Poets and Poems: Jake Adam York and “Abide”

Poet and author Jake Adam York had published three collections of poetry when he died of a stroke in 2012 at age 40. He had a profound interest in social history, and his poetry was focused on the history of the civil rights movement. Specifically, he was writing to remember, and to memorialize, the 126 people who died between 1954 and 1968 in the struggle for equal rights for African-Americans.

His last volume of poems, Abide, was published posthumously in 2014. It’s one of the five finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry.

I began reading Abide without looking at the poet’s biography, previous works, or articles about him (this is how I do most reviews –starting simply with the work at hand and considering it on its own merits).

I had a number of surprises.

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

On Being a Writer: Rest

I’ve invented a word: “misculturalized.” It describes being born, raised and living in one culture when you’re probably better adapted to another culture. And the culture I should have been raised in? The one that celebrates naps. Spain. Mexico. Argentina.

How could I have been born in United States, the country that hates – hates – naps? Think of everything we miss when we succumb to temptation and take a nap: getting work done; staying busy, looking like we’re staying busy; and rest.

Rest.

While I love naps, I have a hard time with the word rest. And rest from writing? Can’t happen. It’s too much of who I am. At least that’s the excuse I make. To myself.

And yet.

We’ve several beach vacations – Gulf Shores and nearby Orange Beach. Some with kids, and once empty nest. On the empty nest beach vacation, I’d wake early each morning, walk down to the beach, rent my umbrella and chair, and sit, reading. To be honest, it was a project – the second time I had read the unabridged version of Don Quixote. And I was doing it because my high school English teacher who taught our class the novel said you should read it three times in your life – when you’re young, when you’re middle-aged, and when you’re old.

Sitting there on the beach each morning, listening to the sounds of the waves and birds, feeling the heart, smelling the salt of the gulf, I read the Cervantes classic. And it seemed like a very different book than the one I read when I was 17.

Even though I was technically doing something, it was still rest. Sitting for long stretches of time and reading, finding myself transported to Spain in the late 1500s, and tilting at windmills, was restful.

It was the kind of experience Ann Kroeker describes in On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts (co-authored with Charity Craig). She finally convinces herself to go with her kids to a family camp in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and she finds herself reading and resting.

“At camp,” she writes, “I sat a lot, often with a book but just as often with nothing. I sat at a picnic table. I sat in an Adirondack chair. I sat on a beach towel on the sand, on a couch in the lodge, and in a folding chair by the calm, cold water of Lake Huron.” She did go jogging one morning.

What she was doing was engaging in mental rest. We have to take time to let our minds rest and regenerate.

Our minds, like our bodies, need a Sabbath.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been discussing chapters of On Being a Writer by Kroeker and Craig. This chapter is entitled “Rest.” There’s one chapter left, and I’ll discuss it next week.

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

He writes in the dust

So what does he write

in the dust, what words

as he listens to the question,

the trap

what does he write

in this story, itself written

in the dust

she was caught, they say

in the act, they say,

of adultery, they say

she should die, they say

stoning, they say

He writes in the dust

The executioner, he says

must be sinless, he says

the one who stones, he says

must be blameless, he says

only the sinless, he says

can execute judgment, he says

He writes in the dust

The first stone drops, thud

then the second drops, thud

the third, thud

thud thud thud thud

He writes in the dust

The stones drop, again

as he writes, again

in the dust

thud thud thud thus

Go, he says

sin no more, he says

only the sinless, the blameless

can execute, he says

only the sinless, the blameless

can forgive

Saturday Good Reads

It’s been a while since I posted a Saturday Good Reads, and what better day to that than Valentine’s Day? These are some of the good things I ran across during the past week – David Rupert asking whether or not he needed a bucket list; a video tribute to London courtesy of Wordsworth; a fun poem about candy by Maureen Doallas; and another London video, this one on how to clean up the financial district.

St. Valentine, by the way, was an early Christian named Valentinus. Not much is known about him, but he was said to have been martyred and buried in the north of Rome near the Milvian Bridge (the site of the later battle where Constantine triumphed, a turning point in the history of the church). Part of the legend about him is that he was imprisoned for performing weddings for soldiers (who were forbidden to marry) and for ministering to the persecuted Christians. Last year, Huffington Post had a “real story” of who he actually was.

Legend or not, St. Valentine is anchored in the early history of the Christian faith. The painting above is “The Morning of St. Valentine” by John Calcott Horsley, painted in 1865. It is part of the collection of the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.

Faith

This Little Light of Mine – Eric Peters at The Rabbit Room.

Who needs a bucket list? – David Rupert at Red-Letter Believers.

Giving Authentic Faith a Welcome Invitation – Kevin Adams at Wake Up My Faith.

My Response to President Obama’s Address at the National Prayer Breakfast – Ravi Zacharias.

Poetry

10 Ways to Read a Poem – Mary H. Sayler at The Poetry Editor.

Hershey’s Got No Baby Ruth – poem by Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper.

Two Knights – Brendan MacOdrum at Oran’s Well.

You and I are so alike – John Blase.

Juliet’s Aubade – Sara Barkat via Everyday Poems.

A Poetic Tribute to London, City in Motion – Anglotopia (inspired by William Wordsworth’s “Composed upon Westminster Bridge”) (Hat tip to my wife for finding the link)

Writing

The sanctity of writing – Billy Coffey at What I Learned Today.

The Writing Life – Episode 8: Keep Calm and Carry On – Ann Kroeker.

