The Overseas Trip Where Language Didn't Matter

Our missions trip was scheduled for September 2001. We’d been preparing all summer. But 9-11 intervened, and the trip was postponed.  

We were an unusual missions team. The mission we’d be visiting had specifically asked for it – a small team devoted to communications to help the mission tell its story, produce a short film for a building fundraiser, and interview missionaries who could use videos and stories to send reports to financial supporters and home churches. We were a team of three: team lead/logistics guy/organizer/general factotum; the videographer, aka the guy with the camera; and me, the writer, the guy with the laptop who would be typing away in airports, planes, homes, offices, and in the car. 

 

We’d be in central Europe for a week, with a schedule so packed I thought we’d need slotted times for breathing. Four countries, five languages, cultural shocks, and no time to detox from jet lag.

 

I could probably write pages about that trip, story after story, detail after detail. But what sticks with me were a few examples of how communication didn’t depend upon language.

Photograph of Dresden by Lukas D via Unsplash. Used with permission. 

Some Thursday Readings

 

Poet Laure: Going Fishing with Dad – Donna Hilbert at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

“Casey at the Bat,” poem by Ernest Thayer – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

“In School-Days,” poems by John Greenleaf Whittier – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

 

Poets and Poems: Linda Nemec Foster and “Bone Country”

One can visit Europe in lots of ways – cruise ship on the rivers, cruise ship on the ocean, bus, car, backpacking, bicycle, airplane, even on foot. I don’t know exactly how poet Linda Nemec Foster has visited Europe, and her 2024 collection Bone Country shows she’s at least visited in prose poetry.  

Bone Country is not a travelogue or tourist guide. Instead, it’s a deep dive into people, history, major upheavals, and small events. She watches a man with a spiked mohawk drink tea in Istanbul. An artist from Serbia insists he’s painted her face. She watches undercover policewomen and ghosts among the trees in Warsaw. 

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

Some Tuesday Readings

 

10 – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

A Poem for the 250^th Anniversary of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense – Andrew Benson Brown at The Society of Classical Poets.

 

“Good Night, World,” poem by Jacob Glatstein – Ruth Wisse at The Free Press.

 

Introducing Inspiration – New Annual Theme – L.L. Barkat at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

“Hurt Hawks,” poem by Robinson Jeffers – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Poetry and World War I: It Wasn’t Only England

It’s an automatic association in my mind. When I think of World War I, I think first of poetry. No war is as closely connected to poetry as “the war to end all wars,” the war that truly inaugurated the 20^th century. And it is the English poets of war, and especially the ones who died in the war – Rupert Brooke, Charles Sorley, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, and more – who have shaped our understanding of the experience of that war.

Geert Buelens

What I didn’t realize was that the poets of World War I weren’t confined to Britain. The French wrote poetry about the war, as did the Germans and the Belgians (it’s estimated that the Germans alone were writing an average of 50,000 poems a day during the war years). And the Austrians and Italians. The Hungarians. The Russians. Even the Serb Gavrilo Princep, the young assassin of the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, wanted to become a poet.

And these poets, including those in Britain, weren’t writing in a vacuum; they wrote within the context of social and philosophical currents that had been building before the war and were transformed during the war years and after. The war elevated poets and poetry to a significant position in virtually all European countries. As the Belgian scholar Geert Buelens writes in Everything to Nothing: The Poetry of the Great War, Revolution and the Transformation of Europe, “As European nations rediscovered their souls, they also rediscovered poetry.”

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