Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Tweetspeak Poetry

“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.

Momentous Discovery: “The Lost Tales of Sir Galahad”

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Sir Galahad, son of Sir Lancelot ad the Lady Elaine of Corbenic, remains shrouded in the mists of time. We knew he undertook his famous quest to find the Holy Grail (not to be confused with the Holy Grail Winery and Vineyard in Missouri) and went roaming in a “wild forest,” but that’s all we knew. 

Until now.

A research team from the Society for Galahadic Study and Emulation has announced a momentous discovery. In the archives of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, they found (actually, it was one of their student interns who found it) a bust of St. Plagiarus of Tintagel (pay attention to the names). Inside the bust was a sheaf of manuscripts of accounts of Sir Galahad after he embarked upon his quest.

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

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.