Upon discovering that Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ was released on this day 30 years ago, I was going to compile a list of songs from 1987. But that list failed to capture what it was that made that year in music such a significant one for me. Thus, I compile and re-post the entries in my abandoned effort five years ago to recount my life that year through music and mixtapes: Continue reading
Tokyo
Poetry Marathon 2016, Hour One: The doors on the right will open
Off to a good start. I wrote my first poem of the day while watching a YouTube video of a trip on Tokyo’s Yamanote Line, as viewed from the cockpit. Continue reading
Lunch in Shibuya (a poem)
Remembering an afternoon from 1987 or thereabouts…
Tokyo (A poem)
Sometimes I return to the old stories, in hopes that I might tell them better…
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A poem from 1992
I did not write anything yesterday; today is still up for grabs. Meanwhile, I re-discovered a couple (okay, four) poems I wrote in 1992, while I was still living in Tokyo. This particular poem would appear to be concerned with the subway.
On finding a new Ryuichi Sakamoto album on my first visit to a neighborhood record store (a poem)
The August 2nd prompt in The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, by Kelli Russell Agodon & Martha Silano is to take an item purchased during a trip, then write a poem incorporating that item as an acrostic poem using the name of the city where it was bought. I chose to write about the day I found a copy of the then-new Ryuichi Sakamoto album, Neo Geo, in a small record shop during a walk through an adjacent neighborhood not long after I had arrived in Tokyo.
A rainy Tokyo afternoon (a poem)
Today’s prompt in The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, by Kelli Russell Agodon & Martha Silano, is to write a pantoum—a poem in which the second and fourth lines of one stanza are used as the first and third lines of the following stanza.
One of Those Small Moments That Come Back As Random Memories (a vignette)
I started out writing this as a poem, but quickly discovered that it needed to take a different form:
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A poem about a job
The July 18th prompt in The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, by Kelli Russell Agodon & Martha Silano, is to “write a poem in everyday speech about a job you once had.” This is kind of a long one, covering the three years at the job I had in Tokyo with a very large corporation.
A poem about two places
The May 30th prompt in The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, by Kelli Russell Agodon & Martha Silano, is to write a couple of ten-line poems—one about a place you loved, and the other about a place you didn’t—and then combine them into a single twenty-line poem. I wrote about Tokyo (specifically, Saturdays in Tokyo), and getaways to Ocean Shores…
Ordinary Average Thoughts 