Some Thursday Readings - Sept. 12, 2024

Handbags & Handcuffs: The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective by Sara Lodge – Claire Harman at Literary Review. 

“Poor Eddy”: A New Life of Edgar Allan Poe – Mark Jarman at The Hudson Review.

 

On the Tarmac – poem by Tania Runyan at Every Day Poems.

 

Shakespeare and Classical Education – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative. 

 

“The Traveler” and “Sunrise” – poems by Shindy Cai at Society of Classical Poets.

 

Author George Saunders on His Novel Lincoln in the Bardo, on Lincoln After the Death of His Son – New York Times Book Review podcast via The Reconstruction Era blog.

 

If your protagonist is bored, you can bet you reader will be to – Nathan Bransford. 

 

End – prose poem / reflection by David Whyte.

 

Photograph: Edgar Allan Poe about 1837.

"Making Peace with Paradise" by Tania Runyan

I’ve lived in Missouri for 43 years, longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. But it’s Louisiana that I still think of as home, or my home state, the one I physically left when I was 21.  

I follow the news about hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. I read stories about the crime rate in New Orleans. I pay attention when I hear about new French Quarter restaurants, or old ones closing. I drink Community Coffee (Signature Blend), whose company is headquartered in Baton Rouge. When I eat a shrimp po-boy sandwich, I always compare it to the Shrimp Po-Boy served at the Come Back Inn in Metairie, the suburb of New Orleans where I grew up. The only football team I follow is LSU.

 

Tania Runyan left California more than 20 years ago, and she’s still coming to grips with her home state. She tells her story in Making Peace with Paradise.

 

Of course, as in my own case, coming to grips with your home state means coming to grips with your childhood and your family. And that’s what underlies the story Runyan tells.

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

"The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sometimes, you’re remembered for your commercial failures rather than the books the critics celebrate.

 

In 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) published The Great Gatsby. Following the commercial and critical successes of This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), Gatsby received generally favorable reviews from the critics, but it flopped commercially. Nine years passed before he published his final novel, Tender is the Night(1934). An uncompleted novel, The Last Tycoon, was finished by a friend and published in 1941. 

 

Yet of all his novels (and a multitude of stories and articles written for magazines), it is The Great Gatsby that is the best remembered and the book that made his literary reputation. And more than one critic has named it in the running for “the great American novel.”

 

Gatsby is both a novel of its time and a novel that captured its time. Its heart is a love story, one between a young soldier from a poor farming family in Minnesota and a Louisville debutante. But the love story, mostly existing in the past, only gradually unfolds. 

 

Jay Gatsby is an extremely wealthy man living in an opulent mansion on Long Island. Next door, in a small, rented house sandwiched between estates, lives Nick Carraway, the narrator of the story, a 30-year-old trying to make his way as a salesman in the bond market. Just across the bay is the home of Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Tom has inherited his wealth from his Chicago family; Daisy is a former debutante from Louisville who was wooed and sought after by man young men.

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald about 1921

Tom, despite his wealth, is something of a brute. He has little polish and considerable vulgarity; he’s also having an affair with the wife of the owner of the local gas station. The polish and manners seem to belong to Jay Gatsby, who throws ongoing lavish parties that people seem to invite themselves to. Rumors abound about the source of Gatsby’s wealth, including ties he has to the gangster who supposedly fixed the 1919 World Series.

 

Carraway is a cousin of Daisy, and Gatsby invites him to a party. What Gatsby really wants is to meet Daisy privately, at Nick’s house. He and Daisy have a past. 

 

Fitzgerald gradually builds the tension of the story, using Carraway as both an agent of narrative development and the recorder of events. The reader senses that this will not end well; some kind of tragedy seems to be inevitably unfolding. The surprise is what and how it happens – and who ends up being the character the reader admires the most.

 

There are numerous editions of the book available. The one I read was recently published by T.S. Poetry Press. With an introduction by poet Tania Runyan, it includes the full text of the story, historical context, fashion notes, vintage illustrations, and a Gatsby poem and poetry prompt. 

