Bible study, Christianity, critique group, family, Harry Potter, travel

A Mishmash While Away From Home

Leave a comment
Elise, working on her “word” for earning money from Grandpa, while Nitwit surveys the scene from above, watching out for Useless and Nuisance.

We are back in West Texas for a visit with our daughter’s family. I know, we were just here a month ago, but they had need for a babysitter last Friday night, and we said we’d come do it. We drove here last Thursday, and will likely leave for home tomorrow, though possibly not till Wednesday.

It’s been an easy gig. The four kids were reasonably compliant with doing their chores on Saturday. Even little Elijah, 5 years old, was given two chores. He had his sister write out a to-do list for him, as she was doing for herself. Grandparents can usually ride herd on the kids in a way the parents can’t. At least, they seem to do somewhat better with us in some ways, being a little quicker to jump-to-it when we ask them to do something.

Sunday was church. I went early with the three oldest kids, Lynda and Sara and Elijah coming later. Richard, as pastor, was already there. I attended men’s class for Sunday school, then, during church, I found an unused room, connected by Zoom, and taught our class at our home church remotely. The attendance was good, and the class went well. Of course, that mean I didn’t sit through a church service yesterday. Hopefully I can do so today on the replays.

Elijah had fun cleaning his play area in the sunroom, then checking it off as a job done.

It was difficult to work on writing during this time, so I’ve done a lot of reading. As much as possible, to be an example for the grandkids, I’ve been reading in a print book. So far, no real indication that it’s doing much good. Except maybe for Elise, who is reading Harry Potter: The Order of the Phoenix in a print book—but she has been doing that for a while. I was able to review two chapters for critique group, which meets on Thursday. I guess on Friday I managed to spend on hour on the Bible study I’m writing. I don’t feel like I got very far with it.

We brought a surplus bookcase from our house to help organize theirs. Elijah’s other chore was to put books and toys on it, which he did with much help from Elise and guidance from Grandpa.

We have also had to care for Useless, Nitwit, and Nuisance, the three pets. Except, it’s now four pets. One grandchild was unhappy that he didn’t really have a pet, so they arranged for a rescue kitten to come join the menagerie. Except, the rescue kitten was in Oklahoma City. So we stopped there on the way here, met up with the rescue woman, and brought the new kitten here. The grandson named her Sapphire. While she is transitioning into the household with three pets there already (actually, more than that if you include the bearded dragon and the goldfish), she is needing a lot of attention. While I was wondering what nickname I could give the new kitten, Elise said it ought to be a name about a girl who needs a lot of attention. Obviously, I immediately named her Diva. Hopefully, with this pet the zoo is complete.

Diva is isolated from the two older cats, she being a female and them being not-yet-neutered males (kittens who are almost cats). I didn’t spend a lot of time with her—if you don’t count the 6 hours in the car between OKC and here.

My plan is to leave the zoo tomorrow. We’ll take their recyclables and drop them in OKC, then get home by a good time, though too late to join an on-line writing group.

One bit of writing I did accomplish (besides this blog post). While sitting on the front porch yesterday, reading for 30 minutes before the onslaught of 20 people from their small group at church for a Super Bowl party, before reading I set my mind to writing a short poem. Nothing major, just a cinqain (a five-line poem). I don’t know if it’s any good, but it’s sitting there on my phone, waiting for me to decide what to do with it.

So, I will see you all on Friday, back home, probably in The Dungeon, in old routines.

 

book reviews, History

Book Review: “Winthrop’s Boston”

Leave a comment
The value of this book for you depends entirely on what you are hoping to learn. For me it was meh.

Around five years ago, or maybe a little longer, I bought a used paperback copy of Winthrop’s Boston by Darrett B. Rutman (1965; my pb copy 1972, I think). I had never heard of the book, but I bought it for the purposes of reading history (which I love), understanding the world many of Lynda’s ancestors moved into when they arrived in Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s, and perhaps providing information for one of the Documenting America books. A couple of months ago, the book finally came to the top of my reading pile, and I read it.

