Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Not Like Everybody Else: Selected Poems
    Not Like Everybody Else: Selected Poems
    Not Like Everybody Else: Selected Poems
    Ebook154 pages43 minutes

    Not Like Everybody Else: Selected Poems

    By Howie Schaffer

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A Note from the Author

    I write many poems, they are like diary entries for me. They commemorate and explore significant moments in my life. I do not necessarily write my poems for a public audience or with the goal of conveying a specific meaning to a reader. It is my hope that the words, images, experiences, and feelings conveyed in my poems will speak to the lives and emotions of the benevolent and brave people who take time to wander through this book of poems.

    It was only because of the encouragement of friends and family that I found the motivation and insanity to solicit a publisher for my book of poems. My early poems can broadly be considered a reflection on how we often make decisions that create distance between who we are and the people we want to be. My more recent poems deal, in part, with the adjustment inherent to the sudden and unexplained arrival of love and the process of, and choices involved in, moving from youth into adulthood. Along the journey are poems that were written for the purpose of seeking to understand myself and to be deciphered by others. Also included are many poems written only out of a spirit of spontaneity and fun.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherXlibris US
    Release dateAug 2, 2005
    ISBN9781469105420
    Not Like Everybody Else: Selected Poems
    Author

    Howie Schaffer

    Howie Schaffer has been writing poetry since his early school days in Clinton, New York. A graduate of Cornell University and Columbia University, he lives in Maryland with his wife, Rachel. In his professional life, Howie works in Washington, DC, as a media officer for a public education advocacy organization. His first book of poems, Notes from a Superfluous Man, was published in 1999.

    Related to Not Like Everybody Else

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Art of Poetry No. 111

      Sep 6, 2022

      The Art of Poetry No. 111
      26 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Marie-Helene Bertino

      Dec 10, 2020

      Both books imagine then endanger tender, delicate bodies and listen only to their own strange pulses against the universe. The post A Year in Reading: Marie-Helene Bertino appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Sharon Olds, America’s Brave Poet of the Body

      Mar 8, 2017

      Sharon Olds can still remember how furious editors became when she started submitting her poems, 40 years ago. “They came back often with very angry notes,” the 74-year-old poet says, sitting in her small, light-filled apartment overlooking NYU’s cam

      16 min read

    • Article

      Joseph Coelho

      Feb 3, 2021

      Can you tell us about the poetry you write? I write poems about all sorts of things, from fairy tales about zombies (Zombierella!) to poems about nature, family and the environment. I very much enjoy playing with form – that means I experiment with

      2 min read

    • Article

      TELL ME A Story

      Mar 31, 2023

      TELL ME A Story
      21 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Jul 31, 2023

      Books
      6 min read

    • Article

      Vagrant & Vulnerable

      Aug 16, 2017

      Vagrant & Vulnerable
      12 min read

    • Article

      Poetry And Emotion

      Nov 16, 2022

      The album was beautiful, made of red leather with gilt-edged pages. My late mother, Linda Kelly, who was a historian and lover of the 18th century, with biographies of Sheridan, Tom Moore and Talleyrand to her name, had been given it by her mother-in

      3 min read

    • Article

      Past Compensation

      Jul 29, 2019

      Past Compensation
      4 min read

    • Article

      A Moose in Maine: Marcia Butler in Conversation with Richard Russo

      Mar 3, 2021

      Music itself creates a space and time where the past and future are suspended—it anchors your entire being to the now. There is no doubt that if I’d not discovered music at age four my life would have played out very differently. The post A Moose in

      8 min read

    • Article

      5 Tips for Great Sex (Writing)

      Jul 29, 2019

      SUZANNE ROBERTS is the author of the memoir Almost Somewhere (Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award), as well as four collections of poetry. She serves as the current El Dorado County Poet Laureate and teaches for the low residency MFA program in

      6 min read

    • Article

      VAGRANT & VULNERABLE

      Aug 16, 2017

      VAGRANT & VULNERABLE
      11 min read

    • Article

      The Beast

      Nov 1, 2019

      Don’t say that you love me!Just tell me that you want me!Tusk! Tusk! Tusk! Tusk!—Fleetwood Mac, “Tusk” This lecture⋆ is called “The Beast: How Poetry Makes Us Human,” but it used to be called simply “The Animal.” When I called it “The Animal,” I was

      23 min read

    • Article

      Writing From The Edge

      May 1, 2019

      One outreaches language in poetry when the inseeing elements of consciousness ask the unseen of life to come forward. My aim has been to unseat what we assume about time, about the verities of love and death, of the consciousness of those other senti

      9 min read

    • Article

      Six Poems

      Jul 1, 2018

      When I said, to my mother, What was a goodthing about me as a child?, my mother’sface seemed to unfurl from the center,hibiscus in fast motion, the anthersand flounces springing out with joy. Oh you wereenchanting, she breathed. What do you mean—craz

      5 min read

    • Article

      Where We Write

      Feb 9, 2017

      Where We Write
      9 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Not Like Everybody Else

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Not Like Everybody Else - Howie Schaffer

      Copyright © 2005 by Howie Schaffer.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or

      transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

      including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage

      and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the

      copyright owner.

