Category Archives: Poetry

Blogs, Socials, Poetry

A Ruined City in Old England and Some Language

Leave a comment

Lars has been talking about poetry this week, which provoked me to consider it for the Saturday post.

A 700 A.D. Anglo-Saxon poem called “The Ruin” speaks of a city that was gorgeous even when destroyed. 

Well-wrought this wall-stone which fate has broken
The city bursts, the work of giants crumbles.

In this translation by Michael O’Brien, you can see what is and what once was: frost on the stones, brightly color scraps of wood, bath-houses, and attractive homes. It had been a welcoming, beautiful home–a “haven.” Skilled soldiers lived here “proud and wine-flushed.” The baths were obviously luxurious. Only one wall remained standing.

Many men fell in the days of wrath;
Death took all the valor of earth.

Did invaders sack this city? No, it was the curse on all creation that eventually wore it down. One way or another, we all see the day of wrath. How do we live today in the light of what’s to come?

What else can we get into today?

Poetry: David Oates has a few verses on “farthing” and going too far.

Language: “We are lucky that English is our language because it’s better than, say, French for poetry. All those millions of words and all those different ways of saying the same, or similar, things. And new words all the time.” 

Parting Quotes: Here are a couple of statements pulled from Joseph Addison’s 1716 play The Drummer.

“That is well said, John, an honest man, that is not quite sober, has nothing to fear.”

“I should think myself a very bad woman if I had done what I do for a farthing less.”

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

Non-fiction, Poetry, Publishing

County Highway, a New Magazine Delivered as Newspaper

3 Comments

When I read on Twitter (X) that novelist and editor Walter Kirn, along with David Samuels, had created “a magazine about America in the form of a 19th century newspaper,” I looked up the website, and when I saw it would be for sale at one of my town’s cute local stores, I decided to check it out.

County Highway is meant to represent the heart of America, a place with natural rhythms, relationships, and grassroots sense. It’s written by “actual human beings,” which is more than some websites can say. “We hope to advance the same relationship to America that Bob Dylan had when he wrote his versions of folk songs” or when Neil Young, Gram Parsons, Mark Twain, and Ralph Ellison wrote of their country.

I enjoy the feel of reading this paper, which cheekily touts itself as “America’s only newspaper” and plans to publish six issues a year for a $50 subscription. Kirn’s front page piece is on his visit to The Miracle of America Museum in Polson, Montana, a place where memorabilia, props, and junk attempt to preserve a moral history. Duncan Moench has a report on artificial intelligence and the imminent threat of corporate technocracy.

I was pulled in by a review of Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (2023 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction), which says Kingsolver’s skill is clear and subject matter well chosen, but this “protest novel” in the form of Dicken’s David Copperfield is heavy on ranting, light on humanity. Other articles in this first issue include a lengthy piece that circles around Joshua Tree National Park, a front story on an American con man from last century, four pages on music, feature on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s falconry hobby, and a full page of legit classifieds: Wyoming cabins, bookstores, alpacas for breeding, and ‘shrooms.

I’ve enjoyed reading some of these, and there are a few more I’d like to get to. There’s a little poetry, a few wisecracks tucked in a small column, and attractive illustrations of a vintage sheen. The articles feel like those I’ve seen online and hoped to get back to, but often don’t. The Internet is ethereal; newspapers sit on the desk.

I may buy the next issue to try to balance what I read in the first, but I’m put off by the feel of the whole. Is it cynical? Maybe too secular? There’s a column about fugitives from someone who speaks positively about the Weather Underground. I believe he says he helped a couple of them back in the day. That’s like longing for time when your granddad would tell stories of fighting alongside Che Guevara. And then there’s this in a joke section: “Drag queen story hour — it’s what my pops used to call church on Sundays.” I don’t know what to do with that. Maybe I should untie my laces. (I wrote about the second issue also.)

Alt Culture: To balance the earthiness of America’s newspaper, let me point you to the new season of Doubletake from World News Group. This is a podcast of long features that can get complicated. Today’s episode is on what some people are doing in the Metaverse and a church trying to reach them.