I must say it wasn’t quite what I had in mind when I bought it. It was good, but the writer had an agenda. He set out to prove that Boston never quite became Winthrop’s “city on a hill”, and that the Puritan influence in Boston wasn’t as great as most historians lead you to believe.

Maybe that’s true, maybe it isn’t. Rutman went to great lengths, in some cases to the point of being tedious, to prove his point. I struggled not to skip at times, and at times I did skip—not a lot, but especially toward the end I came to places where I saw no value to some part, and I skipped it. Shame on me. I guess I also wasn’t thinking when I bought the book. I was thinking it would be about all of Massachusetts Bay Colony. It really was just about Boston. The towns adjacent to Boston come up in the book a little, but not much.

The book has little genealogical information. Yes, a few family heads are mentioned.

The book is a dry history book. Worth the read if you are into studying the Puritans, but otherwise not. There would be better history books of Boston. But, if you have ancestors in Boston between 1629 and 1647 or so, and want to know more about what the city was like at that time, it is worth the read. The value of the book to you will depend on what you are looking for.  For me, it was just 2-stars.

And, it is not a keeper. Into the sale/donate pile it goes.

C.S. Lewis, Christianity, critique group, miscellaneous

A Restful (?) Weekend

Leave a comment

When last I posted, we were just past a delightful snow day on Friday. The snow was on Wednesday and Thursday. The final total at our house I figure was about 6-7 inches. Others in the area had up to 9 inches. I didn’t do extensive measurements.

Of course, after the snow is snow shoveling—if you want to go anywhere on the weekend. We had sunny days on Friday and Saturday. Enough sun to melt some snow but temperatures too cold to see that much snow disappear. So Saturday just before noon saw me outside, shoveling. There were maybe 5 inches on the drive by this time. I knew if I could just get it down to mostly bare pavement, radiant energy would dry it. Sure enough, that’s what happened. By the time sundown came I had the driveway shoveled, the van up at the top of the drive, and dry pavement—except for the refreezing that would happen to three or four little streams of snow-melt running down my nice, dry drive.

Saturday and Sunday were productive. Yes, even Sunday. It’s supposed to be a day of rest, right? And it was, sort of. On Saturday I made a list of things I thought I needed to do. Some were normal Saturday activities, such as my stock trading accounting, updating the checkbook and family budget. I didn’t mess with filing, but will have to do that shortly. Kitchen cleaning was one thing. Filling bird feeders was another. Slowly, the tasks got done, mostly on Saturday.

Sunday was typical. Lynda was well enough to go to church with me. We had missionaries in the service. I taught Life Group. We got Arby’s takeout for lunch. Hope and eat, then for me it was to the sunroom with my half-way read volume of Dylan Thomas’s Collected Letters. I’m trying to read ten pages a day, and doing fairly well with it. I tried to nap out there, but didn’t get much sleep time.

So I went to The Dungeon, where I worked on critiquing works for my critique group, the Scribblers & Scribes of Bella Vista. I did five pages in one and ten in another (neither of which was the complete submitted item) and shot them back by e-mail. It was good to get them out. I also sent out the next chapter in There’s No Such Thing As Time Travel.

My other main task was to complete the edits to the church Centennial book. I had a long Zoom conference with the two proofreaders, whose comments were almost entirely edits. They only found six or eight typos, and half of those I had caught in my own proofread. I thought that was pretty good. But they had lots of suggested changes. We went through them, and I’m afraid I wasn’t real accepting of a lot of the changes this late in the game. I needed edits in October.

However, I decided to go through them all, slowly, on Saturday and Sunday, considering each suggestion, and making some more changes. Last night, around 8 p.m. or so, I finished. All suggested edits considered and dealt with, all changes made to my master document, and the master document e-mailed to the two proofreaders. I have one more photo to put in, and I will do that today. No, maybe two photos.

To end the day yesterday, I read about 20 pages aloud to the wife in the book we’re reading, about a Christian convert from Timor. Then I had an hour or so of reading in Dylan Thomas and C.S. Lewis, both in their collected letters. Now, time to see what goes on today’s to-do list—after this blog post, of course.

