Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

poetry

Why Poetry Can Make You a Better Writer

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Like most of my generation, I read poetry in English classes in high school. It wasn’t until I was a high school senior that I read poetry that stuck in my head. And it was T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Four Quartets.” I read poetry in college as well, but my English literature professor gave brutal tests that put me off poetry for years. 

My professional career eventually led me to corporate speechwriting. I enjoyed the work, the executives I wrote for liked what I did, and I had that sense of “this is what I was meant to do.” It was a good friend, one who wasn’t a speechwriter, who suggested that if I were really serious about it, then I needed to read poetry. He sent me three books – the collected poems of T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Dylan Thomas. He told me to read them and others on a regular basis.

And I thought, seriously? No speechwriter I knew read poetry regularly. Most then and now would read books about current events, developments in science, politics, and a lot of speeches written by others. But poetry? Really?

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

Photograph by Nick Fewings via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“Poets of the Civil War,” edited by J.D. McClatchy

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If I asked you to give me the name of an American Civil War poet, you would likely say “Walt Whitman.” His poems, like “O Captain! My Captain!,” “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” and “The Wound Dresser,” certainly catapult him to the top of the Civil War poets list.  

But if I were asked to name another Civil War poet, I’d be rather stumped. Until, that is, I laid eyes on Poets of the Civil War, edited by J.D. McClatchy, published in 2005 as part of the Library of America’s American Poets Project. And I was in for a major surprise. Whitman doesn’t stand there by himself.

The list of Civil War poets includes some of the best-known writers and poets of the 19th century. William Cullen Bryant. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. John Greenleaf Whittier. Herman Melville. James Russell Lowell. Bret Harte. Ambrose Bierce. Sidney Lanier. 

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

New Review of “Poetry at Work”

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Poetry at Work Poetry of the Workspace

U.K. poet James Sale has posted a review of Poetry at Work at Amazon UK. Here’s what he had to say.

“There are at least two reasons why this is an important book on poetry, as relevant now as when it was published some 6 years ago. First, Glynn Young realises that over the last 30 years poetry has been hijacked by academics; it’s no longer a poetry by the people for the people. Rather, every second poet you hear about nowadays is Professor X or Dr Y doing research on language somewhere you have never heard of. This is pernicious as it has created a cartel of influence in which the ‘experts’ congratulate each others’ books, but in reality very few people are reading them. Why would they? I cannot think of any academic poet of the last 30 years who has written one poem that stands comparison with Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.’

“The thing about poetry is that it is not written by ‘experts’ – its origin is very different. Which leads on to the second reason why Young’s book is so important. If poetry is highly unlikely to be found in academia, where is it to be found? The answer of course is that it will be found in real life, and more specifically, as Young shows, at work. What Young does is re-examine how poetry is everywhere around us, and that it is the poet’s at work who have so much to contribute. That said, as Young observes, ‘Poets, if they remain creative, can find themselves as road kill on the organisational highway.’ It would be good to see these ideas developed further and not allowed to remain fallow; poetry deserves to be widely disseminated and read, and this will never happen so long as the ‘academics’ have it ‘in thrall’. Read this book – it’s worth it.”

The Poetry of the Best Job You Ever Had

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It started with a phone call from a friend. “Did you see the job ad in the paper?” he said.

“What job ad?” I said.

“The city school district is looking for a communications director. You’d be perfect.”

“Do you hate me or something?” I said.

The city school district was indeed looking for a communications director. The district was in organizational chaos. A reform school board had brought in a management consultant firm from New York to reorganize the district. Schools had been closed. Central office staff had been laid off – some 800 people. Management of cafeterias, school buses, and other services was being outsourced. The management firm was doing what had to be done, but the district was so strangled by its own politics and so intertwined with city politics that it was impossible to try to make the changes from within. 

To give some scope to the problem: the district was staffed and resourced for 100,000 students. Officially, something slightly less than 40,000 attended. The real number was closer to 30,000. The day the management firm arrived, it was learned that the district was so in spending deficit that bankruptcy might be required.

And this was the organization I would be perfect for? Not to mention the ongoing issues, problems, and violence associated with virtually all urban school districts?

I ended up applying for the job. I ended up getting the job. It was the best job I’d ever had. It was also the worst. I was living the opening of A Tale of Two Cities.

It was performance poetry. It was improv poetry. It was epic and it was free verse. Everyone knew exactly how communications had to be run. 

I received daily phone calls from the mayor’s office, giving me instructions on what I was supposed to do each day. I ignored them, every single time. 

Poetry at Work

I learned about police radios and how the news media used them to track district news, like when a school board member threw a pitcher of water on a district official because she had seen The Wizard of Oz and knew that water melted witches. 

School board members leaked each other’s emails. 

My budget – which the previous year had been $1 million with a staff of 12 – had been cut to $20,000 and a staff of 1/2, and the budget had already been spent before I arrived. I had to invent communications out of whole cloth, with no money. 

