Mark J. Halliday

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Below are poems written by United States poet Mark J. Halliday. If you like the poems, please comment on the work of this poet. Remember, Poetrysoup is an environment of encouragement and growth so only provide specific positive comments that indicate what you appreciate about the poems of Mark J. Halliday.

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Poems

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Date PostedPoemTitle# ViewsForm  
09/04/2024323 Rhyme
05/31/2024402 Lyric
05/15/2024360 Alliteration
05/14/2024462 Sonnet
02/15/2024395 Etheree
12/15/2023635 Lyric
10/13/2023257 Prose
09/12/2023386 Rhyme
05/19/2023645 Rhyme
03/06/20231033 Haiku
02/09/2023615 Sijo
09/23/2022504 Clerihew
03/08/2022474 Lyric
02/23/2022715 Pleiades
02/15/2022437 Narrative
01/30/2022435 Senryu
01/30/2022526 Lyric
12/25/2021429 Rhyme
12/23/2021468 Lyric
05/16/2021421 Free verse
04/19/2021502 Lyric
04/17/20211049 Ghazal
04/17/2021622 Villanelle
04/03/2021665 Alliteration
03/23/2021446 Tanka
03/19/2021793 Haiku
03/02/2021466 Haiku
02/24/2021445 Haiku
02/23/2021383 Haiku
02/21/2021771 Sonnet
02/20/2021473 Nonet
02/19/2021619 Sonnet
02/13/2021426 Free verse
02/13/2021972 Diamante
02/13/20211452 Diamante
02/02/2021585 Sonnet
01/30/20211310 Pantoum
12/20/2020791 Lyric
01/10/2020589 Lyric
08/20/2019773 Free verse
05/24/2019504 Lyric
02/24/20191771 Lyric
02/24/2019659 Haiku
02/22/20191816 Lyric
02/11/2019636 I do not know?
02/03/2019497 Senryu
02/03/2019565 Lyric
01/26/2019773 Lyric
01/23/2019906 Narrative
01/23/2019725 Enclosed Rhyme
01/15/20191559 Lyric
01/14/2019787 Bio
01/14/2019862 Rhyme
01/13/2019690 Rhyme
01/10/2019580 Fibonacci
01/08/2019823 Sonnet
12/31/2018879 Lyric
12/30/2018606 Monoku
12/21/20181159 Lyric
12/21/2018651 Monoku
12/19/2018749 Lyric
12/18/2018852 Lyric
12/16/20181298 Lyric
12/15/2018645 Lyric
09/28/2018534 Rhyme
06/29/2018545 Lyric
06/29/2018597 Lyric
06/03/20181307 Free verse
04/17/20181099 Verse
04/08/2018523 Lyric
09/06/2017934 Lyric
08/22/2017830 Haibun
06/29/2017911 Pantoum
06/20/20171122 Lyric
04/21/2017932 Lyric
10/28/2016956 Senryu
10/14/20162819 Lyric
09/08/2016869 Lyric
08/11/2016852 Lyric
07/22/20161301 Lyric
07/12/20161064 Lyric
07/08/20163198 Lyric
07/06/2016891 Lyric
06/28/20161041 Lyric
06/27/2016918 Lyric
06/22/2016804 Triolet
06/13/2016832 Lyric
06/11/20161145 Lyric
05/16/20161153 Lyric
05/08/2016957 Lyric
04/17/20162368 I do not know?
04/06/20161308 I do not know?
04/03/20161033 Couplet
03/30/20161488 I do not know?
03/21/20161152 Haiku
03/21/20161141 Lyric
01/25/20163934 Couplet
01/15/20161668 Quatrain
12/31/20151414 Shadorma
12/28/20151040 Senryu
1234

Biography

My Name is Mark Halliday (Staff Sergeant, US Army Retired). 
I grew up in Garden Grove, California.  I had piano lessons as a kid, and played flute in marching bands for 4 years. My first college attended was Santa Ana College, which was interrupted for two years while I served as a Mormon missionary in north-eastern France and southern Belgium.  While finishing my first AA in Liberal Arts, I played keyboard synthesizer with my friends in a band that focused on Beatles songs, surfer music, oldies, and pop songs from the 80s.  I started learning to play guitar around 1985.

Besides being involved in music, I also like to draw.  Often my pictures have the same theme as my lyrics or poetry.  I have a series of drawings of musical instruments in fantasy/science fiction settings, for example a picture of a bass guitar fighting off biplanes from on top of the Empire State Building (based on the original film King Kong), and others of primitive man surrounding a giant set of keyboards (similar to the opening of 2001 A Space Oddessey).

My favorite hobby is reading.  I especially like military-science-fiction writers such as David Weber, David Drake, John Ringo, and Eric Flint.  I'm also fond of books by Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Tom Clancy, Harold Coyle, Harry Turtledove, Frank Herbert, Ian Fleming, W.E.B. Griffin, Clive Cussler, Jack Higgins, Arthur C. Clark, Jim Butcher, George R. R. Martin, and writers for Star Wars novels such as Kevin Anderson.
 
I enlisted in the US Army (1987) near the end of the Cold War to be an Intelligence Analyst/Russian Linguist.  I later cross-trained into the Serbian and Croatian languages during the Bosnia and Kosovo conflicts, and spent time with UN Peacekeepers in Macedonia.  I also spent a year in Mosul, Iraq, helping train the Intelligence section of an Iraqi infantry battalion staff. I spent about a third of my service time in Germany, as well as Missouri, California, Texas, Massachusetts, Arizona, and Maryland.  I taught Russian, then Serb-Croatian, then French at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLIFLC) in Monterey, California, where I finally retired in 2007. 

I met my wife Nelly while visiting Paris, France, during the bicentennial of Bastille Day in 1989 (see my quatern poem A Soldier's Foreign Woman).  We have two sons.  We are still together, and happily still best friends.

While still in the Army, I earned an AS in Ornamental Horticulture at Monterey Peninsula College (and have enough credits for another in Business Administration), and a BS from Excelsior College in Liberal Arts with an emphasis on European languages and culture.
I work full time as an Army civilian Supply Technician at the DLIFLC in Monterey, and for a few years on call as a commercial charter bus driver for a company in Marina CA (see my poem The Butterfly Flutters by).  I've been learning bass guitar the last few years and also using a keyboard workstation.  I'm slowly learning to record my songs on computers, too.

This is how I got into poetry.  I was 'in-like' with one of my French converts back in the 80s; she sent me a poem or two, so I reciprocated and started writing sonnets and songs (see my lyric Odessey), ever since about 1983.  Today my normal focus is on writing songs instead of poems, so in a sense many of my recent poems are ideas that I could not easily make into lyrics....not quite failures per se, but not successful towards my first priority.  As of this writing (January 2015), I am working on recording my songs Tropical Getaway, Something you Left Behind, Egyptian Dancer, Lady Luck Stomped Out, and the children's song Blow More Bubbles.

My dream is to create a band called the Retropolitan Underground, which plays new songs using older musical styles, probably heavily into old pop-jazz fusions.  We just bought an older quaint house in Salinas, California, near Hartnell College.  I want to apply some of my education and skills to upgrade the house, by 1) turning my garage into a home music studio, 2) organically growing vegetables and fruit trees everywhere around the house with enough sunlight, and 3) painting some murals inside.  So far I'm working on an image of a pergola covered with flowers in the master bedroom.

 

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