Transmissions from the Northern Outpost

Tag: Poetry

  • On The Frontier

    For National Poetry Month, I’m sharing poems each day, one that I’ve written followed by whatever one from three sites that share a poem a day that strikes my fancy that day.

    I wrote this poem at my desk in my room in the house where I grew up after I came home and lived with my parents for a few years after college:

    On The Frontier 

    Once again it is too late
    too early for me with the buzz of fluorescence
    and the perking of piped hot water
    even interrupting conversations with myself.

    Used to be a time
    when a man could whisper in his own ear,
    listen to it rise in a roar
    as if his mouth had been a seashell,

    then shape a masterpiece out of the echo.

    This one probably will work best in landscape and desktop view.

    Today’s poem for poem a day on the Academy of American Poets website is “Palazzo Tartaruga” by Mike Tyler.

    I’m also adding another from The Poetry Foundation website since I saw this after I posted: “Eros of Bathing Stimming Dancing Pacing” by Adam Wolfond.

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  • A Poem A Day for National Poetry Month

    In celebration of National Poetry Month, which starts today, I am going to share daily a poem that I wrote and also daily provide a link to another poem from one of three sites that share a poem each day on each site. Many of mine will be from a poetry reading I did in 2004 at a since-defunct cultural society in suburban Philadelphia where we lived at the time. This was the first one from that reading:

    Poem

    -- after reading 
    Tao Te Ching 
    translated by 
    Stephen Mitchell

    Strain not for the word,
    let it come
    like OM.
    As simple as breath.
    As deadly as 
    the viper,
    let it sink its
    skin into your skin
    until you become
    the whisper of
    being,
    non-being
    we all are 
    becoming,
    a breath lost
    in the whirlwhind
    nothing more,
    something less by
    less this way
    comes
    glimpses 
    of the gone world 
    spit out on
    the page.

    This poem should be the way I intended the line breaks in desk or mobile, portrait or landscape, but others I share probably will be best viewed in desktop and sometimes lansdcape. I’ll let you know. Why I’m sharing the link to the poems from the sites is so the line breaks remain according to how the poets formatted their poems. Here’s the first one I’ll share, today a poem by Billy Collins from The Poetry Foundation. Technically, it’s not from the poem a day project, but one I found instead.

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  • Ah, poetry!

    I’m not going to lie, but “cultivating my garden,” why I started this blog not coincidentally on January 20 of this year, is not easy right now. However, I am going to try in April with it being National Poetry Month and the month of my wife Kim’s 55th birthday – and also sadly the month of her mother and best friend passing away four years ago. With two of the three, I have things planned, really only sort of with the second, and the third one is really up to Kim with however she wants to remember them.

    For National Poetry Month, as mentioned in my last blog post, I will be sharing poems each day: first, mine from years ago, and then a link to another poem from one of three sites that share a poem a day that strikes my fancy that day. I subscribed to the three sites earlier this week in anticipation of National Poetry Month. For my wife’s birthday, which is next Sunday, we both are off next weekend and whatever we do, or don’t do, we’ll be together. As of now, we have no fixed plans.

    Also I’m going to try to write a poem or, maybe to be more accurate, to start a poem each day during April. I had a couple of poetry classes in college including an independent study during my senior year of college in the early 90s where the goal was to write poetry and get some poems published in literary journals, a very few of which I did. In the early to mid 2000s, I returned to writing poetry and even had a poetry reading at a now-defunct cultural society in suburban Philadelphia. That is where about half of the poems I’ll be sharing this coming month will be coming from.

    It only seems apropos that I leave you with a poem or two. I thought I’d start small with two of my favorite short poems:

    The title of this post comes from a line by Satine to Christian in the 2001 Baz Luhrmann movie Moulin Rouge that for some reason I think of when I think of talking about poetry: “Ah, poetry. Yes, this it what I want naughty words.”

