Monthly Archives: April 2023

April 16, 2023 Spotlight on “The Writer” by Richard Wilbur and Context for My Poem, “Self as Portraits”

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Richard Wilbur

It wouldn’t be April if I didn’t return to the poems of Richard Wilbur (1921-2017), traditionally formal work marked by ” wit, charm, and gentlemanly elegance.” Today, I am thinking of a the aural portrait he created sparked by listening to his daughter, in another room, typing a story of her own creation. The clatter of old-fashioned typewriter keys is a pivotal device in this poem. “The Writer” is gorgeous on every level to me–it contains its own revision–and quietly speechs volumes of the love the parent has for the child trying hard to fledge. The link above as the full text as well as a voice clip of Wilbur reading the poem in his deep and sonorous voice. Here are a few favorite lines of mine, the poem’s second stanza: 

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.
Wyoming Typewriter (Leslie Schultz)

Context for My Poem, “Self as Portraits”:

After Wallace Stevens’s Poem “Anecdote of the Jar” (Leslie Schultz, 1980)

In the March issue of Vogue, I read a profile, by Dodie Kazanjian, titled “Vision Quest,” of a young graphic artist that held me mezmerized. The artist’s name is Sasha Gordon, and the article describes how this young person is painting self portraits to gain personal and cultural perspective. I am often moved by” the art spirit,” to use Robert Henri’s term, when I read Vogue. The clothes seem sculpture and theater, both, rather than garments, and the coverage of contemporary artists across all genres is something I am grateful for, since mostly popular culture presses forward far ahead of me. Not that I always am drawn to the van guard or even understand it, but still, it is useful to know a little of the explorations, dictions, and preoccupations of what is à la mode, as well as currently celebrated names. I had not heard of Sasha Gordon’s work before, but to my surprise it instantly spoke to me. Today’s poem, “Self as Portraits,” is dedicated to Gordon and derives from the descripton of the way Gordon applies paint to the canvas slowly and methodically and intutively, as well as to her subject matter. Not wanting to violate copyright, I have not included images of Gordon’s work here, but it can be seen online and is worth a look. Someday, I hope to view her canvases themselves.

As I recorded in a poem, “I Wanted to Be a Painter,” published in One Art two years ago, I have often wondered if I am a poet because I don’t have the skill to be a painter! Just this morning, I learned that the Academy of American Poets curates a section called Self-Portrait Poems–in case you’d like even more poetry on this Sunday in April!

P.S. Here are two scraps from my erstwhile dream of becoming a visual artist…

Self-Portrait, 1980 (Leslie Schultz)

Until tomorrow, LESLIE

April 15, 2023 Spotlight on GOD BE WITH THE CLOWN: HUMOR IN AMERICAN POETRY by Ronald Wallace and Context for My Poem, “See You in the Funny Pages.”

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Rusty Rustic Rooster (Leslie Schultz)

Lately, I have been doing some deep cleaning and sorting of the books on my poetry shelves, letting some go and keeping some, but giving each a real perusal before deciding. One I am not only planning to keep but am quite eager to reread is a collection of essays by Ronald Wallace called God Be With the Clown: Humor in American Poetry, (University of Missouri Press, 1984). Ronald Wallace was the director of the Creative Writing Program during my time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a poet who has a true funny bone, as well as deftness with every other poetic tone and key. I agree that it is swimming against mainstream currents to rank poems that are light-hearted and funny as higher (and sometimes higher) than angsty and dark poems. Certainly, to do anything like reflect the world we need scads of all kinds. (I do not forget the middle ground of the quiet lyric, for example.) Wallace asks the question of why Eliot’s “Wasteland” is exalted by critics when little analytical ink is spent on his “Old Possum” cat poems. Wallace has a cogent mind, an engaging prose style, and a true understanding of the crying need for humor at times. (As an example, consider just the title of one of the many poems he wrote for his father, paralyzed for decades with Multiple Sclerosis: “After Being Paralyzed from the Neck Down for Twenty Years, Mr. Wallace Gets a Chin-Operated Motorized Wheelchair,” from his first collection of poems, Plums, Stones, Kisses & Hooks, (University of Missouri Press, 1981).

Context for My Poem, “‘See You in the Funny Pages'”:

Ronald Wallace cites Emily Dickinson as one of his earliest influences, and to that I can say “Ditto.” In looking over his collection of essays, I was struck by how the title is drawn from Dickinson’s poem “A Little Madness in the Spring” (1356). And then, I remembered a collection of humorous sketches, Without Feathers, by Woody Allen that my best friend, Traycee, and I rolled with laughter over back in high school. It, too, draws its title from a poem by Emily Dickinson, “Hope–is the thing with feathers” (314). I encountered the Allen before the Dickinson, odd as that is to recall.

Today, I was thinking about humor in general, specifically how about how it seems to me to be at once very personal and also generational. My poem isn’t humorous but it looks back to the times in childhood and then in high school when I was learning how there can be a gap between what is held up as humor seems either strained or bafflingly pedestrian or simply crass or even downright cruel to one without the right frame of reference to receive it. (For me, the old films of The Three Stooges fall into all of these categories, while the Marx Brothers often transcend them through grace, with, and wordplay surprises. My own personal “list poem” today might cause you to think about your own favorites. If so, I would be delighted to know what strikes you as “funny Ha-Ha.”

