Poetry is complex, beautiful, and mysterious. My wife Amy writes poetry. So does my first business partner Dave Jilk (Rejuvenilia , Distilled Moments ). There is a lot of poetry in my house. Both Amy and I had tears in our eyes after listening to Amanda Gorman yesterday. I knew America had a national poet laureate, but I didn’t know we had a national youth poet laureate . We’ve now had four; Amanda was the first. ...
Dave Jilk was my first business partner (we co-founded Feld Technologies). The photo above is from Dave’s office at 155 Federal Street around 1991. We worked closely together for seven years before selling the company in 1993 to a public company called Sage Alerting Systems, which renamed itself Sage Technologies and then finally AmeriData Technologies. Well, at least the “Technologies” survived that naming transition … Dave recently published a book of poetry titled Distilled Moments . I read it Sunday night and it’s delicious. If you are into poetry, a friend of Dave’s, or just want a taste of something different from your normal reading stuff, grab a copy. ...
I don’t know whether it was Jerry Colonna or my therapist who recommended this to me, but I listened to David Whyte’s Midlife and the Great Unknown yesterday on my evening run. As part of my acceptance of midlife, which I define as the transition into the stage where you know you have fewer days to live than the number of days you have already lived, I’ve been exploring a bunch of different things. One of them is poetry, which has always been extremely difficult for me to read. ...
At the end of another intense year, after two weeks fighting a difficult cold, surrounded by snow, light, and quiet, this poem by John O’Donohue made its way to the surface, sent to me by my beloved soulmate . Happy new year. When the rhythm of the heart becomes hectic, Time takes on the strain until it breaks; Then all the unattended stress falls in On the mind like an endless, increasing weight. ...
While Amy loves poetry, I struggle with it. I find that I generally skim it and don’t really absorb it, unless I read it aloud and slowly. Yesterday, as I was listening to Jerry Colonna read a poem as part of something I did with him and a bunch of other Boulder entrepreneurs and I thought of a poetry book I read recently that I loved. It’s Odes by Sharon Olds . Since it was poetry, and I knew I wanted to read it slowly, I bought it in hardcover instead of Kindle. I decided to read it in the bathroom so it would take me a while. Like a lot of guys I know, I enjoy sitting on my throne for 15 minutes reading – it’s a quiet place for me. So, I put Odes on the shelf in my master bathroom and read a few poems each time I emptied myself. ...