How I Learned the Liberal Arts Were Important

I can remember the first time I knew for sure that something had gone wrong with the liberal arts. I had suspected some things were awry in our own public school district. Teachers and administrators didn’t like parents asking even basic questions about curricula. “Our focus in on critical thinking,” one principal said, “not rote learning.” Included in rote learning were penmanship, learning historical facts, memorizing multiplication tables, phonics, and just about anything associated with traditional learning. 

But it was when my oldest son’s sixth-grade English teacher sent a note home on some class activity that I knew. The note was filled with spelling and grammar mistakes. When I asked if spelling and grammar were still taught, I was given some vague reference to avoiding harming children’s self-esteem. 

 

We pulled the plug. 

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

Some Wednesday Readings

 

What the BBC leaves out – Jack Flockhart at The Critic Magazine. 

 

Who was he? Read a remarkable Battle of Nashville letter – John Banks’ Civil War Blog.

 

The keffiyeh crew’s curious silence on Iran – Brendan O’Neill at The Spectator.

 

“Solitude,” poem by Ella Wheeler  Wilcox – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Why Contemporary Fiction is Bad – Lucas Smith at The Sprawl of Quality.

Essays: Benjamin Myers on Place, Education, and Poetry

I’ve been trying to recall when, or how, I first ran across the poetry of Benjamin Myers. I read his Elegy for Trains: Poems in early 2014, and if I can clear the cobwebs away from my memory, it may have been through a recommendation of a friend I met at a writing retreat in Texas. However it happened, Elegy for Trains put me on the road to becoming a Ben Myers reader.  

I know why I enjoy his poetry so much: I can’t read it without being reminded of my own family – my grandmothers, my aunts and uncles, and cousins on both sides. Family is anchored in the idea of place, and I can’t think of family without thinking of my mother’s tribe of German and Cajuns in New Orleans and my father’s smaller but character-filled family in Shreveport. When I read Black Sunday: Poems by Myers, I found myself reading it two and three times simply because of my own family memories it evoked.

 

Myers, a professor of English and literature at Oklahoma Baptist University, doesn’t only write poetry; he also writes about poetry, about education, and the idea of place. He’s collected his essays and article in Ambiguity & Belonging: Essays on Place, Education & Poetry.

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

Some Tuesday Readings

 

The Sadbook Collections – Book 2 – Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Dead Sea Scrolls Trilogy – poems by Brian Yapko at Society of Classical Poets.

 

A Sonnet for Candlemas – Malcolm Guite.

 

“Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries,” poem by A.E. Housman – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Poets and Poems: Benjamin Myers and "The Family Book of Martyrs"

If I were asked to list my Top Ten favorite contemporary poets, I wouldn’t hesitate to include Benjamin Myers. A professor of literature at Oklahoma Baptist University, Myers’ poetry deeply resonates with my own history and understanding of the world. I can’t explain why, exactly. It’s not the familiar condition known as “echo chamber.” But his poems do seem familiar in a deep, personal sense. 

I discovered this when I read his Elegy for Trains (2010) and Lapse Americana (2013). But it was his Black Sunday (2019) that really punched it home. With its poems about the Oklahoma Dust Bowl of the 1930s, I found myself not that far away, in northern Louisiana in the 1930s, reliving my own family history. And that’s the key – I can’t read his poetry without revisiting my own family.

 

His new collection, The Family Book of Martyrs, does exactly that. 

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

Listening to the Poets in the Sounds of Silence

If a single word could be used to describe the 2400-acre Shaw Nature Reserve 40 miles southwest of downtown St. Louis in Franklin County, it would be silence. When a soul craves contemplation or calm, it’s the silence that attracts. It’s not serenity I’m looking for, though, but rather a cure for restlessness.

I’ve been here before, and late November is a good time to visit. The temperatures are cool without being chilling; slithering creatures have crawled into their dens for the approaching winter; and the gray brownness of the trees and terrain guarantee few visitors, especially on a Monday.

The reserve opens around Pinetum Lake, and the scene, especially in autumn, could pass for a landscaped design in 18^thcentury England, like at Blenheim Palace. All that’s missing is the Greek temple.

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

Photograph: Pinetum Lake, Shaw Nature Reserve.

Poets and Poems: Benjamin Myers and “Black Sunday”

It began as a drought. Farmers in 1930 looked up at the sky and wondered where the clouds had gone, and with them, the rain. For an area the size of three-fourths of the state of Texas, including the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, the western half of Kansas, the eastern half of Colorado, and parts of Nebraska and New Mexico, the rain wouldn’t return until 1939. At times, most of the United States was affected by the drought, but no region experienced what the southern Plains went through.

Benjamin Myers

The land dried up. The wind blew. Dust storms reached the East Coast. By the end of the 1930s, some 2.5 million people had migrated west to escape what came to be called the Dust Bowl. It was the agricultural counterpoint to the Great Depression, and it was part of an era when hunger became familiar to millions of Americans.

