
Poetry for People
Who Don't Read Poetry. Spirituality for Me
and Maybe You.
Chris Spark

"[Spark] definitely has something going here: the quick take, unexpected turn-arounds, lots of playfulness... delightful in many instances." —Billy Collins, former US Poet Laureate
About
I live. I contemplate. I listen. To my thoughts. To plants and animals. To people who have had wildly different experiences.
I read. I wander. Through spirituality, science, psychology, philosophy, religion, anthropology, sociology, the supernatural, the paranormal, the loopy, the crazy.
I know it’s all connected. I try to say how. I feel every moment means something. I stop for the ant that meanders across my computer screen.
I come at all this from every angle that occurs to me. I come up short. When I stop trying, I come closest.
I love most when I surprise myself.

How Did I Get Here
I didn't set out to write poetry or philosophical essays.
In college I wrote humor for The Harvard Lampoon. After graduating in biology from Harvard, I taught science and math, wrote screenplays in Hollywood, played in a band, and spent years wandering through psychology, philosophy, religion, science, and anything else that seemed to hint at how life fits together.
Eventually I stopped trying to build a career around art and started sitting down each morning with coffee, a notebook, and no expectations. That simple practice slowly became the center of my life. It has taught me that the search for approval only kicks up dust around the search for truth.
Today I write poems, essays, and screenplays, and photograph ordinary moments that suddenly flare with the glow of something more. I'm interested in wonder more than certainty, questions more than answers, and whatever lies beneath the labels that usually divide us.
I don't want to write what I think. I want to write what I think is true.
Horn Tooting
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Harvard graduate, summa cum laude (Biology)
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Former writer and Vice President of The Harvard Lampoon
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Screenplay optioned by Warner Bros.
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Poems and essays published in The Aurora, The Rye Whiskey Review, and The Still Point Arts Quarterly
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Contributor to The American Bystander
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One of my pieces was included in The Best of the Harvard Lampoon: 140 Years of American Humor, alongside work by John Updike and Conan O'Brien