Author Archives: Leslie Schultz

April 3, 2023 Spotlight on Sylvia Plath’s “The Moon and the Yew Tree”; The Poet’s Tarot by Two Sylvias Press; and Context for My Poem, “Almost Morning”

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Sylvia Plath has been an important influence on my own work since I first began reading her poems when I was sixteen. I have in mind to write some more about how I stumbled over her body of work and how dazzling I found it in a later post. For now, a little about a specific poem. (For a wonderful essay on Plath by Kim Bridgford, visit the Women Poets Timeline Project at Mezzo Cammin.)

For so many years, Plath’s poem, “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” has remained with me, as powerful art will do. Written in 1961, “The Moon and the Yew Tree” was published that year in The New Yorker, and was one of seven poems published together in The New Yorker in the August 3, 1963 issue, about six months after her untimely death. I first read the poem in my treasured first edition copy of The Collected Poems: Sylvia Plath (Ted Hughes, editor; Harper and Row, NY, 1981).

“The Moon and the Yew Tree” begins with these lines:

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.

As I understand it, the surface imagery was inspired by the view of a tree in the churchyard neighboring her dream house-turned-prison in the English countryside in Devon, but most of the description draws deeply from Plath’s own inner terrains.

In the decades since my first encounter with this poem, I have also discovered a light-hearted but serious creative tool, “The Poet’s Tarot,” published by Two Sylvias Press. On the last day of March, I idly drew one card from the deck, the major arcana card XVIII dedicated to Plath. Not surprisingly, this card correllates with The Moon in more traditional tarot decks, and is an indicator of deep emotions and psycholgical constructs, powerful but often at least partly submerged from conscious awareness. In other words, the card most attuned to Plath’s way of working as a poet. And I can tell her seminal poem was at the very back of my mind when I arose this morning to a view of the moon through tree branches.

Context for the Poem, “Almost Morning”:

Well, this is an absolutely accurate description of the setting moon this morning, seen from an upstairs window at my house in Minnesota, though only I would have seen it that way. The look of the actual moon was inflected through memories of my long-gone Grand Aunt Isabel, my paternal grandfather’s youngest sister, whose mittens of white rabbit fur I inherited during my last year of high school. (They were very warm. Two years later, they were consumed with relish by my roommate’s yearling beagle whose name was Karma.) Isabel’s generation vied with each other over furs, I recall, something I half-understood but that also terrified me in some kind of inarticulate way. I think this poem was an attempt at articulating that complicated not-quite nostalgia.

(To receive my poem via email, send me word at winonapoet@gmail.com.)

Until tomorrow morning,

LESLIE

April 2, 2023 Spotlight on W. H. Auden’s Poem, “Musee des Beaux Arts” and Context for My Poem, “The Big Oof”

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Pieter Brugel the Elder: “The Fall of Icarus” (1560), Musee des Beaux Arts, Brussels

This celebrated painting from the 16th century has inspired many other works of art, including Auden’s almost equally well-known poem from 1938. Auden’s poem has been a favorite of mine since I first encountered it in 1978, and I reread it often. As it is still protected by copyright, I will quote only the familiar first lines:

About suffering they were never wrong, 
the old Masters: how well they understood
its human position,....

If you would like a little context about this poem’s composition, you can read about it here.

This poem (and the painting and myth from which it derives) invite the contemplation of failure, specifically of the “pride goeth before a fall” variety. It is manifestly true that the most successful and productive people fail the most often–simple law of averages, the more one does, the more ‘oopses’ there are along the way–but these stalwart ones pick up and move on more readily, on most days, than I do, but I can say that I don’t always give up. (And I do derive a great deal of encouragement from art in general and ekphrastic poetry, in particular. In fact, I learned just now, in preparing background for this post, that David Bowie’s film from 1976, “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” was inspired by the poem and the painting, both of which appear in the film. I am now going to seek out the film!)

(Note: I regret that my vestigial WordPress skills do not allow me to insert the French accent aigu where it should be, on the first ‘e’ of “musee.’ Mea culpa!)