Christianity, creativity, miscellaneous, Writing

Snow Day

Leave a comment
Looking north, not on our street but the one our circle ties in to. Plowed, but having had almost no traffic on it. The road veers to the left in the distance while our road goes right, both steeply downhill.

Yesterday was a snow day. This large winter storm, called “Landon” by the Weather Channel, was strung-out across more than half the USA. The forecasters missed the start of the storm, but otherwise got it mostly right.  They even predicted that we would get a last band of snow last night, and it happened. It looks like another inch or two on top of the 6 we already had.

So, when you are retired and have hit your 70th birthday, what do you do on a snow day? For me, I can’t resist going out in it. Never mind that the temperature was 18 and a north wind was blowing the fine snow at a 45-degree angle. I bundled up and hiked up the road. Not far, just up to the stop sign and back.

As I left the house, I measured 5″ in two places on our property, and a 13″ drift near the garage. Our street wasn’t plowed. Tire tracks came to our mailbox and stopped. The mailman had obviously driven that far and, not having any mail down the road (one of two houses there is current vacant), just backed up the hill. He/she did a good job of staying within the downhill tracks as they backed uphill.

At the house up the road, my neighbor was out. Having just shoveled his driveway, he was standing there, in just a light jacket. We talked for a while, me at the top of the driveway and him just inside the open garage door. Then I continued my walk. I was surprised to find the next road plowed. It isn’t a main road, though it does connect to main roads at both ends. About an inch of snow had fallen since it was plowed, and only one set of tire tracks showed on the freshly fallen.

At the next road, it was the same. Plowed, more snow falling, and only a few tire tracks. No one was out, either on foot or in vehicles. My walk had been pleasant thus far. But when I turned to head home, the wind was in my face, driving the fine snow. It was biting, not all that pleasant. But, I had only gone .17 miles, so it was a short walk past five houses and lot and lots of woods on both sides. I reached home having not fallen and invigorated.

I then returned to my work for the day, a fresh mug of coffee in hand. I think that was my fourth. My work was reviewing edits to the church Centennial book suggested by the two proofreaders and uploaded to the document in Google Drive. They did more than just proofread it, however. They had a lot of suggestions for changes. We have a Zoom conference scheduled for this afternoon to discuss it, and I figured I should go through the comments before hand. So, in The Dungeon, Google Drive on one screen and the Word doc on the other, I went to work. By the time 3 p.m. came around, my brain was fried, despite having taken those breaks for the walk and for lunch.

On a snow day such as this, I would have then gone to the sunroom with my coffee and read and taken a nap. But yesterday, instead, I did that in my reading chair in the living room. I tackled my e-mail inbox, going through e-mails over 10 years old and deciding what to do with them. I made good progress and can see light at the end of that tunnel. Then I’ll get to tackle the sent box. Through the evening I went through another twenty pages of comments in the Centennial book.

Now it’s almost 8:30 a.m. on Friday. The sun is shining through The Dungeon windows. I have ten to fifteen pages of comments to go through. I have other writing to do, then the conference at 1:00 p.m. After that, hopefully, I’ll find myself in the sunroom, alternately reading and napping. It should be a pleasurable after-the-snow day.

Christianity, Church History Novels, goals, The Forest Throne

January Progress, February Goals

Leave a comment
My cover designer, Sophie Braun, made the revised covers for the series. I managed to upload them this month.

I didn’t exactly set January writing goals. On Jan 3, I posted some annual goals, with some mention of schedule, but I didn’t say “In January, I want to accomplish….” So, I have no monthly goals to report on. I think this was due to being uncertain of what I would be able to accomplish. So let me say what I managed to do in January, then set some goals for February.