Poetry: John Barr’s “Season of spores”:

“a bric-a-brac of fluke and ruff,
lavender cap, topiary puff.”

Photo by Wolfgang Frick on Unsplash

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Poetry, Reading

Liberty Is a Growing Hunger, Like a Long Book

1 Comment

What is liberty? Is it different from freedom?

Do Americans know more than the first verse of “America, the Beautiful,” specifically the second verse with the words:

“America! America!
God mend thine every flaw
Confirm thy soul in self-control
Thy liberty in law!”

In one simple line, we see the law, not as the source of our liberty, but as a tool for protecting it against those who would take it away. But what “it” is remains a question.

It’s that loosely defined something we can’t get enough of.

“More liberty begets desire of more;
The hunger still increases with the store.”

John Dryden

Fred Bauer has a piece on the different views of freedom we’ve had since the colonial days. We had Puritans’ “ordered liberty,” Quakers’ “reciprocal liberty,” Virginians’ “hegemonic liberty,” and Appalachians’ “natural liberty.” These are taken from David Hackett Fischer’s book, Albion’s Seed.

“Ethical concerns,” Bauer writes, “factor into the notion of freedom as ‘elbow room.’ Patrick Henry argued that the centralized Constitution would threaten both ‘the rights of conscience’ and ‘all pretensions to human rights and privileges.’ That ethical strand offers a counterpoint to arguments that American freedom is simply about material prosperity. The genealogy of freedom is more complicated.”

Moving on to the links, we face a new frontier for ethical freedom in the choices we make with our technology. In other words, if we can do it, should we? How is using AI as described below not plagiarism?

To repeat the July 13, 2023, tweet above for preservation, Courtney Milan (@courtneymilan) says, “One of the major reasons I think we need to stand against AI as authors specifically is I suspect a lot of publishing house CEOs are looking at it and thinking ‘you know, why do we pay all these editors anyway?'”

She retweets Maureen Johnson (@maureenjohnson) from earlier that day, who says, “Authors: we need to stand up with the actors. AI is ALREADY HERE in our work. I just spoke to a Very Famous Author who has to remain nameless for legal reasons. They are held up in a contract negotiation because a Major Publisher wants to train AI on their work.”

I’d think training a computer to mimic a popular author’s work would fall within the bounds of plagiarism. If not that, fan fiction.

Running: In Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World, Lauren Fleshman describes what she saw of a sport that interested in recognizing or catering to female athletes as the women they are. Nike, the shoe company, can be especially cruel.

Poetry: “Who Furrows? Who Follows?” by Joshua Alan Sturgill. Here’s the first stanza.

Who furrows? Who follows?
             The owl in the hollow
            The hawk in the meadow
           The jay in the hedgeapple tree
Who follows the farmer who furrows his fields?
Who furrows?  Who follows?
           We three.

Fiction: It may be common for online chat to express a desire for short novels, but do readers want them? Nathan Bransford talks about the dangers of writing shorter works. “When writers are grappling with bloated word counts, physical description tends to be the first to go. Tastes vary, but in my opinion, cutting too much physical description is almost always a mistake. We’re already in a physical description drought, please don’t make it worse!”

Trapped: In other news, 100 people were trapped for hours yesterday in Agatha Christie’s old home by a large tree that had fallen across the only access road. They hung out mostly in the tea room. One witness reported the staff were “doing a great job, they are giving us free tea’s and things. It’s a bit bleak.”

Photo by Priscilla Gyamfi on Unsplash

Non-fiction, Poetry

‘The Tale of Arnor, Poet of Jarls’

Leave a comment
The Viking hall at Ravnsborg, Knox City, MO. Photo by me.

It’s been a little while since I reviewed another saga in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. Tonight’s saga is not a saga at all, but a tale, just two pages long. It’s a sort of parenthetical incident found originally in the Icelandic Morkinskinna saga manuscript. I can’t find any cheap collection you can buy that contains it, so you’ll have to take my word about it. Its title is The Tale of Arnor, the Poet of Earls.

