Monthly Archives: April 2021

April 26, 2021: Spotlight on PHILIP LARKIN: THE MAN AND HIS WORK and Context for Poem “Dandelion”

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I was introduced to the work of British poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985) in the early 1980s. His voice is arresting and nigh unduplicatable (wry to the point of cynicism, unblinking, speaking of what is broken–personally, familially, culturally–with a certain precise relish in naming) while his technical brilliance anchors his disaffection in pitch-perfect music, deploying a kind of carillon-centered bell-ringing that is at once lofty and gritty.

Larkin was nothing if not self-aware. In In 1979 he told the Observer: “I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any… Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.” Paradoxically, perhaps, Larkin renders (in the noisome sense of extracting tallow from carcasses) great beauty from unlikely sources, such as an unswerving concentration of the state of boredom or betrayal inherent in platitude or questioning of faith. At the same time that he appears to be tearing down, he is simultaneously building up. In this way, he offers his own homely-wrought candle with which to light the darkness he finds in the facts of human existence.

Philip Larkin: The Man and His Work, edited by Dale Salwak (Macmillan Press, 1989) is a collection of perceptive essays by the friends, critics, and artists who knew him and his work well helps to illuminate further his temperament, his intention (among them, to “out-Auden Auden as he gazed at the grim landscape of post-war Britain from his post a Librarian at the University of Hull), and his achievement. A Christmas gift from another poet and friend (Thank you, Sally!), it has been in my library since 1989. In it, I have tucked an article from Vanity Fair (April 1993) by Christopher Hitchens, a journalist given to similar excoriations of widely held pieties as Larkin himself. The article appeared after a posthumous volume of Larkin’s letters was published, and takes Larkin to task for assorted bigotries and class privileges. The article opens, “Even while he was still ambulant and breathing, Philip Larkin was a Dead White European Male.”

There is no question that Larkin was a difficult person–this curmudgeonly, confirmed bachelor, jazz critic, recluse–but he is also an acquired taste, and sometimes nothing else will do. Rather like medicinal bitters, there is something bracing, clarifying, and tonic about reading Larkin, reading about Larkin, noting Larkinesque details in a previously overlooked genre or physical landscape. And, much as he might cringe to hear it, there are moments of quiet beauty and even happiness in his poetry that continue to uplift the reader. There are also evidences of unselfish friendship in his life. (Without him, the novels of Barbara Pym would have been long out of print, for one example.)

Paradoxically, perhaps, Larkin’s poetry was much loved during his lifetime, and his reputation as a poet has never dipped. This person who appeared to scorn affection–and perhaps disliked himself most of all–did love poetry. That is apparent in how much care he lavished on polishing to a high gloss each line, each syllable, however sometimes irascible. The sharp-toothed pain-born jazz music of his verse poured out of his fingers onto the page. In the end, I would argue, his wore his heart on his sleeve.

Regarding the Poem “Dandelion”:

The poem is self-explanatory with perhaps one note. (“Piscan”, a name for the dandelion in North Italy, is the informal Italian for “dog pisses.”) I think it was a felicitous convergence that today’s inspiration of the letter “D” and the humble subject of the dandelion could be paired with the acerbic poetry of Philip Larkin, but you be the judge.

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE

Postcard for April 26, 2021 & a Lagniappe for Richard Wilbur–My Poem “Two Voices in a Starbucks”

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After the post in the wee hours this morning on Richard Wilbur, I realized that I had neglected to mention one poem of his that has affected my own work. His “Two Voices in a Meadow” is masterful and lives in my heart and brain (yes, I do have it memorized!)

Some years ago, I wrote an homage poem to his poem. Mine is called “Two Voices in a Starbucks” and was first published in Mezzo Cammin and then included in my most recent book-length collection, Concertina.

I’m sharing it again, here, as a “lagniappe”, a little something extra, a Cajun French term I learned during my years in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where I encountered both Community Coffee and Wilbur’s poetry! (I am also including a link to his more masterful and nuanced poem–do read his first and last!)

LESLIE

Two Voices in a Starbucks
                        (for Richard Wilbur)
 
 
                        Coffee
 
I grow on mountain slopes
cooled by the breath of God,
a rosy, cozy berry.
My bean outshines its pod.
I submit to fire and blade.
My flavor is my yield.
Drop by drop, I offer up
the fragrance of the field.
 
