Poets and Poems: Robert McDowell and "Sweet Wolf"

Like most people, I love a good story. But I’m a sucker for good stories written in poetry. One of my favorite works to reread is Robin Robertson’s The Long Take, an entire noir novel written in poetic form. 

I hadn’t previously read poetry by Robert McDowell, so I closely read poet Chad Abushanab’s introduction to McDowell’s Sweet Wolf: Selected and New Poems. Two phrases leaped off the page at me – lyrical poetry and, even better, narrative poetry.

 

And I thought, “A storyteller!”

 

I was not to be disappointed. Not at all. 

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

Some Tuesday Readings

 

The Unsung Shakespeare – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Prompt Celebration! The Colour Out of Space – Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Sonnets for Michelangelo – 41 – Vittoria Colanna at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin).

 

That’s My Heart Right There – Willie Perdomo at Every Day Poets.

 

“First Time In,” poem by Ivor Gurney – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

"The Mythmakers” by John Hendrix

It was a Facebook post that did it. A fellow book lover recommended The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien by John Hendrix. I highly value her judgment and opinion, and I flipped over to Amazon, pulled up the book, glanced at the price, and ordered it. I went for the hardcover, because my friend’s description sounded like it would be a keeper. 

I didn’t read the details.

 

When the book arrived, I opened it up to discover it was a graphic work. It’s officially a graphic novel, but there’s enough actual statements by both Lewis and Tolkien (and fictional comments informed by what they said) to make The Mythmakers a blend of fiction, non-fiction, and graphic design.

 

I was not a fan of graphic novels. There’s nothing wrong with them, but I have never been seriously interested in them.

 

Until now.

 

The Mythmakers is a “knocked-it-out-of-the-ballpark” kind of work.

 

Almost reluctantly, I began to read, my lack of interest almost noticeable. Until it disappeared. And then I devoured it. 

 

Hendrix tells the story of how Lewis and Tolkien had World War I experience in common, how they met at Oxford, how they became friends, and how their friendship, or “fellowship,” as Hendrix describes it, transformed fantasy literature forever. With Lewis’s encouragement, Tolkien would likely have never published The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Because of pointed criticism by Tolkien, Lewis almost didn’t publish The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Their friendship grew and remained solid, until the years of World War II. And then, to the sorrow of both men, it grew strained. But they continued to support one another’s work.

 

The Mythmakers uses a journey of two fictional characters, a lion (shades of Aslan) and a wizard (shades of Gandalf), through the story of the friendship. And it works. It works beautifully. I laughed, I grinned, I nodded my head, and at one point I even choked up and wiped away tears. The book is that good. Yes, I knew the story of their friendship, but I hadn’t seen it visually portrayed in illustration like it is here.

 

And while The Mythmakers doesn’t make a major case out of it, it does agree with my own assessment after reading so much about both men: Lewis was the truer friend.

 

John Hendrix, the illustrated man

Hendrix has written and illustrated numerous books, including The Faithful Spy: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Plot to Kill Hitler, Drawing Magic: Discovering Yourself in a Sketchbook, Miracle Man: The Story of Jesus, and others. He’s also created a comics collection entitled The Holy Ghost: A Spirited Comic and produced illustrations for numerous comic books and publications. He was named Distinguished Educator in the Arts for 2024 by the Society of Illustrators and currently serves as the Kenneth E. Hudson Professor of Art and the founding Chair of the MFA in Illustration and Visual Culture program at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. He lives with his family in suburban St. Louis (in a suburb so close to mine that we could be neighbors). 

 

The Mythmakers may be aimed at middle grade readers, but it offers a great deal to readers of all ages. And it helped me, or shoved me, away from my apathy about graphic novels.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

Best – artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

An Astronomer Was Able to Pinpoint the Mystery Location Depicted in a Van Gogh Masterpiece – Jackie Appel at Popular Mechanics.

 

All the Saints, and All the Ones They Leave Behind – Logan Hoffman at Plough Quarterly on Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin.

 

10 Composers to Listen to While Studying – Andrew Benson Brown at The Epoch Times.

 

The Pubs of Old London – Spitalfields Life.

Theft

After Exodus 20:15 and Luke 18:18-30 

It raises a question,

telling us not to steal,

the question being is it

really that simple? If

we don’t shoplift or

rob or burgle or take

what isn’t ours, that

fulfills the command,

right? Theft, however,

comes in many forms,

the most obvious being

the taking of something

we don’t own, something

physical. But there are

other things that can be

stolen, like credit for

something, a reputation

or good name. An opportunity.

