Category Archives: Poetry

We Are the Best Obv. and Some Links

I’ve been reading Mark Twain’s 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and have not finished it, but I wanted to share some thoughts today. Blogging is designed for that, updates along the way.

The point almost from the beginning is that this engineer from 19th century America is an intellectual paragon among sixth century rubes. Their superstition and gullibility make them victims of every charlatan (usually of a religious or magical flavor) who comes into town. Hank the Yankee sees through all of them and will deliver them from all bondage, if he can devise a way to do it. I’m near the end of the book, and though luck has saved his neck many times, his progressive prowess has prepared him for that salvation just as often.

His progressive acumen is as good as magic, because Hank’s been able to create a telephone and telegraph network, school system, railroads, various consumer goods, and many kinds of explosives. He intends to create a thriving democracy in Camelot, if not all of England, and I’m wondering if that’s where Twain will leave it–19th century America triumphing overall. We see a little tension in the story here and there, because Hank is not brilliant and has been successful largely by force of plot and luck. So, I’ve wondered if the satire will turn back on him, and the story will end with everything crashing around him. Will the 19th century man be shown to be the greatest product of society, the pinnacle of the evolutionary process, the smartest and the best of all, or will his Social Darwinian hubris trip him up? I may find out later today.

What can I share with you today?

First, let me apologize for missing the Sunday Singing post last week. Circumstances disrupted by routine and by Sunday afternoon, I decided not to post it. I’ll get one up tomorrow, if I don’t fall a roof in the morning.

Boycotts: The SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, has the U.S. Army and defense contractors as sponsors and participants for years, but this year, helping Israel defend itself against the neighboring monsters is too much for some.

Publishing: A new publishing house formed by three experienced executives intends to forego advances and offer “authors a high percentage of a book’s profits—a model used by some other types of hybrid publishers.”

Food: What is corned beef? It’s an innovation of Irish-Americans who lived near Jewish Americans and took a shine to this kind of meat in Jewish delis.

Poetry: “Trash” by Lowell Jaeger.
“… in the old days there was no such thing as trash”

And slightly related to trash, this post on road kill and opossums.

Photo: Bomber gas station, Milwaukie, Oregon. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

How We Conceive of Conversion and Pushing Against a Classic Separation

I didn’t make any progress on The Road this week. (Perhaps I should write about it before I finish, make two posts.) I’ve been reading other books too, which is new for me. Last year, I bought a few books to challenge myself and have picked up more since then, so now I’m reading four at once sorta kinda. Saying it that way doesn’t sound right, because I’m not reading four books together. I just have books I intend to but have yet to finish.

One of those books is Karen Swallow Prior’s The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images & Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis. It describes the recent history of several ideas in Christianity, such as spiritual awakening, conversion, sentimentality, and materiality. They may not be ideas emphasized by our church traditions, but I’m sure I’ll find some challenging thoughts as I keep reading.

In talking about the concept of conversion, she notes a reader of Pride and Prejudice who remarked that Mr. Collins doesn’t appear to be a Christian at all. How could he be a minister? He could be a minister, she says, because the state church made political appointments to these positions. This was the context of the Great Awakening. She writes that evangelicals emphasize reaching the lost among those in the world or of other faiths, so there’s a bit of irony in the development of evangelicalism from a society that claimed to be Christian on the whole. How we imagine the conversion experience shapes our faith and influences how we teach others, especially children, to think about their commitment to Christ.

That’s the kind of thing Prior gets into in that book. I’ll write about it again another time.

Christian Nationalism: Hunter Baker reviews a couple books on the Christian Nationalism debate for Modern Age. “For Wolfe, the answer is to become a transgressor against the boundaries of church and state that today appear to be so firmly drawn by the liberal regime. . . . You can’t fight the something of secular progressivism with the nothing of a disarmed faith that lives in the confining pen made for it by modernity, so set forth a vision of the nation as one that is unashamed to call itself and its people Christian.”

Poetry: Five poems from Dorothy Sayers

I sit within My Father’s house, with changeless face to see
The shames and sins that turned away My Father’s face from Me;
Be not amazed for all these things, I bore them long ago
That am from everlasting God, and was and shall be so.

Humanities: The good people at The New Criterion had abandoned the annual Modern Language Association conference, saying, “we felt that, like Macbeth, we had ‘supped full with horrors’ and resolved to leave those annual exhibitions of narcissistic nullity to others.” But this year, they looked back again and found a curiosity or two.

Scripture: Luther on “the chief point of all Scripture” being the certainty of God’s promises.

Photo: Norwest Bank terra cotta detail, Owatonna, Minnesota, 1988. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

On the West Side of the Red Sea

I started reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road this week, and I’m having a hard time flipping over to the bright side of things. That’s where I’m going to lay the blame anyway.