  • I finished The Forest Throne. I thought this would happen in January. It was in the first ten days that I wrote the scene that connected the book to the actual last scene (which I wrote months ago). It has now been read by three other people besides me, and two beta readers have it. I’ve been in touch with a cover designer and she is working up some options. I have also made the decision to title the series The Forest Throne, and title this first book in the series There’s No Such Thing As Time Travel.
  • I also finished the church Centennial book. I wrote the last words in this in December, and in January I made a complete pass through the book as proofreader/editor. Those edits are typed. The cover designer is onboard and waiting on me to give the final size. Two proofreaders have been going through it in January, and informed me last week they are ready to meet. That is scheduled for Friday.
  • Having two long-term projects come to completion at the same time is unusual. I said in my earlier post that a Bible study would be next. I spent a week looking at where I stood in preparation work on several Bible studies, and made my choice. January 15th or so saw me beginning work on a Bible study on The Last Supper. This is the study I taught during Lent 2021. I have lots of notes on it, some of them typed as if they were going to be a book someday.
  • As you will see from looking back on the blog, I managed to blog twice a week, as per my general goal.
  • Change out the covers on the Church History Novel series with new covers giving the series theme. I received this in early January, and began making the switch outs. As I’m actually writing this a few days before the 31st, it’s possible I will finish this task in the month. If so, I’ll edit this accordingly. Edit: Yes, I managed to get this done on Friday-Saturday. The last of the four was approved by Amazon on Sunday.
It has taken over a year of work to get to this point, but finally we are within a couple of weeks of going to print.

What about for February?

  • Make any edits to the church Centennial book and deliver it to the printer. I guess that means we will have to make a decision on the printer, but that decision is actually almost made. This goal depends a bit on the cover designer, but it’s a fairly simple cover so I don’t see this as a problem.
  • Related to that, though not necessarily writing, finish pulling my research notes together into a format and organization that will make the job of a future researcher easier. I assume someone, in 25 or 50 years, will do something similar to me at a future milestone anniversary. I want to leave my notes in a condition that will facilitate their work. This is likely to take several days or even a week of concentrated work. This task includes writing a short document (short as in 10-15 pages) “Notes for a Future Researcher”. That document, however, is most likely a task for a future month, say March, April, or May.
  • Make any edits necessary to There’s No Such Thing As Time Travel. I want to get a few more chapters through my critique group, and of course I’m waiting on the beta readers and then the cover artist. Assuming that all comes together, I’m looking at publishing either in March or April.
  • Complete significant work on The Last Supper Bible study. I’ve had some trouble coming up with the right format; or rather, I’ve had trouble seeing how the format I came up with a year ago will work. I have to get some words on paper and see how well it comes together. As such, this goal is a bit unfocused. I suppose my real goal is to write enough in February to see if I have the right format, and be able to do more in a future month.
  • As always, attend writing group meetings, both in person and on-line. That will likely be five meetings, three of which will be in person.
  • As always, blog twice a week on Monday and Friday.

That’s where it stands right now. Other things can get in the way, things might take longer than expected—or shorter. But I think this will be a good second month for the year.

book reviews, fiction, Writing

Book Review: “Turning Life Into Fiction”

Leave a comment
This isn’t one of the premier books that every writer needs to read and have on their shelf, but it is a worthwhile read.

I have a fair number of books for writers in my library. I should read more of them, but, given the large number of books I’m working through, I tend to pick others over those. Recently, I browsed one of my bookshelves, the one tucked away in the storeroom, and pulled two out. I took them and no others on our recent trip to Texas, forcing me to read them.

On Wednesday I finished the first of them, Turning Life Into Fiction, by Robin Hemley. Since that’s what I do to a fairly great extent in my fiction, I thought this would be good to read. It was. I read the paperback edition, copyrighted 1994. My copy is a new book but I don’t remember buying it. Possibly I won it at a writers conference.  That might sound old, but really it isn’t. The advice that Hemley gives works across the 90s and the 20s.

Take your life, or any part of real life, and figure out how to turn it into fiction. You aren’t writing history, and there’s no need to make your fiction exactly faithful to history. Begin with the truth. Add characters, delete characters, change the gender of characters. Start with the real setting; make some changes, but probably not as many as with the characters. But, if you change anything about a real place be prepared for someone very familiar with that place to call you out on it. That’s okay. For every 1 reader who knows the place you will have 1000 readers who don’t. So make a few changes. Maybe more than a few.

