Poem of the Day
Poem of the Day is a changing display featuring one poem and photo from my archives. See below.
For additional information about the poem and photograph, contact Marc
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Dimensions
I began from transparent inside
and ended in solid outdoors
encounters with stairs and ceilings
malformed into subbasement floors
I curled to weightless viscous wells
then flattened to heavy crystal towers
my blind helpless blue sound yielded
to silent red hearing powers
my arms rose above tactile height
and my legs dropped down to numb deep
the bottom sweltering alert
became the topmost of cool asleep
I reduced all sideways extent
then enlarged forward and back beyond far
velocity embraced fantastic width
as it slow hugged in length bizarre
I propelled randomly circular
in a set square bound trajectory
I felt infinite narrowness
and tasted continually swelling glory
I left quantum constraints and limits
and magnitudes of time and space
I ended the beginning odyssey
and entered a portal to a new Life place.
Copyright © 2002, 2004 Marc P. Anderson
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This poem was written specifically for this image. The photo is an old one, taken in 1973. As I walked through the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago, in the late afternoon of a June day, I passed by the library. The edge of this modern building contained a stairwell that was enclosed in glass on three sides. I could see reflections in the glass of the campus behind me as well as the stairway inside the building and further to the city and sunset on the other side of the building. This ability to see backward, forward, inside and outside all at once fascinated me and became an abstract photo that I have always valued.
In later years I wrote short stories and poems and combined them with images. I returned to this photo to see what it might produce in me. As the words came, about 30 years later, I wanted to present the idea of otherworldly dimensions in the extreme.
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MarcWords
My poems arise from moods and thoughts generated by my own life and from placing myself in the lives of others.
For decades I have written poems and mated them with specific photographs in the belief that the two art forms can result in something even more fascinating when presented together. Sometimes I have taken a photo first and written a poem for it later. Other times the reverse occurred. A time span of days to years can separate the writing of a poem, the capturing of an image and their final mating.
I am not a poet. Instead I am a photographer who also writes essays and poems. My poems do not follow any rules. I write what I feel. The style of writing is usually accessible and the approach is often personal.
Many of my poems with stronger, controversial themes, which appear in a collection entitled MarcWords, have been categorized under the headings Life and Death, Race, and Love and Sexuality. They are accompanied by equally strong images including artistic nudes. In order to keep this website accessible and non-offensive to the general public, such poems and photo combinations are not included in Poem of the Day but they are available in MarcWords and other non-public web journals.