He pushed open the closet door half expecting to find his childhood things. Raw cold daylight fell through from the roof. Gray as his heart.

We should go, Papa. Can we go?

This year, as was last year, is going to be filled with difficult news. I’m asking myself, on which side of the Red Sea am I going stand, the west side or the east? Will I ask, “Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness” or say, “The LORD is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation” (Exodus 14:11; 15:2 ESV)?

I’m on the west side today, but I can see the east bank from here.

Let’s move on.

Ukraine: “Talking with Ukraine’s own ‘Generation of Fire’ who came of age during the past decade of Russian aggression against their country reveals a keen understanding of the hand they’ve been dealt, despite moments of despair or near disillusionment.”

“We’re faced with paying for the mistakes of previous generations,” Serhiy, a 21 year-old from Chernivtsi, lamented.

From the Shadows: Gina Delfonzo reviews the paintings and stories found in Tears of Gold: Portraits of Yazidi, Rohingya, and Nigerian Women by Hannah Rose Thomas. “I am so happy. I have never held a pencil in my life before, and this is the first time I have been able to write my name and even to draw my face!”

Poem: Here’s a poem that could be plucked from a fairy tale by Marly Youmans (via The Palace at 2:00 a.m.)

Real Food: Advocates for the environment need to wake up and enjoy the bacon. “They strive to protect bees from suffering by embracing policies that will extinguish all bees; they embrace no-animal policies that in the name of animal welfare will end all livestock animals being alive—and with them, the manure upon which plant agriculture has always depended will vanish.”

Photo by Jamie Hagan on Unsplash

Rejected Book Tour and Reading Dante in Ukraine

An original limerick for your weekend.

In meetings at Kensington Cross 
For lingo I searched at a loss. 
One word—marinara 
Was all I could bear, uh, 
For the spots on my shirt were all sauce.

No shirts were stained in the composition of that limerick. Now, on to the links.

Memoir: Rob Henderson has a memoir releasing next month called, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. J.D Vance praised it for a “gripping” message. Others called it “extraordinary.” But major city bookstores don’t want to schedule tour events for him, even though he had tens of thousands of social media followers (over 137k on Twitter).

Sherlock Holmes: Getting the great detective into print was a challenge for Conan Doyle in that he hoped to publish one of the better markets. Historian Lucy Worsley, who has a new BBC series on the author’s relationship with his detective, says the first stories were rejected thrice.

The rejections scarred Arthur and made him slightly ashamed of his character, because he wanted to be a high brow writer. Nevertheless, he persevered because he was short of money, and he had a family to support, and he was also very, very hardworking, and energetic.

After Sherlock’s first two outings, both of which were lacklustre in terms of readership, his literary agent suggested a new magazine called The Strand, which was a mid-market magazine aimed at commuters, who were hustling and making a life for themselves in the busy throbbing urban world of London, in the 1890s, that Arthur struck gold.

Self-Awareness: We seem to be overly aware of ourselves, don’t we? But we aren’t yet schizophrenic. “The cult of the ironic, distanced observer, aware of his own awareness, unable to break out of his solipsistic construction of himself and his world, has displaced what is now seen to be the naive, immediate relationship with reality as it is felt. This point of view has developed its own orthodoxy, even if most of us go about our lives as though we were actually involved with things, events and people not entirely of our making.” (via Rob Henderson)

Enraptured: February 12, 2024, will be the 100th anniversary of the first public performance of George Gershwin’s Rapsody in Blue. World Radio had a segment on it earlier this month, discussing the piece and how it’s been altered in many recording.

Dante’s Inferno: Somewhere in Ukraine right now, my friend who publishes books orders printers in the bombed out city of Kharkiv to produce thousands of copies of Inferno. The trucks deliver weapons into Kharkiv. And, going back, empty, they decide to pick up thousands of copies of Dante’s Inferno.

“This is an image of war that happens as I write it: cars are bringing weapons into the besieged city that’s bombed daily, and they leave full of books.” (via The Book Haven)

Photo by Danya Gutan on Pexels.com

A Christmas Eve Limerick

Her sweater was all warm and cozy
With a scene that was Christmasy poesy.
The sermon so sweet
Almost put her to sleep
For she sat in the pew somewhat dozy.

Editor Sam O’Neil has been stoking the fires for limericks on Sunday for a while now, and today being Christmas Eve, I chipped in with the limerick above. #LimerickSunday

Why, Mary, Do You Rejoice in the Prince of Peace?