A reward. A friend, A place.

A position. And more than

this, there is the theft 

of not giving, of ignoring

a need while having the means

to meet it, turning our faces

away as if we never saw it,

so it doesn’t exist. Remember:

thou shall not steal. Thou

shall not take what isn’t

yours. That shall not ignore

the need you can meet.

 

Photograph by De An Sun via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

“Queen-Anne’s Lace,” poem by William Carlos Williams – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

The Difficult, Possibly Unfixable Lot of Chronic Illness… in This Life – Jess Habib at The Gospel Coalition.

Saturday Good Reads - Nov. 9, 2024

As you can tell from often-included links here at Saturday Good Reads, I am a subscriber to The Free Press. It’s edited by former New York Times staffer Bari Weiss, who quit the Times when it was clear it had abandoned journalism, not unlike most of the legacy media (print and television). The Free Press still practices traditional journalism, ignores sacred cows, doesn’t make itself an extension of a political party, tackles serious and often underreported stories, and doesn’t think its most important audience is itself. Weiss was one of the journalists who reported on the Twitter files, when Elon Musk opened them up, and we all got to see just how much the major social media took their marching orders from the federal government. So, if you were a Free Press reader, the outcome of the Tuesday’s election was no surprise. 

As more information about the COVID pandemic makes its way into the public domain, we’re now seeing some of the damage that was done, how many dissident voices turned out to be correct, and how little of what was forced on us turned out to be based on science. Matt Taibbi at Racket News discovered that, despite the warnings of the head of the CDC and the President, there was no “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” William Briggs at Science Is Not the Answer considers what the panic did science.

 

Did you know that there’s an annual convention for the fans of Nancy Drew mysteries? Jadie Stillwell and Nicole Blackwell at Literary Hub attended one to find out what it was all about.

 

More Good Reads

 

Life and Culture

 

A Warning About Having Children – Jessica Burke at Story Warren.

 

Donald and the Pincer: 'Why did this happen?' and other obvious questions – Paul Kingsnorth at The Abbey of Misrule.

 

Israel

 

Last Night’s Pogrom in Amsterdam – David de Bruijn at The Free Press.

 

Poetry

 

Cosy – Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

Auden’s Island: The poet in the postwar era – Alan Jacobs at The Hedgehog Review.

 

“A Chubby-Cheeked, Shabby-Blazered Colossus.” How Dylan Thomas Influenced Generations of Poets – Dai George at Literary Hub.

 

“A Poet to His Baby Son,” poem by James Weldon Johnson – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Origin Story – Kelly Belmonte at Kelly’s Scribbles.

 

Faith

 

Nadya Williams and the Good News – Jon Schaff at Front Porch Republic.

 

How to Pray After Election Day – John Pletcher at the Institute for Faith, Work, & Economics.

 

All Will Be Well – Andrew Klavan at The New Jerusalem.

 

The Church’s Unsung Hero: The Sunday School Teacher – Trevis Wax t The Gospel Coalition.

 

British Stuff

 

Why was I the only reporter? On the sentencing of the Rotherham grooming gang – Charlie Peters at The Critic Magazine.

 

We Shall Fight in the Buttery: Oxford’s War 1939–1945 by Ashley Jackson – review by Nicholas Rankin at Literary Review.

 

Writing and Literature

 

A Name Nerd’s Guide to Agatha Christie – Naomi Kaye at CrimeReads.

 

B&N on Track to Open 60 Bookstores This Year – Jim Milliot at Publisher’s Weekly.

 

News Media 

 

The Game Really Is Up for the Mainstream Media (Just Like Last Time) – Stephen McAlpine.

 

Nah Neh Nah – Vaya Con Dios

 Painting: Portrait of a Man Readings, oil on canvas by Paul Kotlarevsky (1883-1950).

Five words

After Exodus 20:14 and Matthew 5:27-28 

A message telegraphed

in five words, miscroscoped

like so many messages

into summary simplicity,

meaning more than

its words say. That word,

adultery, means what it

says, its formal definition

of being unfaithful to the one

selected for you, the one 

you loved, the one who loved

you, the one provided to you

to come alongside to be one,

one flesh, the oneness pointing

to the kingdom.

 

And it means more, a synonym

for faithfulness in life, faithful

in all things, to all people,

faithful to your spouse,

your children, your family,

your parents, your friends,

your church, your work,

your society, your culture,

your God. An impossible

standard, only brought

to reality by the One.

