteristically, a serious playfulness that dares much and that seems to me to succeed wholly."
Chasin's book Coming Close and Other Poems won the Yale University Poets Prize and was published by Yale University Press in 1968. She published a second collection of poetry, Casting Stones, in 1975.
Her poem "The word Plum" is not actually about a plum but more of a indirect description of a secret or past lover the narrator once had or has. She uses words that describe sexual meaning in a obscure kind of way.
Chasin's poetry is concerned primarily with the turbulence of America in the 1960s, dealing with such things as sex, supermarkets, addiction, civil rights, hippies, the Vietnam War, drugs and much else of importance to that era. These public issues are always seen in their relation to private concerns, and therefore trace the connections between the public world and an individual's personal experience.
Dudley Fitts has written of her work that her "most pervasive qualities" are "warmth...; clarity; a true and delicate run of the line; and, most characteristically, a serious playfulness that dares much and that seems to me to succeed wholly."
Chasin's book Coming Close and Other Poems won the Yale University Poets Prize and was published by Yale University Press in 1968. She published a second collection of poetry, Casting Stones, in 1975.
Her poem "The word Plum" is not actually about a plum but more of a indirect description of a secret or past lover the narrator once had or has. She uses words that describe sexual meaning in a obscure kind of way.