Thou Mother of the Prince of Peace,
         Poor, simple, and of low estate!
   That Strife should vanish, Battle cease,
         O why should this thy soul elate?
Sweet Music’s loudest note, the Poet’s story,—
Did’st thou ne’er love to hear of Fame and Glory?

From “A Christmas Carol,” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Despite being unqualified to make such a pronouncement, I doubt Coleridge’s “A Christmas Carol” is a very good poem. The verse is clunky, and I worry that the theme boils down to something John Lennon would approve, but perhaps it’s a good theme for this year. Would we rather glory in war or in the Prince of Peace?

Coleridge wrote “A Christmas Carol” in 1799, after he had taken up Unitarianism officially, and it was set to music many years later when the English were reviving the singing of carols. The words do seem to call for a tune with four lines and a couplet in each verse.

“Joy rose within her, like a summer’s morn;
Peace, Peace on Earth! the Prince of Peace is born.”

The world doesn’t understand peace; many believers don’t either. We are too worldly. We don’t follow Christ in making peace as much as possible, and we don’t understand the necessity of being prepared for war. In the poem, the shepherds come to Mary and she rejoices in their tale. Then, the poet steps in to ask her why she should rejoice in the Prince of Peace (note the verse above).

She responds, “War is a ruffian, all with guilt defiled, / That from the aged Father tears his Child!” Strife and Battle break the world and waste everything. “A murderous fiend, by fiends adored, / He kills the Sire and starves the Son.” Yes, yes, but this is personification. War isn’t a person; it’s a description of things people do. We fight each other for power, money, and fame. The Roman founders saw they needed women to be a successful colony, but instead of appealing to their Sabine neighbors, they fought them and took their women. Who taught them to take the path of war instead of the path of peace? No one. It would have been a natural choice for anyone.

I suspect Coleridge was like many who want peace as the absence of war, but the Prince of Peace says he gives a different peace, a peace that follows from seeking the Kingdom of Heaven first. It isn’t one we earn per se. It’s one that follows us, like goodness and mercy. The Lord may put us in a troubled time, and we may even be called to fight for the peace we want to see, but the Lord gives us a peace in knowing his kingdom has no end.

Of the increase of his government and of peace
there will be no end,
on the throne of David and over his kingdom,
to establish it and to uphold it
with justice and with righteousness
from this time forth and forevermore.
The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this. (Isaiah 9:7 ESV)

Madonna Nursing the Infant Christ by Jan Provoost Flemish 1520 oil” by mharrsch is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

What Should a Scholar Do When Civilization Topples?

Clive James’s book of essays called Cultural Amnesia offers a take on a German medieval scholar who wrote influentially on literature and Western civilization. As the Nazi party began to gain power, Ernst Robert Curtius warned of danger to come, but when it did come, Curtius retreated into his scholarly study and said no more. He didn’t directly support the Nazis, but with his silence, one has to wonder where his loyalties settled.

James says many German and French intellectuals prior to WWII wanted to believe they could forge wonderful, cultural bonds high above the dirty politics of their day. He calls this a “wishful, wistful thought.”

Most of our wishful thinking is about what we love. . . . But if we are to learn anything from catastrophe, it is wise to remember what some of the men who shared our passions once forgot. Curtius forgot that continuity is not in itself an inspiration for culture, merely a description of it.

Curtius thought he was doing his humble part to preserve civilization, and it wasn’t worthless work, but the hard chore of cultural preservation was being accomplished by the men in bombers, parachutes, and fatigues. It wasn’t the time to discern the patterns of principles in the past; it was the time to fight for the morals they already had.

Curtius the universal scholar is left looking depressingly restricted, and humanism is left with its besetting weakness on display—the temptation it carries within it to reduce the real world to a fantasy even while presuming to comprehend everything that the world creates.

Clive James, Cultural Amnesia, p. 159

It’s been another week, hasn’t it? Here are some links to consider.

Legacy Press: Are there any good journalists working for the biggest names in news? “These seven failures from the past few weeks should dispel any benefit of the doubt you have left for the corporate media’s honesty.

Russia: A new book exposes a movement I wish American opinionmakers understood. “Russia is systematically and deliberately instilling in its children hatred, vengefulness, and the desire to kill.

Poetry: William Cowper said, “Despair made amusements necessary, and I found poetry the most agreeable amusement.”

Dostoevsky: John Stamps praises the Michael R. Katz translation of The Brothers Karamazov, calling it thrilling and lively. Katz doesn’t attempt a literal translation but adapts the work to English ears by simplifying the naming convention, cutting back some repetition, and using footnotes instead of endnotes.

Woodlands: Two forest lovers, ages 10 and 8, “have hiked every trail in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park”—900 miles of hiking.