      This book was printed in the United States of America.

      To order additional copies of this book, contact:

      Xlibris Corporation

      1-888-795-4274

      www.Xlibris.com

      Orders@Xlibris.com

      24642

      Contents

      Inspirations 

      UNDERGRADUATE POEMS

      What have you done since high school? 

      When hugging in front of the tapir cage at the zoo 

      Trailfinding 

      Things I read in my alphabet soup 

      When meeting your father 

      Stagger + Reel (beware the ides of March) 

      Sure, no Regrets 

      Summer and My Purple Rose 

      Divest 

      Haiku 

      Thinking of How She Might Have Sent the Bird 

      Where I Put Your Legs 

      WASHINGTON POEMS

      Who am I exactly: a moth that crawled out of the woodwork 

      the whole no greater sum than the parts 

      After a Long Weekend 

      For Kelly, away 

      Counting Lives with You 

      Everyday, I’m fighting my demons 

      Terrible dreams too disgusting to write 

      Morbidezza 

      tupperware nation 

      Something Long Overdue 

      Late Night at the Dubliner with Kim 

      When We Stay in Bed 

      NEW YORK CITY POEMS

      New York 

      The Postcard I Never Sent 

      Causes 

      Delivering Pizza 

      Unsafe Passage 

      I am always very close to the ground 

      My Primacy 

      A Conjugal Visit 

      You are in my bed like cookie crumbs 

      I am the Sharpest Edge of the Arrow 

      My Austerity 

      Why Do I Keep You at an Axe Length Away 

      To the magnitude of pain, of being that much alive 

      Reflecting Upon Jody 

      Small Touches 

      Courage is speaking my mind by telling all my heart 

      Last summer we did little 

      Highlights 

      Listening to the Squirrels in the Third-Floor Walls 

      WASHINGTON POEMS

      Parallax 

      Head Full of Commas 

      My Mother is like the Wailing Wall 

      Knife 

      Dancing With My Father 

      Dow Jones: Up 

      Poem for an Old Girlfriend 

      Eulogy for a Bowline 

      We Could Have Been Them Had We Less Ambition 

      THE YEAR BEFORE GETTING MARRIED POEMS

      What My Father Didn’t Do 

      Litany 

      My Dinner Plate 

      Concerning Susan 

      My Parents Eat from the Closet 

      Ocean Gate, New Jersey 

      The Woman I Love 

      Vertigo 

      RACHEL POEMS

      Four Seasons 

      These Jabberwocky Days 

      Do You Mind If I Touch You There? 

      After the Dog Died 

      Conducting the Catfish Chorus 

      Forty Acres and a Butterfly 

      Love is Nowhere 

      Multiple Dislocations 

      My Barber Wants to Talk Politics 

      My Resume 

      The Procrastinator’s Guide to Underachieving 

      Things I Did Before I Was Married 

      Witness to a Seduction 

      SILVER SPRING POEMS

      Baking on Monday Night 

      20th and Irving, San Francisco 

      Rachel, Unaware of Dessert on Her Face 

      Rainbow Lake 

      TAKOMA PARK POEMS

      Ancient Bureaucracies We Have Inherited 

      The First Duty of Love 

      Music for Married People 

      Nightly the Moon 

      North Star 

      Rejected Titles for Poems 

      Tell Me the Best Dog Names in the World 

      2003

      A Prayer 

      Enter the Lumen 

      My First Chest Hairs 

      First Fish 

      Rabbit 

      Tree Full of Cardinals 

      2004

      Making School Lunches 

      The Shock of Being Pulled Back 

      When Christina Slept with John 

      Things You Think I Don’t Like But I Do 

      Today I Am Not Listening 

      Basket Case 

      Honeymoon 

      This book is dedicated to the many wonderful teachers in my life who have generously coached and taught me, enlightened me, been patient with me, and cared for

      and about me.

      "As I review my own literary life with Howie Schaffer, emotions

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1