Hemley starts with journaling, and the importance of it, then moving on to memoir. He talks about the news and how to take virtually any news story and be able to develop a fictional story about it. He cautions the writer, however, that not every historical detail needs to be part of your memoir or story. The writer needs to take great care to see that the story has the right details, the details needed to pull in the reader and keep them reading.

The last chapter has to do with legal and ethical concerns. You don’t want to use real people in your books without permission. If you do, change enough so that the character bears only a little to the original. While successful lawsuits against fiction writers based on characters that resemble real people are rare, they do happen.

I’m glad I read this book. It helped me to see how I’m doing a lot of things right as I turn real life experiences into fiction. I’m not going to keep this book, as I never see myself re-reading it. But it’s a good book, a worthwhile read for any writer.

family, memories

Puzzling, a Blood Sport

2 Comments
All is serene as Elise and Ezra work with me on the puzzle. In the background, Nitwit is perched on the highchair to avoid Nuisance as she passes by.

On our recent trip to babysit grandkids and visit a few extra days, we brought gifts. No, not new games or nicely wrapped packages. We brought children’s stuff from our house to theirs: puzzles, and a few books (we brought two boxes of books the last trip).

They have no shortage of books of puzzles at their house, but, due to garage sale over-buying, we definitely have a surplus here. Lynda went through the children’s puzzles and selected a number—two boxes worth—to take. Needless to say, the parents at the other end of the gift weren’t exactly thrilled with more stuff in the house.

Do I sense a little aggressiveness here?

But, they have a good place to donate them if they turn out to be truly surplus, which they undoubtedly will.

When you have new puzzles in the house, you do them, right? We got little Elijah, 5 years old, to do a number of the puzzles at the younger end of his age range, and maybe one at the older range. We also got Elise, 8, and Ezra, 10 to work on larger puzzles. In the course of doing one, which I’m calling “puzzling”, I was reminded how in our family puzzling has always been a blood sport.

Elise has moved on to other things while Ezra and I get into the end-of-puzzle frenzy.

By that I mean that people get aggressive in trying to find pieces in a certain area of the board. They hoard the pieces for that area and try to keep anyone else from working the area. If someone does try to put a piece in, the speed of the puzzling picks up. You’ve got to go fast before someone else does what you want to do. If you see someone reaching for a piece you might need, you quickly grab it and try to put it in place ahead of them. This gets worse the closer you get to the end of the puzzle, when fewer pieces are easier to find and put in place. This is really when puzzling becomes a blood sport.

I first saw this puzzling behavior in our daughter when, as an adult on visits, we would do puzzles and the aggressiveness came out. Our son, not quite so much. Neither my wife or I are truly like that, though I don’t mind twisting people’s tails a little by pretending to go after their pieces, just to get them going.

So, Ezra and Elise began a 300 piece puzzle. Not all that big, as they have both done bigger on their own, but flat surface space was at a premium. They abandoned the puzzle. Then I, bored with reading the books I’d brought with me, began working on it. That brought them back, first Elise, later Ezra. Ezra and I finished it, him hiding a piece to be sure that he would be the one to put the last piece in. That is aggressive puzzling. Of course, I had threatened to do the same thing but then didn’t. I suppose I gave him the idea.

It was a good time. We didn’t get out another puzzle, but set the stage for future family puzzling on other trips. And when they next come here, I foresee the card table going up and a 500 piece puzzle coming out. Maybe two.

Bible study, family, miscellaneous, The Forest Throne, travel

Random Friday Thoughts

Leave a comment

Dateline: Jan. 20, 2022

Between leftovers and some takeout, I had to fix only one meal. Grandpa’s Mythical Sandwich was a hit, as always.

Yes, the dateline shows that I’m writing these Friday thoughts on Thursday. At least I’m beginning these thoughts then.

Yesterday (Wednesday), we drove back from West Texas from having babysat our four grandchildren last weekend and staying a few extra days. We might have come home on Tuesday, but Lynda had a stomach bug, so we delayed a day. Actually, we had been uncertain of which day to come home on.

