Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

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In Praise of Reading Poetry

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Like most of us, I read poetry – a lot of poetry – in high school and college English classes primarily because it was assigned. I was much more interested in fiction (Dickens!) and noir mysteries (Dashiell Hammett!) than I was in Tennyson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Elizabethans. 

My attitude changed with T.S. Eliot and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It was first published in 1915, and Poetry Magazine published it only as a favor to Ezra Pound. The editors were so uncomfortable with it that they placed it at the back of the issue. But it was our first great modernist poem, and it changed poetry forever. A high school senior, I read that poem, and I was mesmerized. I went to the local bookstore and bought a small paperback edition of Four Quartets (I still have it; it’s now more than 50 years old).

To continue reading, please see my post today at the American Christian Fiction Writers blog.

Photograph by Thought Catalog via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Poetry at Work, Chapter 7: The Poetry of PowerPoint

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Poetry at Work Poetry of the Workspace

I’ve been blogging for almost 10 years. Mostly, I blog about books and poetry. Occasionally I talk about art and work. For years, the blog post that held the record for the most number of visits was work-related: I Hate PowerPoint. That is, until another post overtook and surpassed it: A Sign of the Apocalypse (at the Office), which was also about PowerPoint. 

It turned out that I wasn’t alone in my dislike of PowerPoint. 

Actually, the problem wasn’t (and isn’t) PowerPoint. It’s how speakers and presenters misuse PowerPoint. “We treat it like the canvas for Homer’s Iliad,” I wrote in Poetry at Work, “when we should instead treat it like the backdrop for a haiku.”

To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.

Poetry at Work, Chapter 6: The Poetry of the Organization Chart

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Poetry at Work

I was sitting with a woman in the Human Resources Department. There had been a reorganization of our department, part of a general reshuffling across the company, and I’d been assigned to sit with her to work out the new organization chart. 

You would think this was something of a useless exercise. Shouldn’t it be a simple matter of “here’s the boss, here are his or her direct reports, and here’s who reports to them.” But it was anything but simple, and I was to get a lesson in the Byzantine art form of corporate organization charts.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.

The Ring

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“How do I say I love you,” Michael said, “that I’ve loved you from the first moment I saw you in Fitzhugh’s class? That I want to be at your side for always. I want you painting in that artist space in the loft and then coming into my arms and making love with me? I suppose I just said it, didn’t I?”

Sarah nodded.

“So, Sarah Hughes,” he said, “if you’ll have me, I’m asking you to marry me, to join me in whatever God has in store for us.” He placed the ring box in front of her.

Photograph by Esther Tuttle via Unsplash. Used with permission.

An Incredible Review of “Dancing Prophet”

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Dancing Prophet

Writing a novel is a hard, lonely work. You often struggle through a story, writing and rewriting and editing and deleting whole sections because, well, they’re just bad and aren’t going the way they need to go. And when you finish writing a novel, if there ever be such a thing, you have all the worry and anxiety and disappointment of how people will respond. 

And then you read a review, like “A Prophet Raised Up for Such a Time as This” by Luke Herron Davis.  And you tell yourself this is why you write. 

Poetry at Work, Chapter 5: Poetry of the Boss

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Poetry at Work

More than 40 years, I was handed my college diploma and, two days later, showed up for work at my first official job. I didn’t realize it until much later, but I walked into the doors of my employer that day carrying an assumption. I believed that people in positions of authority – bosses – always knew what they were doing. Why else would they be bosses?

Slightly more than a decade later, my assumption continuing to take body blow after body blow, I was presented incontrovertible evidence that my assumption had been flat-out wrong.

A group of us were sitting in a conference room, waiting for the news to go public that one of the company’s top products had a problem. The first indication would be the stock market. We all knew the news was imminent, and we had prepared for it as if a tsunami was about to strike, which, metaphorically, turned out to be true. The call came, confirming that the news was public, and for a very brief moment we experienced a silence.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.