There was never a work day without multiple crises. The work followed me home at night and on weekends – I once did a television interview on a Saturday outside the car dealership where my car was being serviced. I did another one in my family room. I did interviews at schools, meetings, on sidewalks, at lunches, in hallways. I was on television so much that a crazy anomaly developed: an aging, white male Baby Boomer became the public face of an urban school district. 

I was there almost nine months, the most tumultuous nine months of the district’s history, my career, and even my own life. I left because I could sense I was burning out; no one could handle communications in constant chaos. 

I did get to see and experience the best and worst of human behavior – and sometimes from the same people. I was personally tested for what I could handle, and I knew I had not been found wanting. I loved and hated that job, and I would never do it again. But I was thankful that I’d done it. 

From Poetry at Work:

First day on the job 

It’s only 9 a.m.
Channel 5 is waiting, cameras
filming in expectation
of a statement, any statement,
it doesn’t matter what it says;
school board members 
are leaking emails on each other,
the teacher on the phone 
is correcting my pronunciation;
the newspaper uses police radios
to follow the school district news
while the consultant is calling
about “a better brand for the schools”;
the parents protest is scheduled
for 5:30; the mayor’s office
is sending PR instructions
and I’m told the teachers have 
a sick-out today because they
can’t bank sick days anymore
and it’s only 9 a.m. and 
my first day on the job. I’m
going to love this place.

Top photograph by Mesh via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Poets and Poems: River Dixon and “Left Waiting”

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Time is our greatest asset, poet River Dixon writes in the introduction to his poetry collection Left Waiting: And Other Poems. It can be painful, unforgiving, and indifferent, he says. Squandering it can be devastating. “But time also gives us those moments when we can step back, put down the load we carry and recognize that there is something more at work here than what we can define. It’s these moments that we find another precious commodity: words.” 

Time and words are themes running through Left Waiting. There is a sense of time fading, like the dying rays of the sun and like what happens when as we age, and decades seem to pass increasingly faster. Where did the time go? How did the children grow up so quickly? I blinked and the four-year-old was graduating from college.

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

Poems for Holy Week

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The lull before

After Mark 14:12-31

It is the usual meal,
the annual observance
of deliverance from
the angel of death
in the land of pharaoh,
the last and ultimate
plague foretold,
the death of the firstborn.
It is a celebration, yet
quiet and somber,
an annual thanksgiving
for salvation, redemption.

And yet. And yet.
This is different.
No plans are made.
It’s all last minute,
almost haphazard,
but directed, the man
with the water jug
will lead them 
to the house,
to the upper room.
Imagine the surprise
of the two disciples
told to do this.

They prepare the meal.

He talks of many things.
Betrayal by one present.
Betrayal by one who dips
bread.
He talks of the bread,
with a threefold command:
take it, eat it, understand it
as my body.
He talks of the wine,
with a threefold command:
take it, drink it, understand it
as my blood poured out.

They sing. They go 
to the olive groves
to rest, to pray.
The night begins.
It is the lull before.

Photograph by James Coleman via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The darkness

After Mark 15

The day that begins 
in darkness
and ends in darkness,
the day of arrest,
the day of trials,
the day of beatings,
the day of ridicule,
the day of mocking,
the day of scourging,
the day of jeering,
the day of carrying
a cross through crowds,
the day of spikes 
driven through hands,
the day of thirst,
that terrible thirst,
the day the father
who loves him
turns away,
the death of death.

The sky cracks open,
the earth shakes,
the darkness engulfs,
the curtain tears.

It is done.

Photograph by Jason Blackeye via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Saturday silence

After Mark 15:42-47

It is not the nothing day,
although it’s common 
to think of it as that,
a bridge between
the Friday of death
and the Sunday of life.
But it is preparation day,
actually, the time to be
used to prepare for Sabbath.
The body is sought.
The body is granted,
The body is taken down.
The body is wrapped in linen.
The body is taken to the tomb.
The body is placed there.
The stone is rolled to seal the tomb.
The body is left in darkness.
It is the day of preparation.
It is the day before Sabbath.

It is the day they hide themselves away,
the day they tremble in fear,
the day they expect the pounding
on the door, the day their fate
becomes what his has been.
But it is not that day, yet.

It is the day of preparation,
and the Sabbath comes.

Photograph by Maithilee Shetty via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Just a few words

After Mark 16:1-13

A decision made to go
and anoint meets the reality
of a stone blocking the way.
“But who will move it
for us?” they ask.
A legitimate question, 
answered by the new reality:
the stone was already
rolled away. No one
needed to do it for them;
it was already done.

And inside the cave
they find a young man,
sitting calmly, waiting
for them, dressed
in white, and pointing
to the empty shroud.
His few words explain
and give direction
to the new reality.

The heavens had split,
the earth had shook,
the curtain had torn,
and now time itself
had cracked wide open.

Photograph by Robert Koorenny via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Top photograph by Stephanie LeBlanc via Unsplash. Used with permission.