“Earl,” of course, is a translation of “jarl.”

Arnor Jarlaskald is a figure known from the saga histories, and considered one of the great skalds of the 11th Century. This story doesn’t explain his nickname (he deals only with kings here), but we’re told elsewhere that he got it because he spent a lot of time with the jarls of the Orkneys and composed often for them. Otherwise he was a merchant.

This story is set during the time when King Magnus the Good (St. Olaf’s son) ruled jointly with King Harald Hardrada. (Harald had come back from Constantinople dripping with money, intending to depose his nephew Magnus and take over Norway. Intermediaries convinced them to do a deal – half of Harald’s fortune in exchange for half of Magnus’ kingdom. Though their time together wasn’t without tensions, they managed to keep the peace, and when Magnus died, it’s remarkable to note that nobody seems to have suggested that Harald murdered him. That’s the sort of thing Harald easily might have done, after all).

In the tale, Arnor arrives in the town (doesn’t say what town here; no doubt it’s explained in the larger context. Could have been Nidaros (Trondheim), but it might have been Tunsberg), having composed poems in honor of both kings. But he seems to have been told to wait, so he started to work tarring his ship. Then messengers came to summon him to court. He went directly, not even stopping to wash the tar off his hands.

He then goes into the hall, where both kings wait in their high seats. They ask Arnor whose poem he means to recite first. Arnor says he’ll start with Magnus, because “it is said that young men are impatient.”

Arnor begins the poem, and Harald (himself a poet) can’t resist interrupting to complain that it’s mostly about Arnor’s own journeys and dealings with the jarls. Magnus wants to hear more, and then the saga writer gives us excerpts from the original poem. Harald continues butting in with objections, but in the end he appears jealous. After hearing his own poem, he says, “My poem will soon fade away and be forgotten, while the drapa composed about King Magnus will be recited as long as there are people in the North.”

Which is true, because we have Magnus’ poem preserved here, while Harald’s is not.

In the end, Arnor is rewarded by Harald with a gold-inlaid spear, while Magnus gives him a gold ring and, later, a merchant ship and cargo.

This is a snippet, an anecdote without much of a plot. Its significance would seem to be in the insight it gives us into the characters of two very different kings. And probably an old man’s proud reminiscence of the days when he met celebrities.

Irrelevant details like Arnor’s dirty hands give a strong impression of verisimilitude. This sounds very much like a genuine memory, passed down only a few generations before being preserved on parchment.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Poetry, Reading

Amelina: ‘My Heroes Will Not Stop Dying’

Leave a comment

Ukrainian novelist, activist, and winner of the Joseph Conrad Literary Award for 2021 Victoria Amelina was in Kramatorsk, a city in the Donetsk region of Ukraine. She was “with a delegation of Colombian writers and journalists on June 27 when Russian forces fired two Iskander missiles at the city, hitting a popular restaurant downtown,” The Kyiv Independent reports.

The IT professional-turned writer, 37, had lived in the States for a few years before returning to Ukraine to research war crimes.

In September 2022, “Amelina went to the liberated village of Kapytolivka in Kharkiv Oblast and found the diary of her colleague, the children’s book author Volodymyr Vakulenklo, along with his father,” The Kyiv Independent reports.

“Vakulenko had buried the diary under a cherry tree in his yard before he was abducted by Russian occupation forces that March. The diary is now kept in the Kharkiv Literary Museum for posterity.”

In this 2020 interview with PEN Ukraine, Amelina offers this optimism (which I’ve had to translate via Google): To write Home for Home, I quit my favorite job, ruined the career I had built since I was seventeen. It was painful, and I’m still not sure if I did the right thing – I gained a lot, but I also sacrificed a lot.

“I would not advise making decisions motivated by something external. There must be an inner readiness to live by texts, to turn oneself into texts, to write even when no one reads. No publisher can refuse this. If literature is your way of interacting with the world, miracles will happen.”

She also lists the New Testament among the books that have influenced her the most. “It seems that in the near future my heroes will not stop dying for others, but this is not about death, but about resurrection.”

