"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" - An Old Poem, a New Artwork

The elegy is a poetry form with roots in Classical Greece and Rome. It is a poem of loss and mourning, but it often ends with some sense of hope. Traditionally, it has three sections – lament, tribute, and consolation. Some of the best elegies have a musical sense about them; the elegies of the ancient Greeks were usually accompanied by the playing of lutes. 

The best-known elegy in contemporary times is one written some 280 years ago. It’s the best known because so many of us studied it in high school, and, for a long time, it was also a popular poem for students to memorize. Thomas Graypublished “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” about 1742 after a friend “leaked” a copy to a few others. It was immediately popular, even among Gray critics like Samuel Johnson. The surprise, perhaps, is that it remained popular for such a long period of time. 

 

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

On Being a Writer

I’ve been reading On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts by Charity Craig and Ann Kroeker. I like this book for its simplicity and straightforwardness. I like the wisdom Ann and Charity bring to the subject of writing – wisdom born of experience. And I like how each chapter is organized: Stories about writing, and exploration (live, respond, writing prompt, a bonus activity, and discussion questions). And you can ask yourself the discussion questions, or you can ask them in a group.

Here’s one of the discussion questions from chapter 1, “Identify:”

When did you first call yourself a writer?

I thought I knew. Turns out I didn’t.

It might have been when I was 10, when my father brought home from his printing business a bound volume of blank pages. It had a pale green paper cover. Today we would call it a journal. I even know what I wrote in it – a mystery story for kids, about kids, involving secret passages and tunnels (and likely borrowed wholesale from The Hardy Boys).

But then I realized something. What prompted my father to make that book? It didn’t just materialize in his head as an idea. Something told him this would be something I would enjoy. So, clearly, there was some pre-existing event or condition before that bound volume was placed in my hands.

It was likely linked to my family reputation as “the reader.” I was an early reader. When I was six, I pedaled my bike to the local dime store and bought Trixie Belden and the Secret of the Mansion for 59 cents. That was the first book I bought on my own.

Sometime between the ages of six and ten, something happened that suggested to my parents that I might be writer.

However, my father wanted me to be a doctor. That had been his dream, which he was forced to abandon when he graduated from high school in 1933, the pit of the Great Depression. College had been out. Instead, he went to work as a roughneck in the East Texas oil fields.

Charity Craig

I tried pre-med for one year at college. Too much chemistry for someone who was more interested in English literature. I even considered (for a very short time) the ministry. And it was my father who advised against a business degree and instead still do something that would help me earn a living – journalism. (My father had worked for a time in the circulation department of the Shreveport Journal, and after serving in World War II for a trade publisher in New Orleans, which is where he met my mother.)

Was there a moment when I first thought of myself as a writer? Probably, but it’s buried in the mists and fog.

Ann Kroeker

But I can pinpoint the moment when I first said (or admitted) I was a poet. We were visiting New Orleans in 2010, and I was paying for several poetry books I was purchasing at the Faulkner House Bookstore in Pirate’s Alley. The owner looked over the books, and looked at me and said, “Are you a poet?” I funbled with an answer, something like “I write it a bit.” So he repeated his question. “Are you a poet?”

And I said yes.

So if you’d like to know what On Being a Writer can do, just look over what I just wrote. I moved from a description of the book to a question to the search for an answer that took me back to the 1930s and 1940s – before I was born – and then forward. Ann and Charity’s book is simple, but deceptively so. It will make you think, and think hard.

Yes, I am a poet. And yes, I am a writer.

Photograph: Faulkner House Bookstore in New Orleans. The man on the left was the one who asked me, "Are you a poet?"

Poetry at Work

It started about a year ago. I was talking with (emailing, actually) L.L. Barkat, editor of Tweetspeak Poetry, about the column I write for the online publication, and she said, “I think we need a book.”

Oh, my goodness.

The contract was signed, mailed and received. Then came the work.

I know where I was when I wrote the first draft of the introduction – on a plane to San Antonio, for a kind of communications retreat at Laity Lodge. I know where I was when I wrote the rest of it – sitting right here at my computer. And I know where I was when my editor, Ann Kroeker, shouted with glee when I sent the text that I had found and verified the final footnote – I was sitting in the stacks on a footstool in the Webster Groves Public Library, about 10 minutes from my home in neighboring Kirkwood (my fourth library visit of the day trying to find the book).

So what is this book?

Poetry at Work.

What is it about?

Poetry. And work. And how I learned that poetry is inherently a part of work.

Even in PowerPoint presentations. And job interviews. And layoffs. And crises.

What I didn’t know was how people might react. Once the manuscript was edited, off it went for possible recommendations. That was a scary moment.

Poet David Malone read it and said some really cool things. David Murray, editor of Vital Speeches of the Day, a friend from almost 25 years, said some unbelievable things. Scott Edward Anderson wrote an incredible foreword (Scott blogs at The Green Skeptic).

