I was introduced to the poetry of Rumi (1207 to 1273 C.E.) by my dear friend, LaNelle Olson. When she travelled to Turkey, she returned with a small Persian carpet for my doll’s house and a small jar of dirt from the base of Rumi’s tomb.
LaNelle Olson, September 2003, Carleton Arboretum
Rumi’s poetry has continued to uplift and inspire me. I am grateful to contemporary American poet and translator Coleman Barks for providing the lens through which Rumi’s words can speak to me across the centuries. More recently, my friend and neighbor, poet and teacher Susan Jaret McKinstry, taught me about the poem, “Bird Wings,” to my attention. At her suggestion, I kept it on the refrigerator door and read it at least once a day until I had it memorized.
Bird Wings
Your grief for what you've lost lifts a
mirror
up to where you are bravely working.
Expecting the worst, you look, and
instead
here's the joyful face you've been
wanting to see.
Your hand opens and closes, and opens
and closes.
If it were always a fist or always
stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.
Your deepest presence is in every small
contracting and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and
coordinated
as bird wings.
RUMI (translation by Coleman Barks)
I receive similar inspiration from the photographic artistry of my sister, Karla Schultz. Below is one of her recent soaring images.
Hawk Soaring (Photo by Karla Schultz)
Background on My Poem “Ice Feathers”:
Today’s poem is a small meditation on stillness and motion, ice and air, what is inside and what is outside.
View from Home on Winona Street: (Leslie Schultz: April 10, 2022)
As homebody Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) observed in her poem (1286), written at her desk in Amherst, Massachusetts, late in the 19th century:
There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away Nor any Coursers like a Page Of prancing Poetry – This Traverse may the poorest take Without oppress of Toll – How frugal is the Chariot That bears the Human Soul –
In so many ways, this poem conjures up the essence for me of her countryman and kindred spirit Robert Francis (1901-1987). The excerpts from his journal, penned over twenty years, that are gathered in Travelling in Amherst: A Poet’s Journal 1930-50 (Rowan Tree, Boston, 1986), tell the adventure story of living quietly and frugally, in a house he designed and built himself. Francis, a poet whose work has spoken to me so often that I have some of his short, crystalline lyrics by heart. (My special favorites are “Sheep” and “Blue Winter”.)
Within his journal, Francis compares himself to Thoreau, and the comparison has merit. Francis lived in the woods frugally on soy beans, income from teaching (often violin), some meager royalties and magazine payments for poems, and little else besides the wide-flung and determined joy of living a quiet life according to his own inner light.
His other two major works in my library are Robert Francis: Collected Poems 1936-1976 (The University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1976) and The Trouble with Francis: An Autobiography of Robert Francis (The University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1971). He has other volumes of prose, and individual collections of poems.
Francis deserves now, as he deserved during his lifetime, to be more widely read, funded, and appreciated. Yet, as poet George Herbert observed, “The best revenge is living well.” Francis did have many friends, won numerous awards during his lifetime, and, despite bleak times, ultimately published a great deal. I look up to Robert Francis as a gentle, ferociously talented and productive poet and a good man who lived well. We can all be glad he left, in his poems and his works of memoir, a full record of his sojourn here on earth.
Background on My Poem “Wanderlust”:
I have been writing fiction this year, and because of this I have been interested in how plots work. In my reading, I keep encountering different distillations, such as “Boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy wins girl” or “trauma as animating back story.” This poem arose from mulling over the redactive dictum that “There are only two plots: a stranger comes to town, or a person sets off on a journey.” I suppose there is some truth to these structural suppositions, as there is to defining a dwelling as “a roof, a floor, and walls.” Yet even with cookie-cutter building and common elements, every home is distinct. As a reader, I love to compare and to contrast. As a writer, I suppose that I try to say something that hasn’t been exactly said before but that chimes with what already exists…with varying degrees of success, of course!
My copy of Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui by Karen Kingston (Broadway Books, New York, 1999) has been read and reread and continues to inspire me for two decades now. Each time I read it, I understand a little better and can go a little deeper. Along with its elder sister, Creating Sacred Space with Feng Shui (Broadway Books, New York, 1997) these books have inspired me to effective action on an ongoing basis, with mixed by also cumulative results. Kingston’s work is translated into 26 languages and sold millions of copies, paving the way for others (like Marie Kondo) to help us with the sticky perennial problems of what to keep and what to send on, as well as what else to do to be able to feel supported, rather than burdened, by our homes.
Background on My Poem, “Winnowing the House in Spring”:
As those readers who have elected to receive this year’s April poems via email can guess, today’s poem is a sister poem to “Sifting Through the Basement” from April 4. Both are influenced heavily by my spiral of spring cleaning and clearing (in turn supported by Kingston’s books.)
Today, for some reason, I am thinking about sports, specifically about sports as metaphor. Maybe it is because it is spring, when the very long hockey season begins to wane and the shorter baseball season starts up? The impetus was my own poem, and then I started to think about a poem I read long ago that still impresses me no end.: David Bottoms’ early poem, “For My Father, Who Stressed the Bunt.” I am especially taken by the end of the poem, actually. It begins,
On the rough diamond,
the hand-cut field below the dog-lot and barn,
we rehearsed the strict technique
of bunting.
Photo of David Bottoms by Rachel Bottoms
Bottoms is an American original with his own voice and point of view. I first encountered his work in the mid-1980s when he visited the M.F.A. program I was in. His second book, In a U-Haul North of Damascus (Quill, New York, 1983) was newly published. He was a mesmerizing reader, and I am still reading the poems in that slender volume with undiminished pleasure–cherishing the inscription, too.
A native Georgian, Bottoms now lives in Atlanta where he holds the John B. and Elena Diaz-Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University and coedits Five Points: A Journal of Art and Literature. The whole text of this amazing poem, as well as others by Bottoms, and a full bio, are available at the Poetry Foundation website and can be accessed through the links above.
P.S. In case you might wonder, there is a small city in Georgia called “Damascus.” Current population? 254 at last count!
Background for My Poem for April 8: “Hockey and Me”:
This morning, I awoke with the idea for this poem about the sport of hockey in my head. It practically wrote itself.