Here are some other things to read.

Poetry: Last year, Steve Moyer wrote about Ukrainian poetry having depicted the corruption of war for decades. “Many of the poets writing today in Ukraine, however, compose in free verse, relying more on repetition, word play, juxtaposition of images, and rhetorical devices than on traditional forms and meter to convey the harsh reality they’re witnessing. Images such as rotting fruit occur and recur. Debris lying in snow and crumbling bridges make their appearances.”

Reading: Do you write in your books? President John Adams did, and Joel Miller offers five reasons for doing it too.

“When I was working on my Paul Revere book, I remember hesitating over Charles Ferris Gettemy’s biography, The True Story of Paul Revere. The book was over a hundred years old. I can’t write in it, can I? It felt like some sort of aesthetic crime. But then, no. I need to keep track of ideas and details. Why did I have it to begin with? To use. Once I ditched my reservations, the payoff was immeasurable.”

Reading: Chekhov said, “I divide all works into two categories: those I like and those I don’t. I have no other criterion.” Yes, but maybe there are other legitimate categories.

Photo: Sigurdur Fjalar Jonsson/Unsplash

Blogs, Socials, Fiction, Non-fiction, Poetry

Vanity Is Common, Blasphemy Ever Green

Leave a comment 
Fear and Vanity
incline us to imagine
we have caused a face
to turn away which merely
happened to look somewhere else.
 
----  ----  ----
Everyone thinks:
"I am the most important 
Person at present."
The same remember to add:
"Important, I mean, to me."

from “Marginalia” by W.H. Auden, City Without Walls and Other Poems

Mencken: “[Paul] Fussell credits Mencken’s series of ‘elegantly subversive’ Prejudices volumes with making him a genuine reader and eventually a writer. He reveled in Mencken’s ‘refreshing battle against complacent inhumanity and the morons’ – like any know-it-all aspiring young literary man.”

Comedy: Monty Python is irreverent and sometimes blasphemous, but now one of its productions is being accused of a different kind of blasphemy. “Humankind cannot bear very much reality, as T. S. Eliot opined, and that seems especially true of the progressive political class and its commissars among the creative types.”

Fantasy: Patrik Leo raves over Tad Williams’s The Dragonbone Chair among others. See the whole trilogy here.

Also, Elliot Brooks talks about a few new fantasy novels.

Non-fiction: Bookstore tales. Here’s a “charming tale of an Italian book publicist and poet who ‘launched a [successful] crowdfunding campaign on Facebook to open a bookshop in a tiny village in the mountains.'”

Also, ten non-fiction recommendations from Kirkus Reviews.

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

Fiction, Music, Poetry

How Do We Maintain the Jade Flame (and a few links)?

Leave a comment

Patriotism is not a uniquely American fruit. It can be grown anywhere. It’s a fondness for the qualities, hopefully just the admirable qualities, of one’s own home.

Some time ago, I noted the fierce patriotic theme in the Korean series Mr. Sunshine as something Americans could identify with. They faced threats we did not and still live under a cloud that hasn’t quite reached us, but their fight for sovereignty, to live by their own laws as Koreans and not vassals to another country, still resonates with many Americans.

I’m looking at a translation of a 1000-year-old poem by Korean poet Yo Inlŏ, “Meditating on the Start of a New Era.”

“My candle burns a flame of jade,” he says with pride and describes combing his hair in a traditional fashion.

Would that we so might comb the State 
Free of her follies and her greed!

That’s the perennial question. How do we guard our country against the natural self-aggrandizing of our leaders? Our solders didn’t die in battle and training for battle for the petty projects and personal wealth of our politicians. They died for that jade flame, for the well-being of their families and neighbors.

Have a restful Memorial Day weekend.

Remakes: Steven D. Greydanus talks about the magic of Disney’s original Little Mermaid and how the remake shows the company’s shallowness.

Slang: Another batch of interesting words from Cian McCarthy on Twitter:

Lallycodler: An old American sland word for anyone who is particularly good or successful at what they do.

