Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

poetry

A Street Named Terpsichore

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A flat tire introduced me

to the sirens and their mother.

Before I knew Terpsichore

as a muse or the mother of sirens,

I knew her as a street, relatively

residential, nineteenth century

homes, called shotgun houses, 

stringing each room in succession,

front to back, because properties 

were taxed on width, not depth.

Imagine a street of homes,

sometimes duplexes, with

living room-bedroom-bathroom-

bedroom-dining room-kitchen-

back porch, a long house shaped

the like barrel of a shotgun.

Terpsichore had sister streets, all

comprising the Faubourg Lafayette

and Lower Garden District of

the Big Easy. You walked streets

named Erato, Calliope, Clio,

Thalia, Melpomene, Euterpe,

Polymnia, and Urania, and 

Terpsichore (of course),collectively

issuing their siren calls to come

home. My personal favorite was 

Erato, named for the poetry muse,

because I had a flat tire in a station

wagon on the interstate right

at the St. Charles Avenue exit,

and I guided our car full of teenagers

bound for the French Quarter down

the exit ramp, carefully, parking 

on a street named Erato. I fixed 

the flat, not knowing that decades 

later, that Erato and her mother

Terpsichore would remind me

of a flat tire.

Tweetspeak Poetry has a prompt this week, involving the muses and their siren songs. 

Photograph: A shotgun duplex on Terpsichore Street in New Orleans.

The New Edition of Cultivating Oaks Press: Fidelity

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The autumn edition of Cultivating Oaks Press is online, and its full of stories, articles, poetry, and beautiful photography. The theme is fidelity, defined by my Merriam-Webster Dictionary as “the quality or state of being faithful” and “accuracy in details.” Synonyms are faithfulness, trustworthiness, and loyalty.

This issue includes stories and articles by Tom Darin Liskey, Annie Nardone, Sam Keyes, Rob Jones, Amelia Friedline, Andrew Roycroft, and Lara d’Entremont, among several others. I have a poem, entitled “52,” and an article entitled “A Lock of Hair.”

It’s a wonderful issue.

Related:

A playlist for the autumn edition, Fidelity, of Cultivating Oaks Press.

What Happened to the Fireside Poets?

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When I first envisioned my novel Brookhaven, I focused on a family story passed down through generations, which turned out to be a legend, as in, almost entirely untrue. But two things shifted my focus. 

First, in 2022, I had the old family Bible conserved. It had seen better days; my father gave it to me wrapped in grocery store bag paper and tied with strong. My contribution had been to remove the paper and string, wrap it in acid-free paper, and store in an acid-free box. It sat on a closet shelf for years, until I brought it to a book conservator in St. Louis. He discovered something tucked in the Book of Isaiah that both my father and I had missed – a yellowed envelope containing a lock of auburn hair.

For various reasons, I believe the hair belonged to my great-grandmother Octavia. She died in 1888 at age 44. Unusual for the time, my great-grandfather Samuel never remarried. He died in 1920. And I thought to myself, “There’s a love story here.”

Second, also in 2022, we saw a movie entitled “I Heard the Bells.” It’s a snapshot of the life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) during the Civil War, including both the tragic death of his beloved wife and the near death from a war wound of his oldest son Charles. Both events contributed to Longfellow’s writing the poem that became a Christmas hymn, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” 

To continue reading, please see me post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Illustration: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride”: Creaing a National Legend 

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It’s a tossup as to whether the most famous or best-known poem in America is Clement Moore”s “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (aka “Twas the Night Before Christmas”), first published in 1823, or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride,” (1860). My money is on “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Whole generations of schoolchildren, myself included, grew up reciting the lines that begin “Listen my children, and you shall hear…” 

Both poems are no longer taught in most of America’s public schools, but I know from my grandsons’ experience that they are taught (with great gusto) in many private schools, especially those offering a classical education. “Paul Revere’s Ride” commemorates one of the significant of the beginning of the American Revolution, a horseback ride at night to warn the cities of Lexington and Concord that British troops were coming.

That ride occurred 250 years ago tomorrow.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Artwork: the illustration accompanying the poem in the January 1861 edition of The Atlantic Magazine.

The Random Act of (Finding) Poetry on the Web

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My love for poetry developed in three critical times. First was discovering T.S. Eliot in high school, introduced by a wild and larger-than-life English teacher who wore turbans and proclaimed that Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann was the greatest work of American literature. Well, no, but she was right about T.S. Eliot.

The second critical period was through a friend in the early 1980s, who said I couldn’t be a “real speechwriter” unless I read Eliot, William Butler Yeats, and Wallace Stevens. I don’t know whether he was right or wrong, but I took his advice to heart and started reading them.

T.S. Eliot

Third was the year 2009. Idly searching on the web for something unrelated, I found The High Calling Blog, which mostly focused on the daily practice of faith in our work but also had a regular poetry feature, “Random Acts of Poetry.” This Friday feature involved poems on a stated topic with links to others writing on the same topic. One thing led to another, and not too long after that, I was participating in Random Acts of Poetry and eventually The High Calling itself. 

The faith-in-work site came to an end in 2015, but the idea of Random Acts of Poetry lived on at Tweetspeak Poetry. It’s become an annual event, and it’s focused on painting poetry in the public square. It’s held on the first Wednesday of October, which this year will be October 2.

Tweetspeak Poetry has several resources to help – a handbook you can download for free, poetry prompts, ideas for how to bring poetry into the public square, examples, and more.

In 2017, Random Acts of Poetry Day coincided with a vacation in London. I planned ahead of time and printed out several poems by different authors already and cut down to size for suitable abandonment in different places, like our breakfast table in the hotel, a London double-decker bus, a display table at the National Theatre, and on the tube or underground. You don’t know what happens to the poems, and that’s the fun in the randomness – imaging how a poem by Eliot or Emily Dickinson or William Carlos Williams or even you might be read and understood by a stranger.

