A benefit of a leisurely book-sorting project is the opportunity to revist books again. Yesterday, I dipped into Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays (Beacon Press, Boston; 2003) by poet Mary Oliver (1935-2017). The collection brings together poems on birds from the first forty years of her publishing career, along with two essays, also on birds. Not surprisingly, it opens with her “Wild Geese,” and also not surprisingly, it will remain, along with other of her books, on my culled and dusted shelves, to be revisited soon.
Context for My Poem, “Yesterday”:
I took this still life, a little bronze replica of an Etruscan owl, that Tim and I bought decades ago on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, against a piece of Labrodorite (also known as Spectrolite) that I gave Tim for one of our wedding anniversaries. (I think the lines, lights, and shadows of this form of feldspar look like forest branches.) When I took the photograph, I was thinking of how photographers speak of “captures,” and of how poets seize upon–or are seized by–images and ideas. It seemed to me that humans in their creative modes really do resemble raptors, at least during some of the process of creating.
Then, yesterday, reading Oliver’s essay, I learned that the Great Horned Owl, a fearsome raptor, has as their prefered food, brains. Not sure that my poem of the day addresses that odd natural fact adequately, but I wanted to begin to think about this.
The first poem in Nancy Willard’s collection of poetry, Carpenter of the Sun, (Liveright Press, New York, 1974) is called “How to Stuff a Pepper with Rice.” I love the whole of it, especially the surprise of the ending, the truth of it.
How to Stuff a Pepper with Rice
Now, said the cook, I will teach you
how to stuff a pepper with rice.
Take your pepper green, and gently,
for peppers are shy. No matter which side
you approach, it's always the backside.
Perched on green buttocks, the pepper sleeps.
In its silk tights, it dreams
of somersaults and parsley,
of the days when the sexes were one.
Slash open the sleeve
as if you were cutting a paper lantern,
and enter a moon, spilled like a melon,
a fever of pearls,
a conversation of glaciers.
It is a temple built to the worship
of morning light.
I have sat under the great globe
of seeds on the roof of that chamber,
too dazzled to gather the taste I came for.
I have taken the pepper in hand,
smooth and blind, a runt in the rich
evolution of roses and ferns.
You say I have not yet taught you
to stuff a pepper?
Cooking takes time.
Next time we'll consider the rice.
Nancy Willard
I can recall reading this poem for the first time in the dingy communal kitchen of a falling-down house I rented with friends during my senior year in college. It remains one of my all-time favorites. Since then, I have enjoyed reading Nancy Willard (1936 to 2017). She has many collections of poetry and works for children, including A Visit to William Blake’s Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers, which won the Newberry Medal in 1982.
Some years ago, a friend sent me a pretty amazing book called Eat This Poem. I just love it. (Thank you, Beth!) Among all its delicious contents, however, I was surprised that it did not include Nancy Willard’s poem. This morning, I stumbled upon a blog that Nicole Gulotta has created around her hybrid celebration of poetry and cookery. Yep! It has Willard’s poem and a recipe for “Poblano Stuffed Peppers with Goat Cheese!” Life is good.
Context for My Poem, “Cookbooks”:
My Own Modest Cookbook Library
Until I moved to Northfield, I did not truly understand that neighbors could also become the dearest of friends. Within a few weeks of moving here, in April of 1996, we had been made to feel very welcome indeed. Then, at a gathering across the street for that first July 4th here, I met Raymonde who lives few houses away. The Noers have enriched our lives in countless ways, not the least of which have been many conversations about literature and life. And Raymonde is the stand-out culinary artist of my acquaintance. How lucky our family is to have had meals at her table and gifts of birthday cakes, and soups and pastry for no particular reason!
Over the weekend, we received an email from Raymonde, that she and Richard were giving away “all our books!” They were in bags, ready to donate to our massive annual town booksale, held each spring in the local ice arena. But would we like to look them over?
It was a form of cosmic joke on me, because I am sorting through books myself, a few each day, feeling liberated, too, by making the hard cuts. But it was a lovely interlude on a wet, grey April day, to be a guest in Raymonde’s kitchen, sipping her delicious coffee with cream, looking through titles, many of which were already on our shelves, but many were new to us. Tim left with six enticing selections, and later, after an hour of conversation, I carried off a further twenty. Together, we were given two baker’s dozens–largesse we shall pass on in time.
So, what did this passionate reader keep, primarily, from her large library–cookbooks! Though recipes are widely and generously available on line, there is something elemental and comforting about reading a recipe on the page, perhaps making notes, and revisiting it on occasion over the years.
I have learned so much from friends, mostly about how to make life sweeter.
Birthday Cake from Raymonde!
Until tomorrow, wishing you a delicious day, LESLIE
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 Arttwo 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…
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.”
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.
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
