Tag Archives: Poetry

Like Hearing the Sound of Your Own Voice

Well that was awkward. I recently experienced an impromptu live reading from my poetry collection, A Year in Love: Daily Glimpses of Life’s Most Worthwhile Virtue. Even though I was not the reader, hearing my words read aloud to a group of strangers felt a bit weird at first, but it wasn’t all bad.

A good friend of mine periodically throws Sunday afternoon dinner parties at his home for no reason other than to celebrate food and fellowship among his friends and family. These gatherings are wonderful, almost therapeutic. Invitees often bring beverages, salads, side dishes, and desserts to share with everyone and the thirty or forty people who show up for these gatherings generally leave stuffed but happy. I seldom know more than a few people there, but that never seems to matter. There is always much laughter, no arguments started, no judgments passed, and everyone pretty much just wants to enjoy one another’s company.

And so it was on this cold Sunday in February when my wife Karen and I found ourselves seated around our friend Frank’s dining room table with a number of people, all but one of whom we had never met before, eating copious amounts of fantastic homemade food and talking about everything under the sun. After everyone had eaten and had settled into socializing, an attractive, dark haired stranger came into from another room and sat with me just long enough to extract the details behind the spinach mandarin salad I had brought. It’s a sought-after recipe that a work associate introduced to me twenty years ago and I was only too happy to pass it on to her.

Moments later, our host stepped in to see how everyone was doing, held up his copy of my book for everyone to see, talked it up for a quick minute, and then pointed to me adding, “…and this is the author; you should talk to him about it!” With that, Frank tossed the book onto the table and went off to visit several other tables that had been strategically set up throughout the first floor of his home to accommodate everybody. A flurry of questions ensued as people began passing my book around the table. What had I written? How did I write it? Why did I write it? I did my best to satisfy their curiosity.

An older gentleman, who had been sitting at one end of the table, began leafing through the book as our Q&A session continued. During a brief lull in the conversation, he held up one finger for attention and asked, “Michael, would it be alright if I read one of your poems to everyone?” Nobody had ever asked me this before.

“Of course,” I replied, having thought of no reason to object. And with that, the gentleman read his selection.

“May 28,” he began. I should point out that all but one of the poems have no titles, but are simply marked with a day of the year. “Sometimes I gently trace the contours of your lips with one finger,” he began. The entire table had fallen silent, hanging on every word. I tensed up when he got to the part about “…memorizing every aspect of your delightful mouth…” and prayed silently that no one would laugh out loud at my words. But when the reading had concluded, nobody was laughing. There was just this stillness, as if the words were still landing after having been read aloud.

I glanced over at my dear reader as he looked up from the book, drew a prolonged breath, and then exhaled slowly with lips pursed and eyebrows arched skyward, as if he had just set down something heavy. One of the ladies fanned herself as another uttered one word, “Wow.”

“That bad, eh?” I offered.

“No!”

“Not at all!” The responses came in a flurry.

“There’s just… no mistaking the feeling behind it.” I took that as a compliment as the conversation rolled along. A delightful lady who had joined our table just prior to our spontaneous poetry reading shared with me her own writing aspirations. I think the book idea she’s working on would be a hoot to read and I hope she sees it through to fruition.

An hour or so later, as my wife and I were preparing to depart, I went looking for our host, to bid him goodbye and thank him for his hospitality. “Hey, Frank,” I called out upon finding him, “you should have seen it. This one guy started reading my book out loud and…”

Frank stopped me in midstream. “I saw the whole thing,” he said with a knowing grin. “I was watching you guys from the hallway.” I guess it’s not easy to scoop my friend, especially in his own house.

I love gatherings like this because they remind me of the extended family gatherings of my youth. The attention that my book and I got, thanks to my friend, was merely icing on the cake, but the love, warmth, and camaraderie — to say nothing of all that fabulous food and drink — that was the cake!

As always, thanks for hanging with me.

Sort of Like Having a Baby

The whole thing began as a game. From 2018 through 2020, I had been amusing myself by creating motivational posts across several social media platforms, just to see if I could keep it going. By the end of 2020, though, that game had gotten old. I enjoyed the mental stimulation that the creative exercise provides, but ironically, I discovered that I had been losing my motivation to write motivational blurbs. After all, there are only so many ways to convey the same principles. At some point, a person either gets it or they don’t. But I had no desire to stop creating. All I needed was a new challenge.

My final choice came down to bad jokes or love poems and I chose the latter because I wasn’t sure whether I could come up with an original bad joke a day for a year. Love, on the other hand, has always been a favorite subject of mine and even though I didn’t fancy myself a poet, I was pretty sure I could deliver amorous free verse (short prose) poetry on a daily basis. And that’s exactly what I did. Every day from New Year’s Day through New Year’s Eve of 2021, I posted a different free verse love poem, never more than I could fit onto a square Instagram image. Nobody was ever going to equate me with William Shakespeare, but some of my followers enjoyed the ride and I had fun in the process.

While not every detail I wrote was autobiographical, the feelings behind them were genuine. Admittedly, that took some doing. Night after night, I reached back into every loving relationship I’d ever had and harvested all the positive physical and emotional sensations I could. Fortunately, I have a strong sense of recall so going back forty years or more wasn’t as difficult as one might think. And I only took the positive parts and none of the heartbreak, anger, or frustration.

About halfway through, I began to entertain thoughts of binding the poems into a book, after they had all been written, and self-publishing my year-long collection of romantic bits. And why not, I reasoned, it should be easy once all the poems had been written. Looking back now, I want to shout at that guy, “Oh, you foolish man, you!” I had grossly underestimated the task at hand. By a lot.

