Monthly Archives: April 2023

April 11, 2023 Spotlight on “A Riddle” by Kelly Cherry and Context for My Poem, “What?”

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Photo by Meg Theno

Kelly Cherry (1940-2022) was one of my teachers at UW-Madison. We had not remained in touch directly, but I continue to read and admire her work. After writing my own poem for today, which takes the form of a riddle, I thought one of her short poems that I have read so often that, without even trying to, I have committed it to memory. I was saddened to learn this morning that Kelly Cherry died last year. (Her own website is kellycherrybooks.com.)

This favorite poem of mine is from her book, Relativity: A Point of View (Louisiana State University Press, 1977). 

A Riddle

My beauty is beyond compare
And easy reach. No man would dare
To comb my loosed effulgent hair.
I keep my distance but on rare
Occasions condescend to bear
Eight things that move a man to prayer
(Yet none a child), then disappear
In broad daylight beyond blue air.
Man's grasp still falls just short of there.

Answer

A comet. Coma means hair. According to a verse
published in the seventeenth century, the comet was
thought to bring "wind, famine, plague, death to kings,
earthquake, floods, and direful change."

Context for My Poem, “What?”:

The answer to my riddle is rather obvious, I think: thwarted ambition.

Lately rejections from editiors have flown in thick and fast, making me realize that the roots of my amibitions for my work, which I tend to think of as modest, must run deeper than I usually care to acknowledge. An iceberg structure, perhaps, with 9/10s below the level of consciousness? In any case, it helps to attempt to pin the emotion to the page in the form of a poem.

Now, to dust off my hands and move from black and white into the colorful, uplifting space of the garden!

Crossed Purpose (Leslie Schultz)
Approaching the Buddha (Leslie Schultz)

Until tomorrow, LESLIE

April 10, 2023 Spotlight on “My First Poems” and Context for My Poem, “A Story of Student Art”

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Everybody has to start somewhere. For me, with poetry, that was in Third Grade when I was eight years old. That was when, under the kindly encouragement of a beloved teacher, Mrs. Mumford, I went from being entranced by poetry’s music into trying to make my own poems.

After I wrote today’s poem, “A Story of Student Art,” I couldn’t think of anything that would make a suitable spotlight. And so, I thought I would share a bit of raggedy evidence of the blessing of having a really good teacher. (While I know these scraps are laughable, I don’t disown them because they remind me of how exciting it was to write each small set of lines, embellish each as best as I could, and put it in the basket for Mrs. Mumford to see. I can’t recall a single verbal comment that she offered but I know that I felt she beamed approval on me nonetheless. This gave me my first experience of an author reaching an audience. If I wanted to, I could draw a through line from “My First Poems” to this blog, embellished not by wildly erratic crayon lines but with the hasty snaps of an amateur photographer.

May we be tender with our early efforts!

Context for My Poem, “A Story of Student Art”:

This poem (Prose poem? Flash fiction?) evolved from a very vivid dream last night. After writing it, I decided to share this earliest work, above. I am still pondering this newest poem, thinking of how important teachers are to us but at the same time that they can never see what we see. I have been fortunate enough to know several wonderful teachers–as a student and now as treasured friends–and their work and steady kindness fills me with awe. Their encouragement, like the warmth of the spring sun, makes it possible allow the seeds within us germinate, grow, and flower, and eventually be shared. And I know that students, too, are teachers, even when they don’t know it.

There is something here, too, that speaks to the need to edit and revise. And that we can never tell it all, no matter how big the canvas, how epic the poem, how long the novel.

Nonetheless, it is important to allow the work to emerge fully before we get to work with the scissors. Here’s to allowing those planted seeds to flourish. Reaping will come in its own season.

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE

April 9, 2023 Spotlight on “Sunday Morning” by Wallace Stevens and Context for My Poem, “Flower Power Pop Up Shop”

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Elsie Kachel Stevens, Wife and Muse to Wallace Stevens and Model for the Mercury Dime

Wallace Stevens’s magnificent poem, “Sunday Morning,” seemed just right for this Easter Sunday. It was first published in Poetry Magazine in 1915, in an abbreviated form at the request of founder and then-editor Harriet Monroe. Stevens later restored the cut stanzas in 1923 when he included it in his first book-length collection, Harmonium. The link above will take you to the entire poem. If you scroll down, you can also find a link to the abbreviated form in which this poem made its 1915 debut. The Poetry Foundation website also has a solid bio of Wallace Stevens and the texts of many others of his distinctive poems. In case you haven’t read his “Sunday Morning” in a while, here are the first five lines, the first sonorous sentence:

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.

Here at 114 Winona Street, in April, we have the complacencies of flannel pajamas and the black-and-white freedom of the Maltipoo to accompany our late coffee and oranges on this Sunday morning. I am pondering the history, psychology, and semiotics of clothing under supremely well-written treatise by novelist Linda Grant called The Thoughtful Dresser: The Art of Adornment, the Pleasure of Shopping, and Why Clothes Matter, which is especially delicious to do in my current state of L.L. Bean-inflected dishabille. Soon, I will be dressed and in the kitchen to dress up in Easter finery the top of a key lime pie I made yesterday, a special dish for Tim and me to share in the garden later with a friend.

Life is good! Today, I can feel the renewal symbolized by Easter traditions.