Until tomorrow, LESLIE

Happy Dog (Leslie Schultz)

April 14, 2023 Spotlight on THE TRIGGERING TOWN by Richard Hugo and Context for My Poem, “A Sense of Place”

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Poet Richard Hugo

Richard Hugo (1923-1982), was a poet of the Pacific Northwest. Born in White Center, Washington, near Seattle, he served as a bombadier in the Mediterranean during WW II, before returning to the Seattle area. He used the GI Bill to earn a BA (1948) and an MA degree (1952) in English at the University of Washington, where he studied under Theodore Roethke. For nearly a decade, he worked as a technical writer onsite at the industrial campus of Boeing aircraft manufacturers while he concentrated on writing his own poems. Then, after the publication of his first book of poems, A Run of Jacks, in 1961, he began to teach creative writing at the University of Montana at Missoula where he worked for nearly eighteen years before returning at the end of his life to Seattle.

Hugo’s work is known for its concision, its found metaphors polished into startling imagery, and its vivid sense of place. Versatile in many genres, including a memoir and a mystery novel, Hugo published twelve books during his lifetime; three more were published posthumously. Perhaps his two most well known works at the collection of poems titled The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir (1975) and the collection of essays titled The Triggering Town (1979). As a citation on the website of the Academy of American Poets states: In his book about writing, The Triggering Town, Hugo encourages younger poets to recognize their true subject matter beneath the surface, but above all, to ignore advice about writing and find their own way. His own poems often celebrate the abandoned towns, landscapes, and people of the Pacific Northwest. William Stafford wrote, “A part of the West belongs to Hugo,” and, certainly, a territory of poetry as well.

My own copy of The Triggering Town, acquired when I was a senior in college, is well thumbed. I am especially found of the title essay. I had been wondering if there would be a natural pairing of it with a poem written this April, and, this morning, I decided today is the day. Here is a favorite sentence: “So you are after those words you can own and ways of putting them in phrases and lines that are yours by right of obssesive musical deed.” Indeed.

Context for My Poem, “A Sense of Place”:

I would say that a sense of place always matters to me as a reader and as a writer. Today’s poem makes that concern overt.

Downtown Northfield, Minnesota

Until tomorrow, LESLIE

A View of the Cannon River, South of Bridge Square, in Northfield, Minnesota

April 13, 2023 Spotlight on “A Coat,” by William Butler Yeats, Context for My Poem, “Green Coat,” and HAPPY BIRTHDAY, KARLA SCHULTZ!

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William Butler Yeats, Poet and Statesman
Embroidered Coat (Photograph by Susan Jaret McKinstry)
A Coat

I made my song a coat 
Covered with embroideries 
Out of old mythologies 
From heel to throat; 
But the fools caught it, 
Wore it in the world’s eyes 
As though they’d wrought it. 
Song, let them take it
For there’s more enterprise 
In walking naked.

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
(First published in Poetry Magazine, 1914)

This small poem by W.B. Yeats is one of my favorites, another one that I have inadvertantly memorized. Once I realized the poem I wanted to write for today, in celebration of my sister, Karla’s birthday, then I realized that I wanted this song of a poem to kick things off! (Many thanks, Susan, for responding so quickly with a photograph of your own beautiful coat!)

Is there more enterprise in walking naked? Partial as I am to embroideries, I have pondered this long and long, and I am still not sure. I am, however, so grateful for this poem, encountered first in an informal study group with Doris Kammradt and Anne Johnson, in Madison, in that in-between time after college and before graduate school. Yeats’s poems teach me over and over the eloquence of the poetic enterprise.

Context for My Poem, “Green Coat”:

I am not skilled in the art of the Selfie–not by a long shot–but I wanted to give a sense of the wonderful gift my dear sister gave to me recently. It wasn’t for any special occasion but it was received during what seemed like an unending winter when I was always cold. Once I donned this magical coat, however, I felt warmed through and through. It cuts the wind. The inside of the pockets feel like velvet. I love the color. And when I wear it, I feel my sister’s love protecting me. So, for me, this green coat is both real and mythological and came, as magical things do, all unasked for.

Until tomorrow, LESLIE

April 12, 2023 Spotlight on “Triangles” by Pablo Neruda and Context for My Poem, “Attic Story”

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Pablo Neruda

The always-inspiring Chilean poet and statesman, Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), wrote in Spanish but his work translates well into English. I have already shared (April 2022) on this blog my love of his poem, “Ode to My Socks,” and, indeed I think of that poem often when I wear the socks I knit for myself or when I am at work on a pair for someone I love. Today, I want to share a poem of his I discovered this morning as I thought about the shape of the triangle.

Triangles


Three triangles of birds crossed
Over the enormous ocean which extended
In winter like a green beast.
Everything just lay there, the silence,
The unfolding gray, the heavy light
Of space, some land now and then.
Over everything there was passing
A flight
And another flight
Of dark birds, winter bodies
Trembling triangles
Whose wings,
Frantically flapping, hardly
Can carry the gray cold, the desolate days
From one place to another
Along the coast of Chile.
I am here while from one sky to another
The trembling of the migratory birds
Leaves me sunk inside myself, inside my own matter
Like an everlasting well
Dug by an immovable spiral.
Now they have disappeared
Black feathers of the sea
Iron birds
From steep slopes and rock piles
Now at noon
I am in front of emptiness. It-s a winter
Space stretched out
And the sea has put
Over its blue face
A bitter mask.

Pablo Neruda

While I am unable to read the original, and I could not find a citation for the translator, I find this poem effective and evocative. (If you know more about this poem’s publication and/or translation history, please let me know, and I shall update this post.)

Context for My Poem, “Attic Story”:

Attic Window (Leslie Schultz)

Some of you might recall that last year there were lots of basement poems in April. Today it was this photograph I took in 2012 that inspired the poem, “Attic Story.”

Until tomorrow, LESLIE

Thai Pavillion, Olbrich Gardens, Madison, WI