                        Tea
 
My legend says the Buddha
refused his mountain sleep
by cutting off his eyelids:
these leaves you wake to steep.
Thanks to India and China
the world can now create
my delicate, leafy brew
to sip, to meditate.
 
 
Leslie Schultz
 

April 25, 2021: Spotlight on LET US WATCH RICHARD WILBUR and Context for Poem “Elegances”

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My admiration for the poetry of Richard Wilbur is longstanding and just about unbounded. I don’t rank the poets whose work I love, I just wonder at and cherish them. For me, the fact that I can and do make the same statement about several dozen poets’ work, at least, whose lives spanned centuries of poetic currents in the English language, doesn’t diminish the regard I feel. And what I appreciate about today’s Spotlight book is that it helped me understand the kind of person Wilbur was, and, as it happens, he was just the kind of sane, decent, vastly talented, and very human in his foibles as I imagined him to be.

Robert and Mary Bagg‘s accomplishment in the literary biography, Let Us Watch Richard Wilbur (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017) is remarkable for its sensitivity, range, and timeliness, appearing as it did the same year of Wilbur’s death. It is a rare thing for a biographer (or, in this case, a team of biographers) to have a cooperative subject whose trust, the result of years of collegial friendship and mutual regard, provided access to interviews and documents (including unpublished journals; private correspondence with many people, including some of the giants of twentieth century literature such as Bishop, Lowell, Berryman and Merrill; family archives; and a series of interviews with Wilbur, and with his wife, Charlee (1922 to 2007), to whose memory the biography is dedicated.)

Richard Wilbur (1921 to 2017) published his first in a string of distinguished collections of poetry (as well as essays and translations) in 1947. When poet and critic Louise Bogan reviewed that debut volume, The Beautiful Changes, for The New Yorker Magazine, she concluded, “Let us watch Richard Wilbur. He is composed of valid ingredients.”

Indeed. Wilbur’s accolades are numerous, lofty, and deserved. (Two Pulitzer Prizes, a term as Poet Laureate of the United States, and too many prizes and publications to count for his own poetry and prose, as well as distinguished teaching and incredibly accomplished translations of French writers, especially successfully with Moliere’s plays.) What most impresses me is his formal skill, deep humanity, and sense of order and humor. Such poems as “A Hole in the Floor”, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World”, “Junk”, “Cottage Street, 1953”, and “Advice to a Prophet”, among many, many others, along with his translation of “Tartuffe” make him a perennial teacher of mine, even though I never met him. His restraint, artistry, extensive learning worn gracefully and lightly, and his sense of humanity make his poems always current favorites with me.

Context for Poem “Elegances”:

The poem today is an homage to Richard Wilbur, a writer whose verse is as elegant and muscular as any I have encountered.

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE

April 24, 2021: Spotlight on SYNTHESIZING GRAVITY: SELECTED PROSE; and Context for Poem “Goddess of Forgetting”

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A friend and neighbor who is a poet and a scholar, alerted me last year to Kay Ryan‘s magnificent collection of essays, Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose,(Grove Press, 2020). While she generously offered to lend it, (Thanks, Susan!) I knew I needed my own copy. Reading these essays (or gobbling them down like bon-bons) got me through the early weeks of the pandemic. Reading passages aloud to Tim resulted in his picking up the collection, finding his own favorites, and reading passages aloud to me. One can really begin anyway and wander with pleasure (as with Ryan’s justly celebrated poetry!) I leaped first into “On a Poem by Hopkins” because it considers his “Spring and Fall to a Young Child”, a poem I have memorized and say aloud rather more often than I should and feel I know well. Someday, I plan to compose my own essay on its perfections. When I do, I will be grateful for the new aspects of the poem to which Kay Ryan alerted me (and I shall be careful not to plagiarize!)

I truly enjoyed each of this essays, but if forced to select particular favorites to recommend, I would offer “Notes on the Dangers of Notebooks,” “Inedible Melons” (about the poetry of Marianne Moore), and the four-page gem, “Do You Like It?”, which opens “How a person becomes a poet is a mystery before which one must simply bow down.” This essay recounts Ryan’s own Damascene moment of conversion to the poetry life on a bicycling trip across the U.S. when she was thirty, but, being Ryan (gifted with a capacious sense of wonder and a steely intellect), she also offers universal musings as well personal anecdote.