Get more American slang from the 19th century here, including Shoddyocracy and Tell a thumper.

New Novels: Englewood’s introduction to a few new novels released this month.

America: Have you ever read or sung all the verses of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee”? Here are two of the eight.

Our fathers’ God to Thee,
Author of Liberty,
To thee we sing,
Long may our land be bright
With Freedom’s holy light,
Protect us by thy might
Great God, our King.

Our glorious Land to-day,
‘Neath Education’s sway,
Soars upward still.
Its hills of learning fair,
Whose bounties all may share,
Behold them everywhere
On vale and hill!

Photo by Aditya Joshi on Unsplash

Authors, Poetry, Religion

Looking for the Positives to Share

Leave a comment

My thoughts seem to be a wash today. Every idea I have I doubt, which is normal for me, but today I’m not getting around it. Usually when I feel like this, I try to multitask so I can get something easy done. I burned the brush in the backyard and read an article I thought I’d link to here, but no. It’s too negative. I’m tired of negatives at the moment.

I made a couple changes to comments today. You now have the ability to like comments and subscribe to posts or comments by email. Let me know if it performs as expected (not that I could do anything about it, if it doesn’t).

Faith: God is giving faith to Muslims.

It’s difficult to determine the number of Muslims who’ve converted to Christianity in the United States, but among those who have, Fouad Masri has observed the following two trends: an encounter with a practicing Christian and a vision or dream about Jesus, whom Muslims recognize as the prophet Isa.

“This is freaking out all the imams, because even imams, some of them had a dream of Jesus,” Masri said. “And they’re like, ‘Why did I not see Muhammad? Why did I see Jesus?’”

Critical Theory: Three books by Christians on Critical Race Theory

“Most stories of genies, lamps and wishes illustrate that our desires are discordantly arranged and fatally unwise. Even when we have good intentions, the results fail.” – Tim Keller, NYC

Tim Keller: Above is a somewhat random thought that relates to common themes on this blog. Keller’s last book was on forgiveness.

“At times, he writes, survivors of abuse have been pressured to forgive those abusers and just move on. Or forgiveness is used to cover up the truth about the harm people have done to others. ‘People have used forgiveness as a way of destroying the truth,’ said Keller.”

Here’s an illustration of forgiveness from the many stories people are sharing on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/TonyReinke/status/1659633050354094081
1/6 post thread from Tony Reinke of Desiring God on a time he disagreed with Keller and approached in a self-righteous way.

Ogden Nash: A great truth from this poet of light verse, the New York-born Frederick Ogeden Nash, whose great-great-grand-uncle was the General Nash of Nashville, Tenn.

In chaos sublunary 
What remains constant but buffoonery?

Photo: Postmen on Scooters (1911-17). Harris & Ewing. LOC.

Bookselling, Poetry, Reading

Illinois Tells Readers to Stop Complaining about Library Books

Leave a comment

Illinois will soon have a law designed to put silence readers who might be under a delusion that they have a voice in their community libraries. I wonder if it will matter as much as they think it will.

In his State of the State address, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said, “This afternoon I’ve laid out a budget agenda that does everything possible to invest in the education of our children. Yet it’s all meaningless if we become a nation that bans books from school libraries about racism suffered by Roberto Clemente and Hank Aaron, and tells kids they can’t talk about being gay, and signals to Black and Brown people and Asian Americans and Jews and Muslims that our authentic stories can’t be told.”

The bill, that has passed both house and senate, requires libraries to adopt the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights or to create their own policy against removing books in response to community pressure. At least, that’s the intent.

What the House bill actually says is “In order to be eligible for State grants, a library or library system shall adopt the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights that indicates materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval or, in the alternative, develop a written statement prohibiting the practice of banning books or other materials within the library or library system.” Banning is the term used. Removing from circulation would be another thing entirely, wouldn’t it?

The ALA’s policy says, in part, “Libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues.” and “libraries should challenge censorship in the fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment.”

