Keyboard characters make a poem . . .

     Here's poem found in an old email from my Bloomsburg friend, Janice B.  Its authors turn out to be Fred Bremmer and Steve Kroese and they penned it around 1990, using computer keyboard characters, during their student days at Calvin College.  Enjoy!

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< > ! * ' ' #         read as   Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash
^ " ` $ $ -                  Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash
! * = @ $ _                  Bang splat equal at dollar underscore
% * < > ~ # 4               Percent splat waka waka tilde number 4
& [ ] . . /                   Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash
| { , , SYSTEM HALTED     Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH.

Buffalo 66

     Nearly twenty years ago, in the formative years of River Poets (in Bloomsburg, PA), Jim Murray from Shamokin, then a student at Bloomsburg University) and I both were part of the group that gathered at Phillips Emporium for monthly poetry readings.  We became friends who kept in touch as he traveled to South Dakota and South Korea -- and I almost got to hear him read in Bloomsburg last month. 
     In recent weeks I have been enjoying journeying with Jim across the years and miles, seeing his reflections and insights (and sense of humor) as revealed through his poetry collections, Almost Normal (hardcoalstudios.com, 2012) and Normal:  The Last Ride of a Poet (hardcoalstudios.com, 2015).  Moreover, a visit to Murray's Hard Coal Studios website reveals other facets of his creative activity -- his comics, his ghost stories, his novella, and more.    Here is a sample (a short poem from Almost Normal) set in the old Capitol Theatre (now a restaurant) located along Main Street in Bloomsburg back in the 90s when single theaters were losing viewers to multiplexes.

Imaginary Number

Last week (on November 6) I was invited to read some of my poems at the River Poets reading in Bloomsburg, PA (where I lived and taught for a bunch of years).  Among the friends that I had a chance to greet were Susan and Richard Brook -- and, from them, received this mathy poem by Pullitzer-Prize-winning-poet Vijay Seshadri.

Imaginary Number     by Vijay Seshadri

The mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed
is not big and is not small.
Big and small are

comparative categories, and to what
could the mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed
be compared?    

Forecasting snow and poetry

Snowbound

is that other world
in which no schedules sit
and no ambitions flare
to interrupt the bluest sky
and whitest field
and coldest air