Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Tweetspeak Poetry

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.

10 Great Resources for Teaching the Civil War

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I was drafting and researching what would become my historical novel Brookhaven, and I looked at the census records for Pike County, Mississippi. I’d been having trouble finding my ancestor Samuel Young listed anywhere in Confederate rosters. The only one clue I’d previously found was a listing for S.F. Young, who joined a Mississippi rifles unit late in the Civil War and was sent to Texas. And I thought the census record might have another name by which he was known.

I found the list of Youngs. And the family I’m looking for. There he was – Samuel F. Young, age 13. My eye traveled up the list to his father, Franklin. And the occupation listed was farmer. The same occupation was listed for Samuel’s two older brothers. 

Something was wrong. 

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

Photograph: The 1885 (first) edition of The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.

Relearning Civil War History to Write a Novel

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I was born and grew up in New Orleans, a city saturated with French, Spanish, American, and Black American history and culture. Louisiana law wasn’t based on English common law but upon Napoleonic Code. Counties are called parishes. Mardi Gras was an official holiday.

The state was, and to some extent still is, three regions, each with a distinct accent. North Louisiana, where my father came from, resembled East Texas and Mississippi, including the southern accent. Southwest Louisiana is Cajun country and where my maternal grandfather was born and raised. And then there was New Orleans, with its own distinct accent that sounds vaguely Brooklynese. My mother and her family were all born there, and that’s where I lived with my two brothers. 

If one subject tied and unified the state of Louisiana, it was history, and specifically Civil War history. 

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

Photograph: General Benjamin Butler, known as “Spoons” Butler and “Beast Butler” to the citizens of occupied New Orleans.

7 Tips for the Novice Historical Novel Writer – Learned the Hard Way

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Writing one historical novel does not make one an expert in the genre. I have written exactly one historical novel, Brookhaven, a romance set in the Civil War era and in 1915.

To write Brookhaven, I didn’t turn to how-to works by historical novelists, historians, or romance writers, or read articles on the subject on web sites. In fact, I never intended to write a historical novel at all. Because I had the time, I began to pursue a lifelong interest in the Civil War, with a side-interest in the role of my great-grandfather.

At some point, I told myself, “This is a story worth telling.” And I began to write. 

I also continue to do research, because writing this kind of story demands it. What did people wear? What did they eat? How would they send a letter when railroads and the mail service weren’t functioning? What were prisons like for captured soldiers? How does a society function when social order breaks down?

I learned some lessons along the way. Each was hard-learned and hard-earned. I stopped counting the times I had to go back and revise something, sometimes extending to almost everything I’d previously written.

If you’re thinking about writing a historical novel, I have seven suggestions for how to do it and not do it. 

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

Top photograph: a page from the 1850 census, listing the members of the Franklin Young family in Pike County, Mississippi.

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.

It’s Take Your Poet to Work Day

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Today is Take Your Poet to Work Day at Tweetspeak Poetry, and the site has a raft of resources to help you do that. The celebration of poetry and work has been going strong for more than a decade, and I’ve been an enthusiastic participant from the get-go. I even wrote a small book, Poetry at Work, on finding poetry in all aspects of work.

When I still had an office (or a cubicle), I’d pick a poet and bring him or her to work on the designated day in July. Typically, I’d bring my longstanding favorite poet, T.S. Eliot.

Ten years ago, I was preparing to give notice of my intended retirement from work, which I did in September of 2014. I officially retired in May of 2015. It was early, but it was time. Enough said.

I did some freelance work for a time and was even called back to the company for a three-month assignment in 2018. But “work,” if you define it as something like an eight-hour-a-day job, was over in 2015. 

But I still work, mostly with my own writing. And I still bring my poet to work.

For the last three to four years, that poet has been Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (see lower right-hand corner of photo). Longfellow has accompanied me on a writing project, serving as guide, resource, break from the pace, and sometimes even reality check. I read his works in three different editions – an 1898 “complete poems” edition by Houghton Mifflin, a 1944 edition published by Illustrated Modern Library, and a 2000 edition of his poems published by Library of America. I also used Nicholas Basbanes biography, Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (2020) as a resource.

As I read, researched, and wrote, Longfellow was along for the ride, so much so that, while he didn’t become a character in my story, he did become a presence and an influence on one of the principal characters. If the character recited The Courtship of Miles Standish or Poems on Slavery, I’d stand and read them aloud as well.

I was not only taking Longfellow to work, I was also putting Longfellow to work and working alongside him. I’ll have some news about the final result in some weeks, but Mr. Longfellow may be getting his due.

You don’t have to write a novel to take your poet to work. You can read a poem aloud to yourself or others. You can stick a poem on your bulletin board. You can memorize poem or recite one while you’re doing garden work. Over the years, some have gotten rather elaborate in their efforts, including doing poetry readings at work.

What I discovered was that, even simply reading a poem in the office to myself, my understanding changed because the place provided a different context. 

For resources, tips, and background on poets (including ones you can color like Longfellow), head on over to Tweetspeak Poetry and take your poet to work.

Top photograph: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in old age.