But a library can’t hold everything, can it? Who chooses what goes on the shelf or what provides enlightenment? If the state library system has four copies of one book and 16 copies of another, is the latter book understood to be more enlightening?

This seems to be an attempt to silence reading communities, and I have to wonder if it will amount to much. Will some libraries adopt the proper policy and ignore it, going about their business as usual? Will some communities express their complaints quietly? Will some librarians be run out of town?

Book banning, as you and I both know, is not a thing. Wrestling over the moral propriety and age appropriateness of books is what the ALA calls banning, and that’s what we’re arguing over. Now, Illinois will declare that no one knows moral propriety like public librarians, so sit down and read what they give you.

What other waves are undulating the Internet?

O’Connor: “On Our Need to Be Displaced” – “The richest irony in efforts to dismiss O’Connor is that her fiction provides the insight we need right now to help heal our social and political divisions, and to temper our hostile public discourse. Because Flannery O’Connor, with her scorching wit, fingered the exact cause of all of it, including racism: fear.”

Tips for Creatives: Ted Gioia is offering advice to struggling artists who are trying to make music in the world of TikTok (which is a corrupt platform you shouldn’t use). Here’s a bit of it.

“The music itself is the pathway to joy. Getting applause after a performance is lovely, but not as lovely as the song you just played. Reading a favorable review is sweet, but hardly as sweet as the ecstatic moments of creative expression.”

Podcast: At the end of last year, Trevin Wax released a podcast on the current crises in the church and how to tackles them. It’s called Reconstructing Faith, and it’s marvelous.

Family: Roberto Carlos Garcia has a moving poem about the adults in a child’s life, called “The Tempest.” Poetry Foundation has a short passage from it.

My father was a great sailor, a seaman, navigated
Only the darkest waters—the sweetest squalls

Which is to say he was a drunk

Photo by Maxim Lugina on Unsplash

Bookselling, Poetry, Reading

Refusing or Finding Peace, Quiet Moments, and Satisfying Reading

2 Comments

We live in a world that wants healthy bodies with clear minds but we eat junk food and deny the nutritional difference.

“For to set the mind on the flesh [the things of the world, only what we can see] is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace” (Rom 8:6 ESV).

In The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard writes,

As we increasingly integrate our life into the spiritual world of God, our life increasingly takes on the substance of the eternal. We are destined for a time when our life will be entirely sustained from spiritual realities and no longer dependent in any way upon the physical. Out dying, or “mortal” condition, will have been exchanged for an undying one and death absorbed in victory.

Of course that destiny flatly contradicts the usual human outlook, or what “everyone knows” to be the case. . . . We find our world to be one where we hardly count at all, where what we do makes little difference, and where what we really love is unattainable, or certainly is not secure.

He notes that Aldous Huxley thought it natural to yearn for moments of escape from the pain or monotony of living and that perhaps a new drug would be developed to help us out. He says Tolstoy became overwhelmed by the seeming futility of everything, “until he finally came to faith in a world of God where all that is good is preserved.”

We will not find peace until we acknowledge the fount from which it springs.

New Book: Poet and Author Marly Youmans has released a new narrative poem, Seren of the Wildwood. She shares a couple reactions in this post. “Marly is a gifted visionary, her many published works reflect her unique talents, in Seren she presents a tale of no particular time or place, magical yet not absurdist, familiar yet surprising.”

Ordinary Life: “If we are concerned with what’s practical, the day will come when we will look back and it will be clear to us that there was nothing more practical than prayer, nothing more practical than perseverance, and nothing more practical than praising the triune God even when evil was pressing in on us.”

Ordinary Gratitude: A mom buys her kid a yellow raincoat, tweets about the reaction, and goes viral.

Poetry: Take a moment to consider Seamus Heaney’s “The Railway Children” from the book Station Island. Just a snippet here: 

We were small and thought we knew nothing
Worth knowing. 

Reading: “Much of mankind’s boredom derives from its inability to find satisfaction in a shelf of books.”

Photo: A painted 1969 Volkswagen, Yuma, Arizona. 2003. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.