Not Flying So High: Crow Feather in the Graveyard Snow

Context for My Poem, “The Big Oof”:

Among the many joys of daily life for me is stumbling upon a new word or new expression. Today, while chipping away at the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle, I came across a term new to me, one I recognized immediately as one that describes a certain kind of public discomfort with which I am woefully familiar. The eponymous title for six lines of (somewhat sonorous) blank verse were fun for me to write, rather especially as that compositional time came in the wake this morning of a big thud of a rejection that I could have done without encountering today. That icky Icarus feeling, fortunately not fatal.

Ah, well! So it goes for me, and Icarus, and maybe sometimes for you, too? It must be the way we learn, darn it.

If you are one of those readers who elected to receive the daily poem via email, I would be interested to hear whether you have heard this new lingo, “The Big Oof,” before and if you think the slight poem I made captures its essence–or maybe misses the mark? If the latter, do tell me. I might wince a tad, but I want to know!

Wishing you a wince-free day,

LESLIE

April 1, 2023 Spotlight on Academy American of Poets and Context for My Poem “April Foolish: Overnight”

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First Scilla, March 25, 2023

Welcome to National Poetry Month 2023!

Context for Today’s Poem, “April Foolish: Overnight”: Here in my hometown of Northfield, Minnesota, March departed like a wet and roaring lion–rain, thunder, lightening, high wind–and April entered the same way but that few degrees colder needed to translate a rainstorm into a full-scale blizzard. We had about an inch of new snow every hour for a while there, embellished with continuing lightening flashes and driven by gale-force winds.

I am sure that I am not the only one to feel that Nature is pranking us here, covering newly emerged buds and ground-cover with more than six inches of new snow, especially with temperatures rising past the melting point predicted for today and even higher in the days ahead.

Arbor Vitae Bent Low

Note: If you are not yet signed up to receive my poem each day in April, but would like to do that, please let me know!

Spotlight on the Academy of American Poets:

It probably comes as no surprise that I am a card-carrying member of the Academy of American Poets. (You can be too! Just elect to pay annual dues and reap a host of benefits including a celebratory poster in April.) In case you don’t know, through their website, poets.org, they are big sponsors of National Poetry Month, a celebration now in its twenty-seventh year, and they offered a free, curated “Poem-a-Day” email to anyone who wishes to receive it.

They offer many other free resources, too, for readers, teachers, and poets alike, including a terrific data base of poems (searchable theme, occasion, form, or poet’s name) and more than 3,000 biographies of classic and contemporary poets.

Happy April! Here’s to finding out what we are meant for!

LESLIE

Upcoming: National Poetry Month! My Final “Poem-A-Day” Challenge & Daily Posts on Literature I Love (April 1 to 30, 2023)

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Winona Street Garden in Snow

In Northfield, as I write this, snowbanks still prevent clear visibility for drivers, but in the past few days the thaw has begun. Perhaps one reason that April is especially appropriate for National Poetry Month is that it is a month so full of swift changes in weather, landscape, and growth, at least in these temperate zones. I look out now on rotten mounds of snow and growing patches of muddy soil but I know that by April 30 there will be a translation to the sweet smell of green grass, clouds of new green leaves overhead (where currently bare branches stand against the sky), and blooming plants everywhere. A painter’s palatte of color after a loooooong season of blue and white.

Garden of Quiet Listening, Carleton College Campus (2022)

For the eighth–and, I believe, last time–I am going to tackle the Poem-A-Day challenge. As I have done for the past couple of years, I will write a new poem each morning and then email the “catch of the day” to those who wish to receive it. Here on the Winona Media blog, I will spotlight something I love by another poet or writer, and I will also include a note on the back story for that day’s poem.

To receive my poem each day via email, just send me an email at “winonapoet@gmail.com” and I will add you to the list. (If you received the poems last year, then you’ll be on the 2023 list unless you let me know that you want to opt out.)

I hope that you will find a little extra time for nature and art, in whatever form you enjoy most, in this new season of Spring 2023!