Context for My Poem, “Flower Power Pop Up Shop”:

Happy Easter! LESLIE

April 8, 2023 Spotlight on Poet Lucille Clifton and Context for My Poem, “Gratitude Journal”

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While I have known of Lucille Clifton (1936-2010) and her award-winning poetry for many years, it was not until recently when a dear friend introduced me to Clifton’s poem, “Blessing the Boats,” that I really looked deeply into her work. (Thanks, Susan, for challenging me/encouraging me to commit this one to memory!) After that upclose reading, I bought her a copy of her National Book Award Winning collection New and Selected Poems: 1988-2000. In it, I was delighted to learn of her poetic treatment of the art form of quilting. (In fact, her collection, Quilting, (1991) has this lovely poem that I memorized as the last one.)

A line from her review years back from Antioch Review provided the epigraph for today’s poem. Writing is a way of continuing to hope.  Lucille Clifton

Context for My Poem “Gratitude Journal”:

Last evening, I had a conversation with someone that touched on Gratitude Journals. I shared that the practice has been very helpful to me at times, and I was thinking specifically of this journal of my own.

The short entries are fitful but heartfelt, made since Monday, January 11, 1993 to Monday, January 22, 2023 with still a few pages left. Here are a few examples from twenty-six years ago, days I would not otherwise remember:

Tuesday, August 28, 1997 “I am grateful for the words of world citizen Nelson Mandela.”

Monday, September 8, 1997 “I am grateful for vivid dreams. I am grateful for things that work as they should!”

Friday, November 28, 1997 “I am grateful for Mom.”

Sunday, November 30, 1997 “I am thankful for a wonderful soup made from Yellow Indian Woman beans. I think that harvesting them myself added to the flavor I was able to perceive.”

Yellow Indian Woman beans from our 2022 crop

Then, this morning, I looked at the banner for these posts, and remember with gratitude how I “saw” this image in western Minnesota as Tim, Julia, and I drove to Morris for a college visit. I didn’t want to interrupt things, so I didn’t ask to stop to take a photo, but we stopped for lunch a couple of miles down the road. I could not stop thinking about this photograph waiting to be taken. Tim cheerfully agreed to backtrack after lunch, and Julia cheered me on. I was so happy and relieved that the box car was still on its siderail spur, waiting. I often think about the annonymous artist who “penned” this single word that means so much to me. There is no greater gift we can give ourselves than having a greatful heart, and I do have that this morning, thinking of all of you, of my cherished memories, my abundant current life, and my feelings of hope for our individual and collectives futures.

Now into the kitchen to squeeze fresh limes–in April! In Minnesota!–to make key lime pie for tomorrow. Two fabulous days ahead.

Wishing you abundant joy and the time to notice and share it. LESLIE

Me, in Front of the First Quilt I Made, Thanksgiving 1988

April 7, 2023 Spotlight on Poet Philip Levine and “A Story,” and Context for My Poem, “How It Must Be”

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American poet Philip Levine (1928-2015) was accomplished by any measure. The Poetry Foundation website profile on him says “The author of numerous award-winning poetry collections, Philip Levine was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2000. In 2011, he was named the 18th U.S. Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress, and in 2013, he received the Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Award for proven mastery in the art of poetry.”

Levine’s poem, called “A Story,” is an accomplished illustration of the universality of personal storytelling, and how it is image and memory that transforms a generic house into a a place that means, easily or uneasily, home. The poem also grapples with how one’s schooling dovetails or deviates from the world seen by an individual at any given time or place.

Gold Pan by Leslie Schultz

Context for My Poem, “How It Must Be”:

I have been thinking a lot about the power of story, the human susceptibility to the narrative pull, if you will. For the past two years, I have been plunged again into the writing of fiction, so that is part of why I am wondering about why stories are so important. At the same time, I have been hearing how enrollments by English majors are plummeting, a trend that dismays, baffles, and alarms me, a born English major. Recently, I read Nathan Heller’s analysis of the trend, titled “The End of the English Major,” in the February 23, 2023 issue of The New Yorker. Though the article ends on an upbeat note–that the pendulum will eventually swing away from the current emphasis on STEM, STEM, STEM–I am puzzled that the value of studying the structures and uses of the English language, which I think structures the way speakers of English reason and apprehend the social and natural worlds is now an eclipsed discipline. (By the way, English is now the most commonly spoken language on our planet, with an estimated 1.5 billion speakers.)

But what do I know? At the same time that interest in examining celebrated literature of the past seems to be declining, at least as a committed speciality, enrollments in Creative Writing M.F.A. programs are at an all-time high, and undergraduate creating programs seem to be flourishing, too. A 2018 article from IowaNow, a publication from the state university housing the most prestigious of creative writing graduate programs, reports that “the popularity of UI’s creative writing major explodes.” That program, only established in the fall of 2016, was the only humanities program place in the top ten declared majors. It was expected to enroll 50 majors the first year and increased to 200 majors by 2023, yet in its second year of existence the program already had 526 declared majors. Clearly, the power of story and the power of exploring language is alive and well. (It is also cheering to me to read that bricks and mortar bookstores, selling printed words on paper, are making a comeback!)

The Shakespearean sonnet I penned for today, “How It Must Be,” is this morning’s attempt to grapple with all of this. As I found the poem taking shape, I also found myself grateful for my old teachers, not only those in the Creative Writing Program of the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison but also those like Standish Henning, who introduced me to the powerful and subtle sonnets Shakespeare wrote, and William Gibson, who heroically created a class that yoked together eight weeks of Walt Whitman followed by eight weeks of Emily Dickinson. My only regrets from my undergraduate years are that they went by too quickly and that I was not able to register for the UW’s “Physics for Poets” class. Perhaps in my next life?

(If you wish to receive a copy of today’s poem and haven’t already, via email, let me know!)

Until Tomorrow, Happy Reading! Happy Writing! Happy Pondering!

LESLIE

Pansies on the Front Porch by Leslie Schultz