It was a break from all these snow flurries and colder temperatures the other day, so I decided to take the laptop outside and record a favorite poem. I was going to save this for week four, but sometimes good things just can’t wait.

This year and last, my son Micah and I have been recording poems again for National Poetry Month—not one per day like the crazy 2012 and 2013 years, mind you. And I don’t think I recorded any last year on YouTube. I believe all of them were on Sound Cloud in 2017. If you haven’t played much on SoundCloud, you should give it a try. it’s kind of the YouTube of audio.

Our one rule this year, aside from trying to read collectively from a wide range of poetry “eras,” was that we wanted to make sure we were each reading poems by poets we’ve never recorded before.

Full disclosure: Philip  F. Clark is a good friend. We’ve followed each other’s blogs for some time and finally met face-to-face in NYC last year. I was honored when Philip asked me to read with him at the debut of his book, The Carnival of Affection. But still, I have never recorded his work!

Until now. The difficult thing was deciding which poem of Philip’s to read. I mean, it’s no wonder we were drawn to each other’s work. There is a deep soul kinship in our poems. It’s like they know each other and thus we are connected. I’m not sure how to say it less mystically.

Perhaps the way to express it is by explaining why I chose to record this piece. “Learning” feels very much like a poem I wrote called “Timothy,” about a young man showing his love the way he’d seen men do, “with a fist.” But the speaker in Philip’s poem comes to the conclusion to do the opposite of what he’d seen men do. So they are speaking from opposite ends of the growing-up experience.

We wrote these poems independently and unaware of the other. “Learning” was published in Philip’s recent book, and “Timothy” will be published shortly in my second chapbook. Raised by different fathers, yet brother poems, for sure.