I rediscovered this poem I wrote back in May 2010. It wasn’t left randomly somewhere; it was linked from the High Calling site. The prompt that day was to go to an ancient place and relive the moment. I went back to ancient Greece. The subject is one of the handful of people who heard the Apostle Paul in the marketplace in Athens and followed him; most of his listeners that day thought he was insane. But a few didn’t.

St. Paul in the Areopagus by Raphael (1515)

Dionysus

Yet another day in this ancient place, this Romanized sepulcher,
this urbanized temple to worship what never was, this sacrifice
of marbled skin and stone life-blood, paleness of what was.

Yet another span of hours, sameness and tedium; another day
of listening to the new ideas that are neither new nor ideas,
because of the baneful and prideful duty of an archon.

Today a respite from legalities – a babbler commending us for
our gods, known and unknown. What an impudent fellow, as if
our gods known and unknown actually cared for him and for us.

Although he speaks socratically, with both passion and calm,
like a voice of iron in the forge, does he know the fate of Socrates?
We kill our prophets; assassinate our heroes; poison our truthsayers.

I half-listen until I see Damaris, seated at the front of the crowd in
rapt attention, hearing the babbler’s siren song. Damaris, my soul
mate, my consolation and affirmation that I am not wholly mad.

She is transfixed. The others murmur, laugh and snicker. I turn to
face the babbler, with his thorned flesh. And in that flash of time I
first listen, my soul is seared, torn, shattered like smashed stone.

My heart is pierced; my heart so dead in sameness and tedium, is
stabbed, consumed with the same words that force the crowd’s
laugh and sneer to rise in an illusion of levitation and levity.

The babbler’s piercing look silences the crowd. He leaves with his
few close behind him. I stand to see my white robes now stained
with spilled red from my fingernailed palms, an archon’s stigmata.

Silence gives way to sardonic sneers of those who cultivate minds
of emptiness, the intellectualism of the void. I run to catch the
babbler with the thorn and piercing look, Damaris at my side.

I am broken, she says.
I am not mad, I say,
and run faster.

Consider joining in the fun and celebrating Random Acts of Poetry on Oct. 2. And leave a comment at the Tweetspeak Poetry site with a link or a report.

Top photograph by Jon Tyson for Random Acts of Poetry Day at Tweetspeak Poetry.

“Works of Mercy” and Poet Robert Southwell

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On Monday, I posted a short review of the novel Works of Mercy by Sally Thomas on my Faith, Fiction, Friends blog. It is a fine novel, a little slow moving at the beginning but richly rewarding if you stick with it. I stuck with it, and I’m glad I did.

The main character, an aging housekeeper named Kirsty Sain, works for the priest in a small-town Catholic parish in North Carolina. She lives a somewhat isolated life, until circumstances force a change. But what threads through the change is the poetry of Robert Southwell (1561-1595).

Southwell, who would become a Catholic saint, was one of the Catholic martyrs in the religious wars in England in the 16th century. Yes, but was the age of Shakespeare, but it was also the age of religious war. Henry VIII began the English Reformation; his son and heir carried it onward for the few years he was king. Catholic Mary Tudor represented the reaction, and she was no slouch when it came to martyring Protestants.

When Elizabeth I ascended the throne, it was the reaction to the reaction. That Catholic Philip II of Spain attempted an invasion of England in 1588 to depose Elizabeth and restore the Catholic faith didn’t cause Elizabeth to look on her Catholic subjects kindly. But when it came to martyrdoms, she was a bit more reserved than her older sister.

English-born Robert Southwell was a Jesuit priest who had been educated in France. When he returned to his native England in 1586, he did so in secret and had to perform his priestly offices underground. He was captured in 1592, interrogated and tortured, confined to solitary confinement in the Tower fort wo years, and then transferred to Newgate Prison for his trial in 1595. He was found guilty, sentenced to death by hanging, drawn, and quartered. In 1970, Pope Paul VI canonized him.

The vast majority of his writings and poetry happened in the six years between his return to England and his imprisonment. Earlier works were composed in Latin, but his poems in England were written in English. 

In Works of Mercy, Kristy Sain, raised a Catholic, recalls her college studies, readings, and the affair with her atheist tutor, who disparaged her interest in Southwell and Catholicism. She doesn’t finish her studies, and only years later do Southwell’s poems come back to her.

Because a significant part of the story happens at Christmas, the poem that becomes a part of the story is “The Burning Babe,” which is about the Nativity. In fact, it appears that author Thomas found the novel’s title in this poem.

The Burning Babe

As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow,
Surprised I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow;
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,
A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear;
Who, scorched with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed
As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed.
‘Alas!’ quoth he, ‘but newly born, in fiery heats I fry,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I.
My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shames and scorns;
The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals,
The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls,
For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good,
   So will I melt into a bath, to wash them in my blood.’
   With this he vanished out of sight, and swiftly shrunk away,
   And straight I called unto mind that it was Christmas day.

It’s easy – too easy – to call Works of Mercy a “Catholic novel.” It certainly reflects a Catholic sensibility; the story is centered on a Catholic church, a Catholic housekeeper, a priest, and a number of parishioners. Yet the themes of the novel, the ideas of serving and faith, extend well beyond “Catholic fiction” and even “religious fiction.”

Intrigued by the poems, I found quite a few books on Amazon about Southwell and his poetry. The one I ended up with was simply titled Works of Robert Southwell. It includes seven of his best-known poems, including “The Burning Babe.” He’s a poet well worth knowing and reading about; his is the story of maintaining faith in a perilous place at a perilous time.