Author Archives: Leslie Schultz

April 27, 2023 Spotlight on TOTALLY WEIRD AND WONDERFUL WORDS Edited by Erin McKean and Context for My Poem, “Moromancy”

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Who doesn’t love words? The sounds, the connotations, the denotations, the multifaceted meanings and pronunciations and histories, personal and otherwise? I often recall exactly when I learned a new word, either on the page or through the medium of the ear. That sense of expansion, juxtaposition, and possibility for use is one of the most delightful aspects of a being alive, I find. I guess my friends know that about me!

This offering from Oxford University Press (2006), Totally Weird and Wonderful Words, edited by Erin McKean, arrived on my own shelf late last year as a Christmas gift (Thank you, Beth!)The cover declares this gathering of unusual words as “A whimsical lexicographical petting zoo,” and I agree: this sums up not only the substance of this summoning of rarely encountered words but its spirit as well. It is the updated edition of an earlier title by lexicographer McKean that contains more words, all arranged alphbetically with etymologies, helpful pronunciation clues, a logophile’s bibliography of Oxford Press’s dictionary offerings, and a guide to coining one’s own candidates (correctly, from Greek and Latin roots), words that don’t exist but simply should.

The very first word I chanced upon late last fall was “lacustrine.” I still haven’t used it in a poem, but one day I will. (It means “associated with lakes”–the lakey version of “riparian” or “associated with rivers”–and a useful word for a poet who lives in the Land of 10,000 Lakes (really north of 14,000 at last count.) Until I see how to deploy it effectively, I shall keep it in my pocket like a polished stone.

Context for My Poem, “Moromancy”:

Today’s poem, “Moromancy”, takes an off-kilter look at human attempts at forecasting and was inspired by an entry in Erin McKean’s reference book (above). It means either “foolish divination” or “telling the future by observing the behavior of fools.” And yes, I had to add it to the spellchecker dictionary!

Until tomorrow, LESLIE

April 26, 2023 Spotlight on THE SECRET LIVES OF COLOR by Kassia St. Clair and Context for My Poem, “Polychrome”

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This is the most recent book added to my culled library. I bought it just yesterday morning. The excitement is akin to that of a new box of 100 crayons!

Look! A Rainbow of Cut Edges!

To have a clearer look at the table of contents, please see the link below. (In addition to thoughts on individual colors, there are fascinating general remarks on optics, color perception, and helpful indices. Meanwhile, here is an Impressionistic taste of the interior.

Context for My Poem, “Polychrome”:

My Collage of a Quilt–Photographs of Fabrics to Create a Bagua

Yesterday, I took some valuable advice from a book I will spotlight before the end of the month on good bookstores. I allowed myself to not simply picked up the book I was after, but I allowed myself to browse our local independent bookstore, Content. There, at the very back of the store, on the bottom shelf, I saw the book spotlit today: The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair (Penquin Books, New York, 2016). Sat down to explore its structure and style. And, feeling very excited, brought it home.

So far, I have only read a tiny sliver of its pages but I am certain it will be a permanent resosurce. I have always felt that color is medicine. Too many cloudy days make me feel sick, and I think that full-spectrum light enhances health because it contains all possible color. Linquistically, this resource has great resonance because it showcases the names we have devised for different tints, shades, and hues. I have been enjoying the history of common-name colors and becoming acquainted with names antique or otherwise obscure to me previously. I have also been making mental note of the color names I perceive and use that are NOT here! I feel sure this will provide not only pleasure on first reading cover-to-cover but serve as a kind of color thesaurus for my work as a poet and writer. I think it will help me to be more precise, and it will probably also lead to new ideas for poems.

Case in point: Last night, I read about an ancient pigment called lead white–long-lasting and terribly toxic. I thought that might lead to a poem about poisons. Yet, this morning, I awoke thinking about the seemingly colorless, white or bleached buildings of the Mediteranean world, and how shocked I was to learn in an art history course in college that they were originally highly colored. The result is today’s poem.

Until tomorrow, LESLIE

April 25, 2023 Spotlight on THE THOUGHTFUL DRESSER by Linda Grant and Context for My Poem, “Once: Wyoming”

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For several weeks now, I have been resavoring Linda Grant‘s perceptive prose in her non-fiction work, The Thoughtful Dresser: The Art of Adornment, the Pleasures of Shopping, and Why Clothes Matter. (Scribner, NY, 2009). (It is hard for me to believe that I have so far missed her prize-winning fiction–perhaps this summer I shall be able to remedy that!)

Context for My Poem, “Once: Wyoming”:

Photo: Pete Zarria (Flickr) “The Mint Bar, Sheridan, Wyoming”
The pocket watch I bought on that day

I think today’s poem, “Once: Wyoming” was sparked by my reading of Linda Grant’s treatise. It reminded me of the experiments of dress I made as a college student, and made me think about how we all sometimes try to dress the part when we aspire to some role or other. Specifically, I was remembering a shopping expedition in a city foreign to me–Sheridan– when I was just twenty years old and clearly seeking out an identity that fit. I was also having a lot of fun!