Regarding the Poem “Goddess of Forgetting”:

Today’s poem has a bit of a back story. The above image was the promotional postcard for a joint show I had at The Crossings Gallery in Zumbrota many years ago–my photographs and paintings by Ann Tristani. I sent dozens of them out, in advance of that show, but recently in sorting through office papers I discovered a small cache of them. I have begun using them as bookmarks, and have sent one to a couple of avid-reading friends.

This morning, Jan sent me a photo of the postcard in its now “forever home”, her copy of Tan Twan Eng’s novel, The Garden of Evening Mists, one I loved when I read it with my book group. That was lovely, but what it was such a gift to be reminded of the epigraph at the beginning of the novel:

There is a goddess of Memory, Mnemosyne, but none of Forgetting.
Yet there should be, as they are twin sisters, twin powers, and walk
on either side of us, disputing for sovereignty over us
and who we are, all the way until death.
 
 Richard Holmes, “A Meander Through Memory and Forgetting”
(Epigraph to In the Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng)

On a day when I was tasking myself to write a poem inspired by the letter “F”, this was divine inspiration for the Petrarchan sonnet that all of you who so graciously agreed to get these April poems via email received. I think that subject is vast, and the sonnet is only the best I could manage in the hour available. I might be able to revise it, and…who knows?…it might end up as a series of poems.

The fact of friends is ever a gift, and I was powerfully reminded of that this morning. Thank you all for the grace notes with which you embellish the simple melody of my life. I am deeply grateful for Memory, as well as for, when happiness depends upon it, Forgetting.

“Goddess” print, shown at The Crossings, now with spider plant blooms, plant a gift from Patty
Close up of Elizabeth Barrett Browning daffodil, gift from Sally

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE

April 23, 2021: “Happy Birthday, William Shakespeare!”; Spotlight on IN RADICAL PURSUIT; Context for Poem “To a Grackle”

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One of the best things I learned in graduate school was the work of W. D. Snodgrass. His book-length, Pulitzer Prize-winning poem, “Heart’s Needle,” was published the year I was born but I had never heard of it until I was given a Xeroxed copy of it in a seminar class. (I now have a treasured copy in proper book form!) Snodgrass came to McNeese when I was a student there and read from his then new work, what became the collection, The Death of Cock Robin (University of Delaware Press, 1989). He was a magnificent reader of his own lyric poetry (even singing sections of it, at times, wholly effectively) and, in every way, a big presence.

Not long after encountering his poetry, I was also given a Xeroxed, stapled in the corner, copy of his essay, “Tact and the Poet’s Force,” which I still have, which treats, among several topics, the power of what is not said. I find Snodgrass’s prose to be as lyrical and muscular as his poetry, and I am particularly drawn to read his thoughts on works I know pretty well already, as he always sees new-to-me elements and communicates them with eloquent gusto.

Today, in honor of the global celebration of William Shakespeare’s 457th birthday, I would like to recommend the Snodgrass essay, “Moonshine and Sunny Beams: Ruminations on A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream“, in his collection of essays titled In Radical Pursuit (Harper & Row, 1975). In this essay, Snodgrass begins with all the questions surrounding the title and action of the play–Who is the dreamer? The poet-playwright? Any or all of the characters? The audience?–and who gets dreamed? What is the nature of the phenomenon of dream/nightmare? Throughout the essay, Snodgrass turns over the phrases and assumptions of the drama and keeps coming back to the need to understand, so well as can be done in the strong light of day, the nature of the Moon, symbol of enchantment and illusion, particularly the illusions patriarchal society invests in the power of fathers over children (which, as we remember, launches the action Shakespeare’s comedy). I read this and delight in the insights into the Elizabethan poet and playwright, and I think of Snodgrass’s first masterwork, Heart’s Needle, so autobiographical that it has been cited as a major work of mid-century confessionalism (a term Snodgrass disliked), which is in part a long lament about the powerlessness of the divorced father who sees his daughter growing up and growing away from him.

Signature slip, tucked into my treasured (though water-damaged when I got it) first edition copy of In Radical Pursuit

Regarding “To a Grackle”: Today’s poem features a bird common here, but one which William Shakespeare would not have known. Still the grackle puts me in mind of him, not only of the Chandos oil portrait of him, where he looks a little crow-like to me, but of his testy and protesting “Dark Lady” sonnets, in which the speaker is (often unwillingly) entranced by unconventional beauty. I like to think that had Shakespeare seen a grackle, he would have made at least one sonnet for it.

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE