So….there was this thing called the pandemic, followed by giving up my apartment in Brookline, a job change, a temporary furnished place in Boston, and finally, a condo in Waltham. There was some poetry during that time–reading a book a day in August for the Sealey Challenge (two years in a row), poets from the Harlem Renaissance course I took in Fall 2021, poetry dates, and a poetry workshop through the Cambridge Center of Adult Education earlier this year.

If you’re a poet, then April is supercharged with poetry for National Poetry Month. This newish job, however, has a lot more traveling and my poetry activity had to wait until May. Fortunately, I had a panel accepted at the Mass Poetry Festival (May 5-7, 2023). It was the first in-person festival since 2018. Of course, the panel included a fabulous lineup of double-life poets:

• K.T. Landon – poet and software engineer
• Robert Carr – poet & infections disease specialist
• Cynthia Manick – poet & SCRUM master

Each poet took turns answering these questions:

1. How do you describe what you do/did for a living to dinner party guests?
2. How did poetry find you?
3. How have people at work reacted to you being a poet?
4. If you were to describe the relationship between your career and your poetry as a song, TV show, or movie title, what would it be and why?
5. How do you stay connected to poetry?

We read 1-2 poems each and then opened up the floor to questions. My favorite question came from a woman whose day job was reading other people’s academic writing for a living and could only spare five minutes a day for poetry. We recommended subscribing to Poem-a-Day and listening to poetry podcasts such as The Slowdown.

Brunch at home

So much has happened between my last post and where I find myself today—writing in the midst of a global pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus COVID-19. I approach this page after a long morning walk while listening to episodes of The Slowdown that have accumulated since January 31st. It’s a Sunday morning that feels like a Sunday morning. It’s raining and I want to stay inside with hot tea & make a big breakfast—french toast, fried egg, and turkey bacon. Yesterday before the rain started, I ventured out to pick up wine I ordered online from the shop around the corner and went for a quick walk around the block. It felt like a Sunday morning instead of Saturday at 6:30 pm—streets and sidewalks near empty, cars parked by expired meters, upturned chairs stacked on tables in restaurant windows.

This time last year, I had attended the one-day Colrain One-Day Informational Retreat where I got feedback on the poems feeding my manuscript. I’m still working toward the manuscript now. Some but not all of my time will be spent on writing more poems. Some but to all of my time will be spent listening to and reading poems and posting the poems I read before lunch and dinner on Instagram & Facebook. Some time will spent on writing letters and postcards, and I’ll definitely have to put in 7.5 hours of work every weekday. Under the current set of circumstances, I will find myself attending meetings and events on Zoom, texting and calling friends and loved ones a little more, and vegging out on the couch. In a lot of ways today feels no different than where I would be otherwise. But somehow, even a stay-at-home advisory seems to restrict my thoughts.

As I stay at home, I want to use this time to take stock of what has happened between then and now. Normally, I would try to fit it into a single blog post, but my instincts tell me to chronicle each month separately, to give October, November, December, January, February, and March the space they deserve. Not sure how long this will take me, but I want to try. My thoughts are free to roam around the past, while my body and brain stay present and the world moves toward an uncertain future.

Sometimes You Must Return

Go back to that moment where you first fell

in love with those words you read or heard

that made the grief, doubt, and loneliness

make sense in your head as if you had tapped

into the maple tree of yourself and now

everything oozed out thick, dark and sweet.

Go back to that first note that broke skin

and to the lyrics that soaked into your blood

stream, and to the music that moved through

you like a silent tsunami. Go back to the first

time you witnessed the chorus of stars, vast

against the night sky, surrounding you

with the brilliance of your birthright, filling

all your emptiness with their shine.

~Pamela Taylor © 2013

I’ll Be Glad When the Present Catches Up

In the future, I see you sitting across from me pouring the wine that I will buy for the meal you will cook, nothing special, just a salad and roasted chicken on what will be an ordinary Wednesday and we will not talk about my feeling stuck in this job or your struggle to find your true purpose or the where and how of everything between us because there will be no where and how, there will only be this moment when you cover my hand with your hand without thinking and kiss it out of habit when you get up from the table and ask if you can offer me more and I will say everything you have and you will know I mean I’ve fallen in love with you because you will have already read this poem.

~Pamela Taylor © 2013