"Belligerent Muse" by Stephen Cushman

“The past is never dead,” wrote William Faulkner in Requiem for a Nun. “It’s not even past.” One hundred and fifty-eight years after the last battle and the final surrender, it seems we’re still living with the effects of and trying to understand the American Civil War.  

Poet and English professor Stephen Cushman has been fascinated with the Civil War since childhood. He understands that any historical event, like a war, is understood generations later through the writings of those who lived it and then those who wrote about it. The subtitle of his 2014 book explains what he was about when he wrote it – Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Out Understanding of the Civil War.

 

The ”belligerent muse” in this case is war. Cushman points out that “war destroys, but it also inspires, stimulates, and creates.” The Civil War brought destruction, especially in the southern states, but it continues to be the source of an enormous outpouring of memoirs, reports, journals, historical texts, biographies, and fiction. In this book, Cushman says that we should not simply see these writings as “transparent windows opening into the past, but also as literary engagements with the momentous events of the war itself. In other words, they were writing to understand themselves the events they were living through.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

The Axis of the Human Heart – Rod Dreher.

 

Civil War Art: Antietam by James Hope – Kevin Pawlak at Emerging Civil War.

 

A Conductor at Twilight: Michael Tilson Thomas’ Last Days – Teez Rose at The Imaginative Conservative. 

 

Meet Meredith Angwin, the grandmother changing the energy industry – Emmet Penney at The Spectator.

Somewhere in England, a short story by Glenn McGoldrick (and it's a dark one), is free to download on Amazon today and tomorrow.

Poets and Poems: Stephen Cushman and "Keep the Feast"

I’ve been reading about the Civil War Battle of the Wilderness, fought largely amid dense trees and shrubs north of Richmond, Virginia. Weather conditions had been dry that spring of 1864, and the artillery fire ignited the brush. Horrific conditions resulted. Many men burned to death; others barely made it out of the line of fire. It was the first military confrontation between Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, and neither man was going to budge.  

One of the books I was reading was Bloody Promenade by Stephen Cushman. It’s less of a historical account and more a reflection upon the battle itself. Cushman lives and teaches not far away, in Charlottesville, Virginia, and he’s been long fascinated with the Civil War in general and that battle in particular.

 

He’s also a poet. When I read his book jacket biography, his name sounded familiar. Later, I saw his list of poetry collections, and I realized I had reviewed one of them, Riffraff: Poems, here at Tweetspeak.

 

His latest collection, Keep the Feast, was published last year. In an odd way, I’m glad I read Bloody Promenade first. It was published almost 25 years ago, but I can how the poet who reflected on a terrible, tragic Civil War battle would write the kinds of poems that comprise Keep the Feast.

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

Some Tuesday Readings 

 

On Going Through Max’s Things – poem by Martin Rizley at Society of Classical Poets.

 

Derrick Porter, Hoxton Poet – Spitalfields Life.

 

Poetry Prompt: Back to School, in the Second Person – Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

What the Body Knows – poem by Jean Janzen at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin).

"Bloody Promenade" by Stephen Cushman

I found Stephen Cushman’s poetry first, and then I discovered he wrote about the Civil War as well. 

Cushman is a professor of English at the University of Virginia. He’s known for his seven collections of poetry and two books of literary criticism, Fictions of Form in American Poetry and William Carlos Williams and the Meanings of Measure. 

 

But when he was a child, he was given a book about the American Civil War. It was The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War (1960), with a narrative by noted Civil War historian Bruce Catton. The book became the key that unlocked a lifelong interest in the war, to the point where he’s published three books about it – The Generals’ Civil War: What Their Memoirs Can Teach Us Today, Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War, and Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

“Trouble Him a Little Longer”: Morgan’s Raiders in Bardstown, Kentucky – Caroline Davis at Emerging Civil War.

 

The Surrender of Port Hudson – Sean Michael Chick at Emerging Civil War.

 

A Civil War Road Trip of a Lifetime by John Banks.