 

The Great Gatsby is a novel of the Jazz Age, a story of rich people whose main occupation seems to be drinking and entertaining themselves. It’s also a story of old money and new money, the decay of values, and the superficiality of what passes as society and celebrity. 

An Ode to Poetry: "How to Write a Form Poem" by Tania Runyan

I start this review with a disclaimer. How to Write a Form Poem: A Guide to 10 Fabulous Forms by Tania Runyan includes a poem I wrote. I also once tapped some lively feet to a performance by Runyan when she played the fiddle. Neither affected my judgment about the book.  

Well, the fiddle might have.

 

If you like form poems, Runyan has some advice. And a guide. Even if you don’t like form poems, Runyan has some advice. And a guide. And for those who like form poems and those who don’t, she offers this seeming contradiction: form poems are liberating. Liberating? Who knew?

 

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

Poets and Poems: Tania Runyan and “What Will Soon Take Place”

Religious faith has inspired poets for likely as long as faith and poetry have existed. About a third of the Old Testament is written in poetic form. The Greek and Roman poets were inspired by their pantheon of gods. In Christian times, a considerable amount of poetry made its way into church liturgy and popular culture as well; the Christmas carol “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” is only one of many songs and poems that come from what are called the “O Antiphons,” songs of appeal sung at the vespers service in the last week of Advent. And faith continues to inspire contemporary poets like Scott Cairns, Luci Shaw, Wendell Berry, Dana Gioia, Mark Jarman, Julia Kasdorf, and many more.

Tania Runyan is another contemporary poet inspired by faith, but her most recent collection demonstrates just how unusual and surprising that source of inspiration can be.

The 54 poems of Runyan’s What Will Soon Take Place spring from an unexpected source – the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, or what some faith traditions call “The Apocalypse of St. John.”

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

Tania Runyan’s “How to Read a Poem”

It should be straightforward, right? Reading it is like reading any other piece of text, correct? Well, no, actually, it’s not. And actually, yes, it is.

"It" is a poem.

Poet Tania Runyan has a suggestion on how to read a poem, or rather, she has six suggestions, all taken from the poem “Introduction to Poetry” by Billy Collins, published in his 1988 collection The Apple That Astonished Paris (it's been republished a couple of times since then). Of course, in the style of poets generally, Runyan has far more in How to Read a Poem than approaches to reading poetry.

But first, her suggestions:

·       Consider the poem’s imagery – “hold it up to the light.”

·       Listen to the sound of the poem.

·       Reflect on all of the pieces that comprise the poem (or, as Collins writes, drop and mosue in and watch him nibble).

·       Look for what creates the Aha!” or “Gotcha!” moment.

·       Study the poem itself, and don’t worry about who the author is or what he or she is trying to do or convey.

·       Let the poem be instead of trying to wring everything possible out of it.

Runyan pulls these suggestions straight from the poem by Collins. What she does with them is one of the best parts of the book. She expands each of the lines of the poem, enlarging one’s understanding, and gives her own example of the suggestion at work. And then she provides several poems in each section for the reader to do the same.

In the process, she provides a wonderful if understated, introduction to reading poetry, and she introduces the reader to poets well known and not-so-well known. Poets whose poems are represented include Tennyson, George Eliot, Emily Bronte, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, Marianne Moore, Robert Browning, Thoreau, Anne Doe Overstreet, Edward Scott Anderson, Carl Sandburg, John Keats, Maureen Doallas, Sara Teasdale, and many more.

“Think of it (How to Read a Poem) as less than an instructional book,” Runyan writes, “and more as an invitation. For the reader new to poetry, this guide will open your senses to the combined craft and magic known as poems. For the well versed, if you will, this book might make you fall in love again.”

Well versed, indeed. The pun suggests another quality of the book, and that is playfulness. How to Read a Poem is above all playful, written by a poet in finds joy in her own work, and joy in poetry generally, and knows how to laugh.

Interested in poetry? Read it. New to poetry? Read it. Well versed? Read it. It’s a wonderful guide by a poet who clearly is in love with her craft and magic.