 

Photograph by Clay Banks via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

Four Years After Our Hardest Day – Tim Challies.

 

The School of Faith – When God’s Ways Are a Mystery – Sarah Walton at Set Apart.

 

The Flight from God, & a Flight into the Country – Michael De Sapio at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Psalm 23 – Megan Willome.

Marjorie Maddox Have: Poetry, Art, and Spelling

In 2018, poet Marjorie Maddox Hafer drove with her then art-student daughter Anna to Baltimore. Their destination was the American Visionary Art Museum. As Hafer describes in her introduction to In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind (2023), they drove through a thunderstorm, and she herself was recovering from a recent medical procedure.

At the museum they walked into both poetry and artistic inspiration. Hafer would write nine poems based on art and photography works; within a year, her daughter would receive her art degree, hold her first exhibition, and sell her first work. Hafer includes the nine poems in this 2023 collection, accompanied by the inspirational artworks themselves. The other 23 poems in the collection are matched to works by her daughter. (You can see many of Anna Hafer’s art works here.)

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

Some Thursday Readings

 

Poet Laura: What’s in a Name – Sandra Fox Murphy at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Else Lasker-Schuler’s Grief – David Bannon at Front Porch Republic.

 

Finding Your Needle in Chesterton’s Haystack – Alan Cornett at Miller’s Book Review.

 

“How to Tel the Wild Animals,” poem by Carolyn Wells – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

"Ushers" by Joe Hill

Martin Lorensen is a young man who’s been extremely lucky, or he’s extremely guilty. Twice he’s narrowly escaped death – a train wreck and a school shooting. Both times, his escape was a last-minute thing – a panic attack kept him from boarding the train and an upset stomach stopped him from entering school and returning home. In the train wreck case, he warned a mother and daughter not to board.

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

Some Wednesday Readings

 

The Mystic Chords of Memory: Reclaiming American History – Wilfred McClay at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

In William Blake’s Lambeth – Spitalfields Life.

 

“Tragedy,” poem by Jill Spargur – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Andrew Fuller on the Politicization of the totality of our lives – Michael A.G. Azad Haykin at Historia ecclesiastica.  

Shifting Landscape – poem by Kelle Belmonte at Kelly’ Scribbles.

Bruce Lawder: Prose Poems, (Very) Short Fiction, or Both?

Poetic stories have been around ever since there were stories. The Epic of Gilgamesh, scholars say, was written sometime between 2150 and 1400 B.C. Homer wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey sometime in the 9th or 8^th century B.C. Closer to our own time, John Milton wrote his epic poems in the 1600s, and in the 19^th century we had epic poets like Alfred Lord Tennyson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. But our attention spans have grown shorter, as have our poems and our novels (a few contemporary Europeans notwithstanding). 

It's not necessarily a bad thing. Writing short, or writing short well, requires laser-like focus, concise words, and abandoning adverbs. In Dwarf Stories, his most recent poetry collection, Bruce Lawder does exactly that.

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

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Journeys: What We Hold in Common – L.L. Barkat at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

“The Antenna,” poem by Mia Anderson – D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

 

Alistair Begg with Biblical Wisdom for Voting – Truth for Life.

 

“The Vanity of Human Wishes,” poem by Samuel Johnson – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Or Did You Think Crushed Hopes Couldn’t Reawaken? – poem by Hedy Habra at Every Day Poems.

Some Monday Readings

The New Push for Censorship Under the Guise of Combating Hate – Paul Thacker at Tablet Magazine. 

A Blockbuster Met Exhibition Takes Visitors Back to Siena to Trace the Origins of European Painting – Christian Kleinbub at Art in America.

 

“Poor Eddy”: A New Life of Edgar Allan Poe – Mark Jarman at The Hudson Review.  Law Student Faces Expulsion for ‘Aggressive Pointing’ – Olivia Reingold at The Free Press.   Appreciations: Bram Stoker’s Dracula – Eduard Habsburg-Lothringen at The Lamp Magazine.   The other side of TS Eliot – Jeremy Noel-Tod at Prospect Magazine.   Do the Hard Work of Publishing – Terry Whalin at The Writing Life.   Murders for November – Jeremy Black at The Critic Magazine.   James Mackinnon, Artist – Spitalfields Life.

 

A New Mozart Work is Discovered – Stephen Klugewicz at The Imaginative Conservative.