Poet Benjamin Myers uses the 54 poems of Black Sunday to explain, interpret, and illustrate what happened in those years. You read these poems in somber stillness. You look out your window and consider what your own landscape would be with grass dead, gardens parched into sticks, the limbs of trees reaching upward like unanswered prayers.

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

Pinocchio in Nineveh

This post first appeared at The Master’s Artist.

How much does culture – American culture – influence Christianity as practiced in the United States? It’s a fair question, and the answer is likely “a lot more than we realize.” The idea is that Christianity is supposed be salt and light in the culture, but we know from the New Testament and from the history of the church that it too often works the other way.

Benjamin Myers is an associate professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University. His first book of poems, Elegy for Trains, was published in 2010, and received the 2011 Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry from the Oklahoma Center for the Book. His poems have been published in such journals as The Chiron Review and Christianity and Literature, and included in several anthologies.

Elegy for Trains is a fine collection, with poems ranging thematically from Shakespeare to seasons, from the writing process to Psalms and Revelations. But Myers also considers this “faith and culture question, and he does so in an interesting poem entitled “Jonah and Pinocchio:”

It was the two whales,

swimming each an inch

below the surface of my eight-year-old

mind that confused me,

left me standing before the Sunday School class

mute in my corduroy pants,

hair as stiff and slicked as the oil-spill

collected in the rushes along the beach,

trying to remember

what God sent a marionette

to Nineveh and whether the message

was “repent” or “always tell the truth.”

I wasn’t here that often,

and they were waiting

for me to retell the story of the prophet,

but I kept adding donkey ears,

a growing nose,

a blue fairy where there ought to be a storm.

Then the little room itself

rolled around me

like a stomach. The window

on the far wall became a blowhole

through which I was given a vision:

trees in an upward avalanche of green,

each spring leaf like a bird in sudden flight

after the long skin and bones of winter.

And who’s to say I wasn’t right,

that the point of the story might not be

that after this life’s long childhood of wood,

I could awake some clear, cold morning

where the waves wash over the sand

to find I have become a real boy.

Pinocchio – the story of the puppet boy who, through a series of adventures and misadventures, eventually becomes a real boy, first appeared in story form in 1883. But it was Walt Disney who transformed the story into an American cultural icon, with the famous admonition to always tell the truth or your nose will grow.

There is a whale in the story – Monstro, who devours Pinocchio’s father Geppetto. The whale plays a critical role in the climax of the story, when Pinocchio becomes a real boy.

Benjamin Myers rather playfully takes one whale story – Monstro in Pinocchio – and confuses it as a child would confuse it. Asked to tell the story of Jonah and the whale, the child in Myers’ poem conflates the whale of Jonah with the whale of Pinocchio. God sends a marionette to Nineveh, with a message to repent or to tell the truth; the child isn’t sure.

But he plunges onward, “…adding donkey ears/ a growing nose / a blue fairy.” The room becomes the interior of the whale (Pinocchio’s whale), and the child has a vision of “trees in an upward avalanche of green, / each spring leaf like a bird in sudden flight / after the long skin and bones of winter.”

He digs his hole deeper and deeper (you can almost feel the child squirming). And then, right at the end, he realizes that, if they’re not the same story, they actually may have the same outcome. The child speaker of the poem realizes that, like Pinocchio, he may one day become a real boy.

One way to consider the poem, and the boy’s dilemma, is to see his required recitation in the context of both whales – both stories – competing for the telling. He means to tell the faith story, the Jonah story, but it’s the cultural story, the Pinocchio story, that (mostly) comes out. And yet nothing is actually lost, because in this long childhood of wood, the real boy may well emerge.

Culture can be used redemptively, too.

Illustration by Enrico Mazzanti, the first illustrator of Le avventure  di Pinocchio (1883). 

Poetry Review: The Submerged Depths of Lapse Americana

Sometime in our late 30s, perhaps our 40s, we become aware of time passing. Our 20s and early 30s are spent trying to hurry time; after that we try to slow it down, until in our 60s when we realize the train is hurtling ever faster. Time to stop and enjoy the ride.

With the slowing comes understanding, and occasionally wisdom. We understand a life, our life, to be an aggregation of people, events, places, decisions, choice made. And we grasp the vital importance of childhood.

It’s that sense of realization and understanding that permeates Lapse Americana, Benjamin Myers second volume of poetry.

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

Pinicchio in Nineveh

Poet Benjamin Myers has taken the story of Pinocchio and the account of Jonah -- remember the whales in the both? -- and written a poem that is both funny and raises larger questions about culture and Christianity. He rather playfully takes one whale story – Monstro in Pinocchio – and confuses it as a child would confuse it. Asked to tell the story of Jonah and the whale, the child in Myers’ poem conflates the whale of Jonah with the whale of Pinocchio. God sends a marionette to Nineveh, with a message to repent or to tell the truth; the child isn’t sure.

To read more about the poem, please see my new post at The Master's Artist. The poem is from Myers' new collection, Elegy for Trains: Poems.