Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Tweetspeak Poetry

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.

“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.