A few months ago I signed up for a daily “newsletter.” This guy, this poet George Bilgere emails a poem he loves and then says a few words about why he picked it. And so every day for months now I’ve started each day with a poem, and besides dogs, I think it’s the best thing to happen to me in the last year.
I’m not a poetry person. I would say that 95% of the poems I read, I either don’t understand, don’t like, or both. And yet I still keep reading a lot of poetry because the other 5% make it worth it. But for some reason this guy George gets me. We are on the same wavelength.
The poems he sends are approachable, digestible by my middling intellect, but no less meaningful in the way that poetry can cut right through you and reveal something meaningful in just a few words. Anyway, his newsletter is called poetry town, with George Bilgere. A few of my favorites from the last few months have been The Coyote, by Alan Feldman; Fix, by Alicia Suskin Ostriker; a song in the front yard, by Gwendolyn Brooks; and Wild Turkeys, by Lawrence Kessenich.
Otherwise, not much is happening in my life besides that I’ve been so busy and stressed at work the last few months that I’ve wanted at times to blow up my life (which is barely held together in any case) and quit my job and hit the road and head to Mexico and then deep into South America and never look back. I’ve been skipping the gym and skipping my personal writing because I’ve been too exhausted to do either, which has only made everything worse.
So the other day, instead of exploding, I signed up to do a reading at an open mic event this June. Terrified isn’t quite the word for how I’m feeling about it, but it will be a first for adult me, though back in grade school we had to read out loud in class (which also terrified me).
As I’ve gotten older, especially within the last few years, I’ve made a direct effort to face some of my fears, like spiders and public speaking, though ideally not both simultaneously. I think this is just one of the many thrilling benefits of the increasing weight of mortality as one ages—the now-or-never risk-taking that comes from the contemplation of the coffin on the horizon.
My long-term goal for the past few years has been to take an improv class, and someday to get on stage and try to do stand-up comedy, which I will do in secret should it ever happen, probably in a town where no one knows me, a drifter passing through who no one in town has ever seen before and who they hope they will never see again after what transpires. But that is still far down the road.
The improv class has been on my radar for a couple years or more now as a thing I intend to do but never get around to doing, and so, baby steps. Foot in the door. Reading aloud to a small crowd who may judge me in the harsh stage light is the first step.
My thought is that this will begin to build my public-speaking courage, and after a few of these experiences, I’ll sign up for that improv class and become more comfortable without a script in my hand. Then I will someday put the storytelling and the improv together and get on a stage and tell a story or jokes that are perhaps rehearsed but not entirely memorized. And after I do that, I think I’ll go skydiving, because someday the chute won’t open for all of us. And when I hit the ground, I want to hit the ground unafraid.
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