How do you research? Swim – Megan Willome.

Photography

Light and Leaves Abstract – Tim Good.

Fun Stuff

Baths4Banks – London figures out how to clean up its financial district (and mind the gap!)

Doug Spurling’s “The Voice”

As I read Doug Spurling’s The Voice, a phrase Kept going through my mind – “unto the third and fourth generation.” It’s from the Book of Exodus in the Bible – “You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.”

The Voice isn’t about sins being passed down through generations, but it about patterns of behavior recurring in generations. But fundamentally, it’s a love story, a story of love and faith stretching across generations and decades. Four generations, in fact.

It begins with RJ, who owns a fishing shop at a marina in the Florida Keys. His 16-year-old son Mac is working there, doing so well that he’s put in charge of maintenance at the dock and marina. He meets Maggie, or perhaps Maggie meets him. Mac joins the Navy, he and Maggie marry, and have one son, Richie. They want more but are unable to have more children. About the time Richie turns 16, he meets a girl, but Mac and Maggie know a mistake is being made. They marry anyway and Richie goes off to the Navy.

Then come the losses. Spurling piles several on at once – death, desertion, depression. Mac faces personal devastation. Richie’s wife moves away.

Doug Spurling

Eventually, we learn there’s a Rickey. And it is around Rickey that the story begins to turn.

The Voice is full of the stuff of life – love, faith, tragedy, injury. It’s about the sea, and sailing, and why we do the things we do when we’re dealing with pain and suffering. It’s about hope, and redemption. It’s even about how a bar can serve as a missionary outpost.

Individual patterns and character traits repeat themselves – falling in love at a young age; the connection to the sea and the Navy; and even a crooked smile. Extending through the years and generations is something else, too – faith.

The Voice is a story written for the heart, from the heart. Well done, Doug Spurling.

Photograph by Weyenbergh Jacky via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Fighting Breast Cancer – With Joy?

Minutes before she’s to give a presentation at the Mount Hermon Conference Center, Margaret Feinberg answers a phone call from a number she doesn’t recognize. It’s her doctor.

He tells her that both masses in her breast are positive. Carcinoma. Both of them. She needs to schedule surgery.

Her husband is there, and she goes to him. He knows without her saying a word. They’ve been waiting on this call. He holds her, and she asks one question.

“What if we fight back with joy?”

Joy?

Yes, joy.

She goes on to make her presentation, or as she writes in Fight Back With Joy: Celebrate More. Regret Less. Stare Down Your Greatest Fears, “I delivered my talk that morning. Barely.”

Feinberg is clear. This isn’t a joyful experience. The emotional fears and scars start immediately. The fear is there. “I was now a member of the guild no one wants to join. I discovered that once you’re in, everyone lends a hand. “Our shared experiences, desire to fight back, and will to survive bind us together.”

She points the fight, this fight in life, beyond her immediate breast cancer. All of us share a fight, because all of us are human, broken, fearful, scarred, battling our own fights that are awful if not as scary as what a person with cancer faces.

This is all part of life. And we can surrender, or we can fight. With joy.

“From the day of the diagnosis,” she says, “I felt compelled to choose a different type of weapon: joy…Joy would not deny the hardship, but would choose to acknowledge and face it no matter what the outcome.”

This isn’t about a feeling. Feinberg defines joy much more broadly than that, to encompass all of the positive, beneficial, good things in our lives. It is a practice, and I suspect Feinberg didn’t just practice it daily but also hourly and, often, minute by minute.

The darkness – defined by cancer, other diseases, addictions, depression, financial setbacks, job losses – that darkness will not win.

What happens is that the outcome becomes less important than the path to the outcome.

Life is hard, and often “always hard” rather than “often hard.” But that hardness is also not the outcome or the point.

“Joy is your heritage, purpose and destiny,” she writes.

And the focus becomes how to practice joy daily, no matter what the circumstances.

It’s difficult to read this chapter of Fight Back With Joy without tears. But tears, too, are part of the joy.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’re reading Margaret Feingberg’s Fight Back with Joy. To see other posts on this chapter, “A Choice That Changed Everything,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

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

Poets and Poems: Dave Malone and “O”

My first experience with the Ozark Mountains was virtual – a novel called The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks by the late Donald Harington. It was published in 1975; I read it about 1980 and thought it hilarious. A few years later, we spent a long weekend in Branson, before it was discovered by all the big name entertainers and when Silver Dollar City at the duck boats were the bog attractions.

It was then that I learned about The Shepherd of the Hills and the Bald Knobbers, a group of vigilantes who were still fighting the Civil War for the North in the 1880s, their enemy being the Anti-Bald Knobbers, who sided with the south. I also discovered that St. Louis is considered to be in the foothills of the Ozarks, surprising, since the Ozarks about 100 miles away. And we’ve spent several long weekends at Lake of the Ozarks, created way-back-when by a dam and today a heavy tourist draw Missouri.

So my knowledge of the Ozarks was essentially limited to what any observant tourist might know. And I didn’t consider the movie Winter’s Bone to present an accurate portrayal of life in the Ozarks, either.

I’ve had a different picture of life in the Ozarks, and it’s thanks to Dave Malone’s poetry: View from the North Ten; Under the Sycamore; Seasons of Love; and Poems to Love, and the Body. His latest collection, O: Love Poems from the Ozarks, includes some of the most vivid love poetry I think I’ve read.

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

Photograph by Candy Simonson via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.