A metaphor

After Exodus 20:13 and Matthew 5:21-26 

Murder is a metaphor,

meaning much more

than it implies. Murder

encompasses any kind

of destruction of people,

a body, a mind, a heart,

a reputation. It doesn’t

have to be acted out or

spoken. The heart rages

and is guilty. The mind

thinks, and is guilty.

The lips speak, and are

guilty. The hands act,

and are guilty. Murder is

any form of destruction

of life. And it is forbidden;

thou shalt not.

 

Photograph by Jr Korpa via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

Hometown – poem by Kelly Belmonte at Kelly’s Scribbles.

 

Whatever Happens, Love Thy Neighbor – Larissa Phillips at The Free Press.

Saturday Good Reads - Nov. 2, 2024

Jewish men have been recently attacked in Brooklyn, Chicago, and Maryland. Every register that tracks such incidents says anti-Semitism is on the rise in America, and not only on elite college campuses. And just when I think these kinds of stories are being exaggerated as part of a right-wing conspiracy theory, a story like this comes along: what’s been going on in the country second-largest teachers’ union.  

Jeff Bezos, found of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, made news this week by directing the Post not to endorse a presidential candidate. This followed the same move by the Los Angeles Times and was itself followed by USA Today. And then The Nation retracted its endorsement. But it was Bezos who drew the ire of journalists and the Left in general. Hamish McKenzie, founder of Substack, used his own column to point out something most critics have missed: Jeff Bezos has a business problem.

Punching the point home: Hugh Hewitt, one of the few conservative columnists at the Post, quit this week. 

 

Next Tuesday, or in the weeks and months afterward, some candidate is going to lose. While dire threats from both left and right warn of violence to come, including “tabletop exercises” being planned possibly involving the Department of Homeland Security, some saner heads are counseling a different response; John Pletcher at the Institute for Faith, Work, & Economics has some suggestions for what to do if your candidate loses.

 

More Good Reads

 

Israel

 

Sally Rooney’s Literary Mob – Lionel Shriver at The Free Press.

 

American Stuff

 

Getting Punched by a Minie Ball – Samuel Flowers at Emerging Civil War. 

 

A Thousand Words a Battle: Wilson’s Creek – Kristen Trout at Emerging Civil War.

 

Civil War Nurse Saves Mount Vernon & Valley Forge – Daniel Welch at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.

 

Life and Culture

 

The Easiest Way into America – Dave Seminara at The Spectator.

 

Is There Really a Plot to Use Migrants to Turn America Blue? – Peter Savodnik at The Free Press.

 

Scientist who battled for COVID common sense over media and government censors wins top

Award – Jonathan Turley at the New York Post.

 

Faith

 

What Exactly is “Sola Scriptura” Protecting Us Against? – Michael Kruger at Canon Fodder.

 

British Stuff

 

Does Britain need its own First Amendment? – Toby Young at The Spectator.

 

What the British Government Wouldn’t Say – Douglas Murray at The Free Press.

 

Art

 

The frugal life of Piet Mondrian – Honor Clerk at The Spectator.

 

Poetry

 

“Dusk in Autumn,” poem by Sara Teasdale – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

At the Butcher’s – Jennifer May at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

Free Form Friday: Haibun – From Sewall’s Bridge – Kelly Belmonte.

 

Trespasses – David Whyte.

 

Love One Another – Elton Lux (Piano) & Annie Southwick (Violin)

 Painting: Woman Reading 2, oil on canvas by Fernand Toussaint (1873-1956). 

The real, the symbolic

After Exodus 20:12 and Ephesians 6:1-4 

Honor your parents,

even if they fail,

even when they fail,

because they will,

because they do. But

they are in place

for a reason, to provide

structure and to nourish,

to bring up and sustain,

to rain and create

stability, a picture

of the divine, a symbol

of all authority on this earth.

Likewise, parents and

authority are not

empowered to vex,

to anger, to betray those

entrusted to them. Instead, 

they are to lead,

they are to love,

they are to nurture.

 

Photograph by Ioann-Mark Kuznietsov via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

A Father’s Prayer for His Son – Tim Challies.

 

Getting Found: A Three-Year Anniversary – Martin Shaw at the House of Beasts & Vines.

 

A Dedication to My Wife – poem by James Matthew Wilson at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin). 

 

The Miraculous Phenomenon of Post-Hurricane Weather – Samuel Schaefer at Front Porch Republic.

 

A Sword in the Devil's Heart: Halloween Sermon by St. Gregory Thaumaturgus – Cody Ilardo at Power & Glory.