In 1837, a large group gathered to commemorate the Battle of Lexington and Concord, the Declaration of Independence, and the American Revolution. And Ralph Waldo Emerson read a poem that contained one of the most famous lines in American history and poetry.
By the way, not everyone living in America liked the Declaration of Independence. Tories and Loyalists objected, and two of them actually penned and published a response. Back in England, in the nave of Westminster Abbey, you can find a memorial to Major John Andre, ordered by General Washington to be executed for spying; the memorial commends his zeal for his country. We forget that for those who signed the Declaration of Independence, they were risking everything, including execution for treason. (I discovered, courtesy of Family Search, that I am related to one of the signers, Robert Treat Paine; he’s a second cousin seven times removed.)
A couple of contrarian views about poetry surfaced this week. Steve Knepper at New Verse Review explained why he’s against publishing the “selected poems” of poets, at least somewhat against. And former English teacher Susan Spear took issue with how poetry is taught in schools, focusing on “meaning” rather than “versecraft.”
When I agreed to co-teach a Sunday School class of second graders, I had no idea of what I was going to experience. And it wasn’t the kids.
It was my co-teacher, Carl.
He recruited me. We both had our youngest children – boys – in second grade. The Sunday School class needed a teacher. We’d met in an adult Sunday School class, but we weren’t particularly close friends.
“Look,” Carl said, “they need a teacher for the second grade. I can entertain the kids, but you’re the teacher. We have to make this fun. We can show the kids that Sunday School is fun. And so is learning about God.”
It begins with the boy slowly waking up and welcomed by the rays of his much-loved friend, the Sun. While not noted, it’s assumed that they know each other well and have had previous adventures together. This day the adventure will be a swim.
As always, in addition to the adventure, the Sun tells the boy a story. The stories are like fables, running the human qualities good and bad, each with an obvious moral. This day, the story is about pride, and how a sunflower listens so deeply to the flattery of a snake that he forgets his closest friend, the rose.
I’m always suspicious of Facebook messages coming from people I don’t know. If it seems that a message might possibly be legitimate, I’ll check the person’s profile page. More often than not, it’s people from Hong Kong or the Philippines or Africa, or people who names and profile photos clearly don’t match. Click delete.
A few weeks ago, one arrived that raised my suspicions, but the sender seemed legitimate. And he was. He asked me if I was the author of this article at Emerging Civil War: “Research for a Novel Upended a Family Legend.” Yep, that was me.
He said he had an interesting story to tell me, and we eventually connected by phone.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
We’re familiar with the meaning of chronic illness. The most common types are cancer, heart disease, and diabetes, diseases with no known cures. They can often be mitigated and their effects reduced or controlled, but that doesn’t mean they’re eliminated, or that they no longer have to be dealt with and lived with.
The impact of chronic illness on families can be devastating, disrupting and forever changing the patterns of daily life and relationships and often fundamentally changing the relationships themselves. That is what Alison Blevins explores in Where Will We Live if the House Burns Down?: Poems, a collection of 62 untitled prose poems in paragraph form. Collectively, the poems read like a fable of contemporary life.
Acting Detective Inspector Superintendent Nick Dixon of the Avon and Somerset Police has a lot on his mind. It’s his wedding day; his wife-to-be, Detective Sergeant Jane Winters, is seven months pregnant. The wedding goes as planned, but that’s about all that goes as planned. A knock at his door that night is from his boss. A body has been found in the bay, and it’s a serving police officer. His partner is missing. Wedding day or not, Dixon has to deal with the case.
Another case is added; two drug dealers had been found weeks earlier tortured and then killed. The dead and missing officers were involved. What ties the two cases together is the still-missing murder weapon – a 3D printed gun.
Adding to the threats of other deaths and someone printing guns is the investigation keeps leading the team back to the police. And Dixon has to cut through deceit, lies, and possible corruption to get to the truth.
Damien Boyd
Blue Blood is the 15th Nick Dixon crime novel by British writer Damien Boyd, and it’s a thriller of a story. Boyd is a master at riveting the reader’s attention, bringing the novel to a fever-pitch close.
Boyd uses his own experience as a legal solicitor and a member of the Crown Prosecution Service to frame his stories. And that knowledge and experience is telling. He understands how policemen do their work, how prosecutions operate, and what happens when a former tax lawyer (Dixon) brings his very unorthodox thinking to police work.
Blue Blood keeps you guessing right up to the end, and not only who the killer is but also whether some of the good guys and innocent bystanders will survive. And it’s a “I have to get up and walk around” ending.
Trivia question: what’s the most sung song in American history, perhaps in all human history? Here’s a hint: it started life as a kindergarten song in 1893, and gradually people started changing the words. The composer was Kentucky-born Mildred Hill, whose sister ran an experimental school. The Hill’s sisters’ ideas about music influenced Anton Dvorak’s “New World Symphony.” And the song? “Happy birthday to you.”
What punctuation mark seems headed for the ash heap? According to Joel Miller, it’s the semicolon. And he asks, and answers, what happened to it.
We think of the end of the Civil War, and we connect to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Technically, that’s wrong. Confederate General William Johnston surrendered to Gen. Sherman two weeks later. The Confederate forces in Texas surrendered in June of 1865. But the last shots of the war were fired a long way from the battlefields – would you believe the Arctic Ocean?
The novel has been dead, close to death, dying, and on its last legs for nearly a century. If true, it’s the most prolonged death in literary history. Lincoln Michel at Counter Craft takes a long, thoughtful look at the so-called death of the novel, and he has some surprising insights.
The first thing I noticed with The Locust Years: Poems by Paul Pastor is that it is a physically beautiful book. The cover illustration and interior art are by Michael Cook, an artist and gallery owner who lives in Derbyshire in England. This is the kind of book I find a pleasure simply to hold in my hands. I’m attracted to books like this; books that are as much a work of art as what they contain.
The second thing I noticed, or rather learned, is that the poems were written over a four-year period that the poet says were the most difficult of his life. He doesn’t explain, except to say the poems themselves will provide the reader with few if any clues. The collection is not a memoir; it is a collection that grew from personal difficulties.
In my research for my novel Brookhaven, it was difficult not to run across references to one particular officer.
John Pelham was an Alabama boy, the third of three sons and born in 1838 in a small wooden house in rural Benton County. His father was a doctor and farmer, enjoying both community respect and economic success. The family’s reputation was such that John’s father was able to get an appointment for his son to the U.S. Military Academy. The young man arrived at West Point in 1856, enrolling in a five-year degree program.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
When I first envisioned my novel Brookhaven, I focused on a family story passed down through generations, which turned out to be a legend, as in, almost entirely untrue. But two things shifted my focus.
First, in 2022, I had the old family Bible conserved. It had seen better days; my father gave it to me wrapped in grocery store bag paper and tied with strong. My contribution had been to remove the paper and string, wrap it in acid-free paper, and store in an acid-free box. It sat on a closet shelf for years, until I brought it to a book conservator in St. Louis. He discovered something tucked in the Book of Isaiah that both my father and I had missed – a yellowed envelope containing a lock of auburn hair.
For various reasons, I believe the hair belonged to my great-grandmother Octavia. She died in 1888 at age 44. Unusual for the time, my great-grandfather Samuel never remarried. He died in 1920. And I thought to myself, “There’s a love story here.”
Second, also in 2022, we saw a movie entitled “I Heard the Bells.” It’s a snapshot of the life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) during the Civil War, including both the tragic death of his beloved wife and the near death from a war wound of his oldest son Charles. Both events contributed to Longfellow’s writing the poem that became a Christmas hymn, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.”