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  • 2 days off in a row X 2

    Every Thursday, I share three good things from today, in the past week, and/or in the week or weeks to come, to focus on what is good. I encourage you to share in the comments your three good things too, if you want. I was introduced to thinking on three good things for the week by Deb Nance of the blog Readerbuzz who lists hers every Sunday on her blog.

    Two days in a row off…

    …with Kim. She and I were off work yesterday and are off work today too. Yesterday since she was done with her previous shift at 6 a.m. (normally 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. when she works as a 911 dispatcher ), she slept part of the day. We then binge-watched a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Today we might get to some housecleaning while also continuing our binge-watch of this or that.

    Two days in a row off…

    …this weekend but by myself as Kim goes back to work tomorrow at 6 p.m. (me at 9:30 a.m.) and works through the weekend until her next days off Monday and Tuesday. I will be getting ready for National Poetry Month starting Tuesday. I already have 30 poems I wrote during and after college to share each day on the blog. I just have to work on formatting them, which might involve changing the theme of the blog so the lines in the poem break where I want them to break.

    Exercise accountability with family

    On Tuesday, in the process of talking with my father, who is 81, we committed to doing exercises daily that we each are supposed to be doing for respective issues: him, his back; me, my left wrist. We are checking in with each other every Tuesday to hold each other accountable. When I mentioned to my sister (not mentioning her age because I value my life 😉) in a text, she said she’d join us with knee exercises. So, now it’s a family thing. I’m off to do mine as soon as I post this…

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  • To care and not to care

    Here are two poems for you today. One is from Buddhist teacher Joseph Goldstein; the other, poet Marjorie Saiser, with both poems inspired by the planet Venus. The first I came across from a newsletter from author and podcaster Dan Harris; the second, blogger Anne Bennett, who shared Saiser’s poem on her blog on Sunday. I then shared with her Goldstein’s poem and now both with you. Maybe they will resonate with you as well.

    Venus in the Western Sky

    My companion in its brightest month
    A diamond cool radiance
    Lingers above the horizon
    Reminding me (in the words of the poet)
    To care
    And not to care
    As all the earth-bound madness
    Engulfs our lives.
    Steady, faithful
    A light in the darkness
    As the day
    Morphs into night

    -- Joseph Goldstein
    When Life Seems a To-Do List

    When the squares of the week fill
    with musts and shoulds,
    when I swim in the heaviness of it,
    the headlines, the fear and hate,

    then with luck, something like a slice  
    of moon will arrive clean as bone and 
    beside it on that dark slate
    a star will lodge near the cusp

    and with luck I will have you 
    to see it with, the two of us,
    fools stepping out 
    the backdoor in our pajamas.
     
    Is that Venus? -- I think so -- 
    Let's call  it Venus, 
    cuddling up to the moon 
    and there are stars further away

    sending out rays that will not reach us 
    in our lifetimes but we are choosing, 
    before the chaos starts up again, 
    to stand in this particular light.

    -- Marjorie Saiser

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  • Ah, poetry!

    I think I’m going to have to give up on Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor as being my first book that I’ll read this year. Instead, today I’m turning to poetry. About an hour and a half ago, I went to Libby to pick out some possibilities. I have about half a dozen choices. I’ll let you know next week what I chose.

    As for the rest of the year, I have three books I want to finish before its end:

    1. Candide by Voltaire
    2. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
    3. The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor

    The first is because two different friends recommended and at the end of the book is the inspiration in part for this blog: to cultivate my garden figuratively. The second is one that my wife has been trying to get me to read for a while, plus another friend. My wife and I are also playing quid pro quo with my reading this before the end of the year and her reading Bruce Springsteen’s biography Born to Run. The third is a reread for me, from a course on O’Connor and William Faulkner that I had in college.

    What are you currently reading or what is on your radar for this year to read?

    This is part of The Sunday Salon hosted by Deb Nance of the blog Readerbuzz.

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