Photo by David Hawkes on Unsplash

Old Book Love, a Pub Renewed, and More

Here’s a Thoroughly Professional Video showing a couple of my antique books. They aren’t commercially valuable, but they’re pretty and have the humanistic value of a great books. On the left is the Complete Works of Shakespeare, a Walter J. Black edition, which I think means it’s cheap. I say it’s leather bound, but I’m sure it’s imitation leather. On the right is the Works of Edmund Spenser, an 1895 MacMillan edition.

It’s too bad I don’t have something really nice to show you, but I may record more physical books to better reveal their tangible value, especially if I can up my A/V quality.

Inklings: “The Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT) has purchased the historic Eagle and Child pub on St Giles’ from St John’s College, with plans to refurbish and reopen the space to the public.”

Poetry: From Philip Larkin
“For nations vague as weed,
For nomads among stones,
Small-statured cross-faced tribes
And cobble-close families
In mill-towns on dark mornings
Life is slow dying.”

Horror: Mike Duran has written on horror stories and how they fit with a Christian worldview.

Also, some of the story of the man who portrayed Father Damien Karras in The Exorcist.

(Photo: “The Eagle and Child,” Hofendorf/ Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0)

Seeds Among the Ruins and Silence

The greatest displeasure of the largest number
Is the law of nature.
– Pao Chao, “The Ruined City”

Paul J. Pastor writes about The Kalevala, an epic poem written from Karelian and Finnish folklore, focusing on “the great bard Väinämöinen” who chooses to live

on the island with no words
on the mainland with no trees.

After a long while, if I’m reading this correctly, Väinämöinen begins to sing the world into being.

Pastor applies this to our own small creative works. Silence, not just moments of quiet, but true silence that endures beyond our comfort can be “the great and difficult friend of the writer and the artist.”

We are not artistic dynamos. We cannot truly create anything of own mere will. We must rely on the Lord and his revelation, both general and specific. Noise, even a natural and healthy noise of life, can drain us—at least, it does drain me.

And yet what brings Väinämöinen, the bard of bards, into the fullness of his power is precisely that condition of emptiness that so disgusts or unsettles us. It is being in the boring-place, the empty-place, the still-place that something happens to him, something so vast that nature itself unlocks her most intimate secrets.

Photo by jean wimmerlin on Unsplash

The great bard began singing on a rock so bare we would have trouble finding a similar one today, but we may find a deafening silence among ruins, a place where

. . . grains of sand, like startled birds,
are looking for a safe place to settle.

Bushes and creepers, confused and tangled,
seem to know no boundaries.

These verses come from fifth century Chinese poet Pao Chao (or Bān Zhāo). In “The Ruined City,” he describes a vast plain with visible canals and roads cut into it, all leading to crumbled ends and weeds.

The young girls from east and south
Smooth as silk, fragrant as orchids
White as jade with their lips red,
Now lie beneath the dreary stones and barren earth.
The greatest displeasure of the largest number
Is the law of nature.

This too is silence and a little despair; we need more than human hope to endure it. Can we throw seeds into the wind that will sprout in what time the Lord will give them? Kyrie, eleison.

‘Old Songs,’ by Olga Sedakova

If you know boldness, you know mercy too, because they are like sisters;
boldness is lighter than all things on earth, but compassion is lighter than anything.

It’s not my custom to review poetry on this blog; I write it poorly and read it with only middling comprehension. But the description I received of Olga Sedakova’s recently released volume, Old Songs, intrigued me enough to accept the offer of a free review copy. As might be expected, the poems baffled me a little, but they nevertheless left an impression. The translation is done by Martha M. F. Kelly, and seems excellent so far as I am able to judge.

Olga Sedakova is a Christian Russian poet, a survivor of the Underground in Soviet times and today a major critic of her country’s war in Ukraine. Old Songs was published only a few weeks ago, and still awaits its first Amazon review.

Speaking from my limited perspective, these poems seemed resolutely Christian in a realistic way. No easy answers. No assumption that rewards will come to us in this world. The poet knows suffering and placidly expects to suffer more. All temporal hopes are likely to fail; we believe anyway.

I felt like a child trying to follow an adult conversation through most of the poems (it’s not a long book), but certain passages definitely resonated. I particularly liked the one I placed at the head of this review. Here’s a couple other good ones;

Ah, I’ve watched people a long, long time, and strange things have I learned: I know that the soul is an infant, an infant until its final hour, 
that it believes absolutely everything, and it sleeps in a den of thieves.
The dead don’t need a thing,
not houses nor dresses nor hearing.
There’s nothing they need from us.
Not a thing, save everything on earth.

Those are good lines. Recommended. I was impressed.