But yesterday morning before we left, our son-in-law was sick, went for a covid test, and was positive. So we have been exposed. As it turns out we hadn’t been all that close to him in the house, so maybe we will be okay. But, let the quarantine begin. I guess 5 days. Except, I have prescriptions to pick up at Wal-Mart and a few after-trip groceries I must get. I’ll do that this morning.  I’ll have to miss the monthly meeting of the Scribblers & Scribes, our critique group, Thursday night. I’ll send my piece to them by e-mail.

With The Forest Throne done and waiting on beta readers, and with the church Centennial book done and waiting on proof-readers, I’m about to spend time on my next writing project. As I said in my annual writing goals post earlier this month, it would be a Bible study. But which one? On Tuesday, I consolidated my various files from the Holy Week study I taught last Lenten season, on the Last Supper. Thursday morning, I found my hand-written teaching notes and will go through them over the next several days.  I have a feeling I will make this my next book rather than the study I did on 1 and 2 Timothy some years ago. But we shall see. I should know by early next week.

I’m in the process of contacting an artist about a cover for The Forest Throne. Hoping to make contact on Thursday. Also, the first beta reader of TFT is my granddaughter Elise, 8. She loved it. She also picked up on a number of subtle things I put in the book.

I’ve been brainstorming the concept of individualism, having posted on that before and wanting to do a follow-up or two, possibly even write and publish an essay on that. I have come to the conclusion that the opposite of individualism is collectivism. I even found a quote by Dr. M.L. King that agrees with that, but I can’t trace it back to the actual speech or document, so hate to use it. I don’t know that this essay will ever happen, or if it does it will be anything more than serialized blog posts.

The drive home from W. Texas was pleasant. I was worried about road conditions near the end, in our own county, as the forecast was for a wintry mix that afternoon. As I looked at radar that morning, frozen precip was showing over Oklahoma City, where we were making a brief stop to drop recyclables from our daughter’s accumulation. But after driving an hour and a half, and checking the predicted radar again, it showed the OKC precip abating by the time we would get there, and that what would fall toward the end of our trip would be minor at most. So on we drove. We stopped about 45 minutes from home and made a couple of phone calls, learned the roads were fine, and so we continued on home.

I’m in the midst of reading three different books (well, four if you include the one I read 3 or 4 pages of on my phone a day—no, five if you include the book I’m reading for Life Group teaching), two of which are books about writing. I took those two with me to Texas, and made good progress in them. One I should finish in three days or so; the other will likely take over two weeks. It’s interviews with 20 writers, and I’m just reading one interview a day.

That’s enough random thoughts. I hope to head to the sunroom later, with my handwritten notes, and get to work on the Bible study. See you all on Monday, when I hope to get back to something on my list of upcoming blog posts.

Documenting America, self-publishing

The “Documenting America” Series

Leave a comment

In my post about 2022 writing goals, I said that I was planning to complete my two works-in-progress, then shift to writing/completing a Bible study, then move on to the next volume in my Documenting America series.

My highest selling book in 2021.

I’ve written about this series before, but not recently. If you want to see some previous posts, look for Documenting America in the Categories box on this blog. I’ll give the short version here.

I began this as a series of op-ed pieces for our local newspaper after I bought a 20-book set The Annals of America, which published a lot of American documents. I saw how these could be worked into the op-eds, the local editor liked it, and I had four published before the guest op-ed program was cancelled. I kept writing the columns to see what frequency I could produce them at. I was up to 18 to 20, and was considering self-syndicating it, when I laid it all aside for other pursuits.

This was one of my favorite books to write.

When easy self-publishing came along, and I was looking to put together a book to self-publish because my novel wasn’t ready, I decided I could cobble those columns into chapters in a book. That all came together quickly, and the first volume, Documenting America: Lessons From The United States’ Historical Documents, was published in May 2011 as an ebook and in Nov 2011 as a print book.

