Poets, Prayers, and Radio Talk Show Hosts

A  Brief Review of Recent Popular Posts

Photo by Charles Kinnaird

Earlier this year my blog surpassed 600,000 page views (602,000 as of this date), so I figured it was time fora brief review of what’s happening at Not Dark Yet.

The Top Four Posts This Month

The top posts for the past month include two new ones and two old ones. My recollection of “Rush Limbaugh’s On-Air Reign” has been the most read piece this month. The second most read is an interfaith essay that was first posted during Ramadan in 2013, “The Lamps are Different but the Light is the Same.” 

Coming in at number 3 is “My Season with Dante,” a colorful account of my encounter with Dante’s Divine Comedy that began with an evening class at church and continued with my listening to the entire work on an audiobook. It was first posted in 2012 and includes illustrations by William Blake depicting the passage through Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.  

The fourth most popular post this month was my review of all the Inaugural poets from U.S. Presidential Inaugurations (there have only been six, and I make a tenuous claim to have heard all of them in real-time). With “The Presidential Inaugural Poem: Calling Us to Our Touchstones” you can see and hear each inaugural poet from Robert Frost to Amanda Gorman.

Recent Popular Posts

Some of you followed my series about growing up in the Jim Crow South. “Growing Up under Southern Apartheid” featured 10 personal essays that spanned my pre-school and elementary school days in which I tried to convey what it was like in the days of segregation. There is an eleventh essay about my grandfather and his encounter with the KKK back in the 1920s.

There is still a lot more to tell about growing up in the segregated South and I have plans to continue the memoir series at a later date. For an index to all the stories so far go to https://notdarkyet-commentary.blogspot.com/2020/10/index-for-growing-up-under-southern_6.html.

During the past year, as one would expect, there were many essays and poems about life during the pandemic which we continue to live with even as we are finding hope with the vaccine efforts. Some of my poems are in a book that my writing group has published, The Social Distance: Poetry in Response to COVID-19. You can read about that in my September post, “PoetryDuring Days of COVID.”

In the Days Ahead

In the coming month of April, I will feature a variety of poets reading their work in celebration of National Poetry Month. Not Dark Yet continues to feature music on Mondays, haiku on Saturdays, and personal essays during the week with humor and recipes tossed in as well. I hope you will find something that piques your interest there.

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