Monthly Archives: March 2018

Ready? Set? GO! In Anticipation of National Poetry Month 2018!

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Elizabeth Barrett Browning Daffodil from My Garden (2016)

One week from today–Sunday, April 1–is not just Easter Sunday and April Fool’s Day but the first day of National Poetry Month. For the third year in a row, I am planning to take on the National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) challenge to write a poem each morning and then publish it here. If you would like to know more about this annual event, and to see who else has taken up the challenge, take a look at the website generously hosted by Maureen Thorson, a Washington, D.C. poet.

Recently, someone asked me, “Who are your five favorite poets?” Only five? I found I couldn’t answer! Yet the question has been reverberating in me for days now. I have been thinking about which poets’ work I turn to again and again, each for distinct reasons. All of these have influenced my own work and, more importantly, given me great and abiding joy.

So, I am embarking on a maneuver worthy of April Fool’s Day. I am playing a trick on myself in deciding to share here a longish but necessarily incomplete list of those poets who have enriched my life with their own work. These are in no particular order, and have been listed without reference to my book shelves. Some I have met in person, some only through their work. The Universe of Poetry is vast and always expanding, and I am (sadly) limited to English and translations into English. I have included only the poets I return to again and again–and I know as I draft this that it is woefully incomplete. Scroll down, and see if your favorites are here. (I know that your own list will be different.)  If you see any glaring omissions, do let me know! (As new names occur, I am adding them to the list(s) in purple–but still without recourse to the perusal of shelves–a heroic act of self-restraint!)

Happy Reading! Happy Reciting and Declaiming! Happy Writing!

Poets from the Old World

William Shakespeare
Geoffrey Chaucer
Dante
Petrarch
Horace
Virgil
Homer
Basho
William Wordsworth
Edith Sitwell
Alexander Pushkin
William Butler Yeats
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Rumi
Robert Browning
John Clare
John Keats
Wendy Cope
T.S. Eliot
Stephen Fry
Phillip Larkin
Ted Hughes
Seamus Heaney
W.H. Auden
Thomas Hardy
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poets from the New World

Emily Dickinson
Walt Whitman
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Billy Collins
May Sarton
Nancy Willard
Richard Wilbur
Rita Dove
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Natasha Trethaway
Susan Stewart
Maura Stanton
Maxine Kumin
James Wright
Frank Stanford
James Tate
Margaret Atwood
Ted Kooser
Wallace Stevens
Robert Service
Sylvia Plath
William Carlos Williams
Elizabeth Bishop
Robert Lowell
Mary Jo Salter
Marianne Moore
Robert Hass
Anne Sexton
Robert Frost
Robert Francis
Ron Padgett
Naomi Shihab Nye
Amy Lowell
Henry Longfellow
Louise Erdrich
Pablo Neruda
Janet Beeler Shaw
Alfred Nichol
Rhina Espaillet

Poets Whom I Have Been Lucky Enough to Encounter and Share Thoughts About Specific Poems

Amy Clampitt
Kim Bridgford
Karen Kelsay
Sally Nacker
John A. Wood
Doug Green
Stella Nesanovich
Ken McCullough
Rob Hardy
Emilio DeGrazia
Leo Luke Marcello
Ronald Wallace
Kelly Cherry
Janet Beelar Shaw
David Bottoms
Justin Caldwell
W.D. Snodgrass

Super Nova News Flash! My Book, CLOUD SONG, is Published by Kelsay Books

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Last June, while I was in Decorah, Iowa, touring the Vesterheim Museum with my friend, Ann, I got an email informing me that the manuscript for my second collection of poems, Cloud Song, had been accepted for publication by Kelsay Books. As you can imagine, I was ecstatic! I asked Ann to take a photograph of me in that moment. Here it is:


(Photo by Ann Wilson Lacy)

It is fitting, perhaps, that behind me is the twenty-five foot, hand-built ship, TradeWind, that Harald Hamran and his brother, Hans, sailed from Norway to New York in 1933. According to the logbook Harald kept in English, ““Our chances are slim, but no matter. It’s great to take chances when all things are against one.” That is certainly the way it can feel when one sends out a single poem–like a message in a bottle–or a collection of poems–a buoyant but fragile bundle of reeds lashed together into a raft. It certainly feels like a small species of miracle to see one’s poems bound together into the form of a book.

Cloud Song is arranged into three sections–poems inspired by the sea; poems inspired by landscapes, gardens, and plants; and poems inspired birds, ,sky, weather, and constellations. I suppose there is a sense of journeying underlying them all–journeying inward or outward bound.

I think Harald Harman sums up the hazards and the excitement of the creative process: “It hurts…especially when admiring the silvery moon, and thinking of a dream girl ashore, to be rudely awakened by a flying fish in the eye.” But that flying fish…that’s what’s memorable!

If you would like to locate your own copy of my new book, it is available locally at Content Bookstore or at Amazon. Here is a poem from the collection:

The Best I Have to Offer
 
I make my poems into little paper boats,
put a light in each, a small votive candle,
then sail them into the dark.

They are borne on my experience, over
shoals and snags, the salt and cold rot,
monsters and sinuous beauty rocking deep beneath.

Poets always know that their fragile vessels
may never reach the other shore or
even see the morning, but
what else can we do?

Poems are precious;
the light they carry is
the inestimable treasure of witness.

Together, flotilla of millions,
they form new constellations,
fling back radiance into the ocean of stars.

Leslie Schultz

HAPPY SAILING! HAPPY READING!  LESLIE


(Author Photo by Atia Cole)

Norwegian Book Case; Vesterheim