As the 150th anniversary of the Civil War was coming, I decided to put together another volume of documents from that time. I didn’t get it done in time for those anniversary years, but I eventually did publish it. Then, for a next volume, I decided to make about the development of the Constitution. I finished that in 2019.

Sales are better than for most of my other books.

The way the books work is I take a quote from some American document—not always a famous one, but one I think expressed things important in our national development. I take a large excerpt from that, in a couple of paragraphs explain its importance in its time, and link it to an issue we face today. My goal in doing this was not to show my intelligence but to introduce people to these documents, hoping they would then go ahead and find the document and read them in their entirety.

Did I meet this goal? This review on one of the books tells me that for some readers I did.

This is a great compilation of primary sources. The editor/author adds a few paragraphs of analysis but the bulk of the book is primary source material. Some sources are well known. The best part, though, is lesser known documents that are now more easily available in this book for readers.

What’s next for the DA series? I have completed the research and laid out the documents for the next volume, Documenting America: Run-up To Revolution. It looks like it will be a little harder to produce than the last three, which is one of the reasons why I’ve gone on to publish the next volume.

After that? I have identified six volumes based on historical eras I would like to produce. After that? We have so many documents, with many of them becoming easily available, I can see how this could easily be a long series, more than 20 volumes. Even 40 volumes long. Of course, as I’m now 70 years old, I would be doing good to make this a ten-book series.

I hope to write and publish the next one before 2022 ends, but we will see. Meanwhile, I’m happy with the series even as it is now. I have more sales of this series than of any other.

book reviews, poetry

Book Review: Four Ways of Modern Poetry

Leave a comment
A good and pleasurable read, but ’twill not be put back on my shelves.

I continue to pull books from this or that shelf, looking for any that seem interesting but which I’m sure I won’t keep. Reading those should be a win-win situation. A bit of enjoyment and decluttering/dis-accumulation at the same time.  The one I chose a couple of weeks ago was an oldish one: Four Ways of Modern Poetry, edited by Nathan A. Scott.

Published by John Knox Press in 1965, I have the Chime Paperbacks edition. Original cost was $1.00, stamped right on the front page. It’s in pretty good condition for its age.

The book looks at four poets: Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, and W.H. Auden. I’m sure I bought this primarily for Frost, but also secondarily for Thomas. Since I bought this, I have read a little of Stevens, and have liked what I read. I’m still unfamiliar with Auden.

The book, 92 pages, consists of four essays by four different men, each one covering one of the four poets. I found the essay on Steven, by Stanley Romaine Hopper, mostly incomprehensible. I plowed through it but didn’t enjoy it and doubt that I learned much about him. I have a large book of his poetry and will have to get back into that sometime soon.

The essay by Frost was by Paul Elmen. This might have been equally incomprehensible as the first except that I know more about Frost. Elmen’s point is the Frost was a dark poet, not the simple, pastoral New England poet he appears to be. Others have said the same thing. I haven’t decided yet. I enjoy the pretty pictures that Frost’s poems paint, and am happy not to look for darkness beneath the surface.

The Thomas essay was by Ralph J. Mills, Jr. I’ve read a fair amount about Thomas. In fact, on my reading table is A Dylan Thomas Reader, which I dip into from time to time when other books at hand don’t excite me. I also have a book of his letters, which I read half-way through. Thomas’s poetry I don’t really care for, but he is an interesting character. Mills did a good job on explaining Thomas’s place in modern poetry.

The essay on Auden was written by the editor, Scott. It was by far the best of the four. It made me want to read more of Auden’s work, and some critique of those works and some biographical pieces. Alas, I will have to get much further into retirement and to the point where I don’t want to write anything of my own before I do that.

It took me only six or seven sitting to get through this. I consider the time to have been well spent. I won’t recommend it, mainly because I suspect it would be difficult to find a 1965 paperback in whatever bookstore you go into. It’s probably available on-line, from ABE Books or wherever you go for out-of-print books. It is worth reading if modern poetry is to your liking. But for me, I won’t be re-reading it so it is not a keeper. Nope. It’s already on the sale/donation shelves. A good read, but off it goes.

 

Author | Engineer