Related: My review of Tania Runyan's A Thousand Vessels: Poems at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Saturday Good Reads – TweetSpeak Poetry

Little did I know that when I improvised a short poem (contained within one tweet on Twitter) back in 2009 that it would me to a regular Twitter poetry jam; editing the tweets from the jams into poems; a blog created to contain the poems; other stuff (reviews and features) being added to the blog; and then a business enterprise that goes by the name of TweetSpeak Poetry.

Currently, I’m a weekly columnist for TweetSpeak (Tuesdays) and one of the things – just one – we’re up to is beginning to get our heads around the idea of poetry and business. I do reviews of poetry books, reflections, recollections, whatever sounds interesting.

I love being a columnist.

I work with a terrific team, led by chief instigator, central plotter, primary conspirator, writer, editor, publisher, poet, mother, wife, blogger, tea expert, lighthouse climber and who-knows-what-else Laura Barkat. Laura, or L.L., is the Grand Poobah of TweetSpeak (that sounds like a title from a Gilbert & Sullivan musical opera). She has three blogs: Seedlings in Stone, Love Notes to Yahweh, and Green Inventions Central.

She’s also written a memoir, Stone Crossings; a book of spiritual exercises, God in the Yard; a book of poems, Inside/Out; and a novella, The Novelist.

The editor for TweetSpeak is Lyla Lindquist, who is not only editor but also chief publicist, social media captain, writer, promoter, columnist, book club discussion leader and skunk works leader. Lyla is here, there and everywhere, and all at once. What she’s capable of doing leaves me in awe. She blogs at A Different Story, and also has a collection of reports and meditations about weekly visits to a Benedictine monastery for six months, called Making Headroom.

Then there’s Claire Burge. Claire is young (at my age, virtually everyone I know is young) but knows everything and how to do everything. She knew about Pinterest before Pinterest knew about Pinterest. She takes beautiful photographs (I used one for the cover of my novel Dancing Priest, and will be using another for an upcoming novella), travels to exotic places, knows everything about social media, and lets nothing intimidate her. She blogs at Claire Burge.

Monica Sharman has an official title of Editorial Intern, but she’s all over poetry, all over the business of poetry, all over our poetry jams on Twitter. Monica blogs at Know-Love-Obey God about faith, family, poetry and writing. She’s also a contributing writer to online publications like Bibledude.

Tania Runyan is a columnist for TweetSpeak, and is also a published poet, with three books of poetry: A Thousand Vessels, Simple Weight, and Delicious Air. Her poems have been published in numerous literary journals and anthologies, and she received an NEA Literature Fellowship in 2011. Tania is a tutor, writer, gardener and fiddle and mando player. Her web site: Tania Runyan.

Charity Singleton, another contributing writer, is a poet, writer, blogger, and works in online media for her Midwestern employer. She blogs at Wide Open Spaces, and I have to say it’s one of my favorite blogs to read.

And then there’s my friend Seth Haines. Seth is an attorney (but a nice guy in spite of that); he and his wife Amber are raising four boys in Arkansas. Seth is a writer, poet, and sometime theologian. He writes TweetSpeak’s weekly poetry prompt on Mondays. Seth blogs at Seth Haines.

TweetSpeak Poetry is a fine group of people – and a fine group of writers. Despite its origins as a place to deposit poems from poetry jams, it has become a presence in the field of poetry, and has plans to become even more.

Tania Runyan's "A Thousand Vessels"

In A Thousand Vessels: Poems, poet Tanya Runyon writes poetry about Biblical women and then pairs the poems with more contemporary subjects and stories.

Poems about Dinah (the sister of the 12 sons of Jacob) and her rape are paired with a poem about child sex offenders. Poems about the woman at the well in the gospel of St. John are paired with a poem about the sins committed by a child against another child. Poems about Esther are grouped with a poem about walking on a beach.

The result is a wonderful volume, full of truth, hope and faith.

To read my full review, please visit TweetSpeak Poetry.