There is pleasure and pratfall in this kind of exploration, of course. Somehow chiming in my brain is this tangent, from Alexander Pope, inscribing his pithy definition of “wit” on two of his signature couplets” from “An Essay on Criticism,” written in 1711, when he was twenty-three.

“True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd;
Something whose truth convinced at sight we find,
That gives us back the image of our mind."

I still wonder what, if any, connection exists between what one sees in the mirror and what one sees on the page one has labored over.

Until tomorrow, LESLIE

Postcard of artwork by Gene Zesch that hung on my wall after my return from Wyoming–it still cracks me up!

           

April 24, 2023 Spotlight on “Stanley Kunitz” by Mary Oliver, and Context for My Poem, “Fairy Tale Quilt”

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Garden Magic (April 24, 2023)

I have shared my love of Stanley Kunitz and Mary Oliver separately before on this blog. Today, I want to share one of my favorite poems of Oliver’s about her friend. Certainly gardens and poems are magic places. Maybe those who succeed in creating something transporting do have a little bit of the magician in them, at least in a fleeting way, to participate in the everyday magics of growing plants and shaping words.

Stanley Kunitz 

I used to imagine him
coming from his house, like Merlin
strolling with important gestures
through the garden
where everything grows so thickly,
where birds sing, little snakes lie
on the boughs, thinking of nothing
but their own good lives,
where petals float upward,
their colors exploding,
and trees open their moist
pages of thunder -
it has happened every summer for years.

But now I know more
about the great wheel of growth,
and decay, and rebirth,
and know my vision for a falsehood.
Now I see him coming from the house -
I see him on his knees,
cutting away the diseased, the superfluous,
coaxing the new,
know that the hour of fulfillment
is buried in years of patience -
yet willing to labor like that
on the mortal wheel.

Oh, what good it does the heart
to know it isn’t magic!
Like the human child I am
I rush to imitate -
I watch him as he bends
among the leaves and vines
to hook some weed or other;
I think of him there
raking and trimming, stirring up
those sheets of fire
between the smothering weights of earth,
the wild and shapeless air.

Mary Oliver (Dreamwork, 1986)

Context for My Poem “Fairy Tale Quilt”:

Little Red Riding Hood

This quilt, as the poem makes clear, was made by my grandfather’s mother, Mary Houghton Pressel, in Detroit in 1930, when she was a young and active mother. To shape the poem, I transformed history, since, as you can see, I had different images framed. To share these with you this morning, I decided to photograph them in our garden.

If you look closely, you can see the old flannel sheets peeking out on the right-hand side. As a quilter myself, and one who spent two hours yesterday in a losing battle to mend one of my own recent quilts, I am really happy to know that in some sense quiltmaking has a history in my own family.

Until tomorrow, LESLIE

The Three Bears

April 23, 2023 Spotlight on SHAKESPEARE AFTER ALL by Marjorie Garber and Context for My Poem, “Shakespeare in a Park”

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For anyone who needs occasional clarification and context on Shakespeare’s plays and the Elizabethan world that gave rise to them, this reference by critic Marjorie Garber is a welcome resource. Readable and well-researched, Shakespeare After All (Anchor Books, New York, 2004) weighs in at nearly two pounds and nearly 1,000 pages, but its enlightening scholarship is presented with clarity and occasional levity. It gives twenty-first century readers a sense of how the plays were first received as well as how their merits and qualities have weathered over the centuries. Today, the traditional day when we celebrate the birth of William Shakespeare, bardic wellspring of so many English words and linguisitc vivacity, I wanted to share my regard for this perennial companion to the plays.

Context for My Poem, “Shakespeare in a Park”:

This morning, I was thinking about my first experience with Shakespeare. I already knew his name but until third grade I had not experienced his work directly. Naturally, I found it baffling, opaque. But also oddly compelling. In writing this poem, I began thinking also of how baffling I found what I heard on the television news, saw in headline form in magazines and newspapers, and overheard in snippets of adult conversation. I am still baffled by politics and popular culture most of the time but still find seemingly random juxtapositions, like silk of one apparent color shot under with another color, another set of meaning.

The poem, “Shakespeare in a Park,” tries to give voice to that preoccupation as well as to a childhood memory. Portland, Oregon is known as the City of Roses, and the production to which I allude, “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” was held in the city’s International Test Rose Garden in Washington Park. I could no more make sense of the humor in this “Civilian Comedy” (thank you, Marjorie Garber, for this term) than I could understand why Ernest Borgnine of McHale’s Navy was supposed to be funny–he frightened me more than the Big Bad Wolf, and almost as much as descriptions that began surfacing the next year (1969) of the My Lai massacre. I couldn’t make sense of why people talked about burning flags and burning bras. I do know that I had loved meterical language (“Twas the Night Before Christmas,” “Madeline’s Rescue,” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee”) as a very young child, and 1968 was the year I first began to write my own poems. Perhaps the impulse was (and still is) an ongoing attempt to make sense of the worlds inside and around me.

Until tomorrow, LESLIE