Seriously, I thought I’d have the darned book out within a year. When it became obvious that wasn’t going to happen, I made arrangements to steal away to a hotel up in Wisconsin for a few days to assess the job at hand and begin giving my proposed book some structure (see My Self-Imposed Seclusion). This was where I realized just what I had gotten myself into. First off, not all of my material was suitable for publication. It’s one thing to fire off a few lines of affection and post them on social media, but it’s a whole ‘nother thing to arrange them into a book that people want to pay for. And the key word is arrange. Besides the edits, rewrites, and outright replacements that surely lay ahead. None of these poems — 365 of them — had been released in any kind of logical order. Holy cow! Well, at least I’d had the foresight to bring some good wine along.

Imagine looking at 365 randomly written poems that had to be sorted out somehow. They had a common theme, but there had been no clear flow between them, no story to be told. None of them even had titles. I began looking at them individually, not with the intent of editing but just to see if I could at least place them into buckets.

“That’s it, buckets!” I exclaimed aloud, startling myself, to say nothing of whoever may have been in the neighboring rooms at the time. But I had no time to lose. I went back to the beginning of the pile and began placing each raw, unedited poem into one of four imaginary buckets, each representing a three-month quarter. The first quarter represented beginnings: meeting someone, being attracted to someone, becoming smitten with someone, you know, the early stages of love, in whatever form it might take. The second quarter dealt more with earthy, physical affection. Advancement, if you will, but still at a gut level. The third bucket was for the poems that attempted to see past mere physical affection. And the last bunch were the ones reaching for fruition, for something more permanent than the earlier pieces.

Lacking titles, I assigned each poem to a day of the year. Everything was still tentative at this point, but at last I had a loose sense of logic regarding how these poems would be presented in book form. I even added a placeholder for a 366th poem, not yet written, that would be devoted to February 29, the Leap Day.

Three days later, I thought I knew what I was doing. I left my Wisconsin hideaway with a logical structure for the book and one month out of the twelve drafted. As it turns out, I would still be making adjustments to my plan for two more years. That’s a very important strategic principle, by the way. When things don’t go the way you thought they would, as long as you’re sure of the goal you set, you make changes to the plan, not the goal.

From the beginning, my intent had been to self-publish this book, mainly because so many of the poems, or raw versions of them, had been placed in public view on social media platforms. Self-publishing gives the author a lot of control over all aspects of the book, but with that control comes responsibility — and quite a bit of work. The final manuscript had to be delivered as a 100% print-ready file meeting a lengthy list of technical, artistic, and legal requirements, enough to make a newcomer’s head spin. And every little change, whether to the content, the layout, or even from one file type to another, was an opportunity for something else to go wrong.

The first full draft of the book, including all the front and back matter, was completed sometime during the second half of 2024. Knowing I am my own worst proofreader, I asked my wife, who had worked as a public relations writer and editor in a past life, to have at my manuscript and give me her suggested edits. This she did no fewer than five times, including the proof copy, finding things that had passed before my eyes unnoticed. Besides the usual typos and grammatical glitches, Karen drew my attention to passages that despite being correct as written, I was able to make better. This is what a good editor does.

The most stressful part, for me, was the actual publishing. Despite having launched a half-dozen corporate websites, developed and contributed to various blogs, and even executed a few million-dollar direct-marketing campaigns during my professional career, I was as nervous as a kid on his first date putting out this little poetry book. There were so many choices to be made and questions to be answered, each a good bit of research. Then came the cover art, the marketing plan, and so forth. By the time I got to it, making the final click that would set everything in motion, was like pulling the trigger on a 10-gauge shotgun.

And then it’s over. A Year in Love: Daily Glimpses of Life’s Most Worthwhile Virtue, available in paperback and ebook editions, was officially published on December 17, 2024. The copyright registration process, a task in itself, is underway, as are some basic marketing activities, but the book is done. It feels so good to say, “I did it,” but there is also a letdown from realizing that the job is finished. Almost 30 years ago, when I finished my first full-color product catalog project, I told the head of the agency that had handled the project that I was both glad and sorry to be done with it. “Yeah,” she replied, “it’s kind of like the postpartum period.” Being a guy, I can’t know firsthand what giving birth is like, but my sense of things is that she was correct.

As always, thanks for hanging with me.

The Ride

My last post, My Apolitical Take on Masking, went over like a lead balloon with my readers. Okay, I get that. I’m neither a health and science writer nor a political writer, so that was a bit of a curveball. Fair enough.

These have been most unusual times for many of us, in so many ways. I have close friends who are not yet able to articulate their fears about what has been going on in their lives. I am sympathetic to them because I have things going on in my own life that I don’t talk about, either. Moreover, circumstances are such that I have a deal of free, solitary, discretionary time, during my evenings and weekends, that I assure you, I never wanted to have. But I have it. So I did what any writer would do… er. well, almost.

I’ve been taking a poetry class. Not so that I could begin spewing out love sonnets — although that would be something — but because I wanted to push my boundaries further with regard to the way I use words to convey not just thoughts and ideas but also emotions and sensory experiences. Poetry.

The course I’m taking recently had a session on metaphor and included a writing prompt on crafting a conceit, where the entire poem becomes an extended metaphor. My readers can breathe easy because I didn’t write a poem about masking. No, I wrote something I called The Ride. It did okay in peer review, so I thought I’d share it here.

The Ride