This was different from writing my two novels. The novels never actually seemed like work, although they represent years of effort.

Poetry at Work was work. Rather intense at times. Really intense.

The result – well, you’ll have to read it (I hope).

It comes together as a whole piece – a whole piece of a life.

Related:

The Poetry at Work page at Tweetspeak Poetry

I opened a book

I opened a book, selecting

a place at random, and began

to read from mid-sentence,

to see that it is only a fragment

of time, text without context.

I look to the sky.

I look to the sky to explain

but it remains a bright blue,

silent except for a few clouds.

Even the wind has stopped,

hiding in the mountains,

hovering above the sea.

This poem is submitted to Open Link Night at dVersePoets. To see other poems, please visit the site. The links will be live at 2 p.m. Central today.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Converging Paths

The last several months have been a study in contrasts. I’ve had a disc/back problem that began in June and reached its worst point in August, but is now slowly (very slowly) improving. I told my wife a couple of nights ago that it has sometimes felt that a third person has joined the family: Mr. Pain. She agreed.

I’ve been dealing with the problem on a number of levels – physical therapy, learning to deal with the stress at work (there’s no question that the problem is stress-related), curtailing physical activity (no biking for the last five months), taking pain meds when needed – a whole array of things. Improvement is happening but usually measured in tiny steps.

In some strange way, this back pain problem is connected to this book of mine that is actually going to see the light of day.

The writing of the novel began with hearing a song by the Greek tenor Mario Frangoulis in 2002, while I was flying to San Francisco for a conference. The song was “Luna Rossa,” or “Red Moon,” and sung in Italian. I didn’t understand 99 percent of the words. But the music, for whatever reason, evoked an image in my mind of a priest dancing on a beach.

The image wouldn’t let go. For three years, I developed a story in my head, based on that one image. The beach disappeared at some point; the priest moved to Scotland and became a student studying to be an Anglican priest, who falls in love with the wrong person. Things developed from there. I wrote the entire novel, or most of it, in my head before the first word ever hit the computer screen. I also didn’t say a word about this to anyone, including family.

In 2005, for reasons unknown, I started typing the story. Something odd happened. After I typed a particular scene on the computer, it stopped running through my head. It was if I was physically transferring the thoughts in my head to the screen in front of me. Something else happened: it flowed like a tidal wave. I had more words than could fit in one novel. By the time the flow subsided, I had enough words for two novels.

I spent the next five years typing and rewriting and editing and typing. The story grew chronologically. It grew from a romance to something else again. After a while, I understood what I was doing – telling the life story of this student, a young man who has been called to ministry but finds himself living a very different life than what he thought had planned.

I did shop the story to a few agents. All returned the standard refusal. An editor actually read a piece of the manuscript at a writer’s conference, and when I met her to discuss it, the first question she asked was “What happened to the couple?” I saw that as a good sign.

I kept editing and rewriting and cutting. By this time, my wife knew what was going on. She read a version of the manuscript and cried at the right places. She suggested I try self-publishing, but I didn’t think I was ready to do that.

Last year, I mentioned this “work in progress” to a friend, who asked to read the manuscript. I reluctantly agreed; other than my wife, who is a good editor but loves me too much to be a totally objective reader, no one had read it. But I gave him the manuscript to read.

His response was brief, and I didn’t at first know what to make of it: “It made me cry.”

A few months later, he came back to me. “I want to publish your book.” He had already published two books of his own, and was working on a third by another person. I wanted to think about it. He kept after me. And one day, when he said, “Are you going to let me publish your book,” I surprised him and myself when I said “Let’s do it.”

I’m now on the throes of the realities of book publishing. It is work. It is not hard work, but it is a lot of work. And a lot of nervous waiting, while an experienced editor reads it, edits it and assess it. And then the publisher goes through it with a fine tooth comb, and asks for changes. And some rewriting. Proofing. Book cover design. Developing a marketing plan. Writing a number of related documents. The publisher (and book designer) asked for a summary that could go on the back cover. You would think I would know the story well enough by now to write a simple summary. But try taking 92,000 words and editing them into 50. More work. But good work.

And I’ve been simultaneously dealing with the back pain issue. I believe the two events are related – the pain and the book. Something is being cleaned up and cleaned out, while something new is being created. A new path is opening up as I clear out all the choking, overgrown stuff form the old path.

The ebook version of the novel will appear in December; the paperback version in January. We’re already talking about the sequel, which is written but not edited. I already know it will be a lot of work. But the work will be good.

Over at Faith Barista, Bonnie Gray has asked the question, “What is the current path God has you on?” I don’t know if I have a complete answer to that question, but the answer is becoming clearer.

To see more posts prompted by Bonnie’s question, please visit Faith Barista.

Photograph: Nature Trail by Vince Mig via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.