This book was an eye-opening gift to me from a friend (Thank you, Ann!) Through it, and the membership I now hold in the Cloud Appreciation Society, along with their daily email of an image and an explanation of the science behind clouds, I have become ever more alert to the forms and beauties of the skies. I even like cloudy days a little bit better–though not completely socked-in grey skies like Northfield is experiencing in this moment. Not enlightened enough for that, clearly!
Background for My Poem “Views/Points”:
This poem is a mystery to me. The orange and white just appeared. Possibly a longing for summer was the root of this imagist construction.
Sunflower in Our Garden, 2021 (Photos: Leslie Schultz)
Yesterday’s mail brought a welcome envelope containing the newest issue of a favorite journal of mine, Blue Unicorn. As a subscriber, I welcome this journal twice a year because I know there will be something interesting in it that I couldn’t find anywhere else. This issue makes me especially happy to have because it contains my short poem, “The Craft of Poetry,” inspired by Robert Frost‘s masterful and chilling poem, “Fire and Ice.” Frost’s poem, known to most, is another one that I have memorized. Because of that, I think, the sounds of it were simply there, waiting, and that it was this tight net of rhythm, meter, and rhyme that gave rise to my own poem. (I used different rhyme sounds, but otherwise followed Frost’s nonce construction.)
This issue of Blue Unicorn also contains the best statement in a journal I have ever seen on the whole fraught topic of rejection, as well as more that eighty poems. So far I have read only a small fraction but what I have read whets my appetite. It is fun to see work by poets whose work is already known to me (A quick look finds work by Laurence Thomas, “The End of Desire”; Kathryn Jacobs, “Paying Court” and “Human Beans”; Lynn D. Gilbert, “A Sonnet for You and Yours”; John Hart, “It Seems to Me and I”–these last two playful exchanges on shifts in “correct” English usage–Dan Campion, “The Conspiracy”; and Shutta Crum, “Some, Too Indifferent to Spring Wind (for Emily Dickinson), as well as translations (by Robert E. Tanner, Thomas Feeny, and Susan McLean) of work by Alexander Pushkin, Antonio Machado, and Charles d’Orleans.) I know I will read the work in this issue many times over.
Blue Unicorn’s founding editor, John Hart, also shares thought-provoking essays on his poetry blog from time to time as the spirit moves. You can find his essays at Memorable Speech. Modern poetry is a very large tent, and Hart’s lifelong experience as a poet, editor, and critic gives him a rare perspective. His most recent essay succinctly elucidated for me one of my least favorite trends of modern poetry–known as “Language Poetry,” I learned–and also helped me understand just why this kind don’t appeal to me, but also understand its attraction for those who write, publish, and enjoy such work. As a bonus, I love the way Hart puts sentences together.
(Photos: Leslie Schultz)
Background for My Poem for April 19 (emailed to those who requested my personal poem-a-day), “Spring Frolic”:
Many of you know that Tim and I welcomed Stella into our home last month. She is a rescue Poodle-Maltese mix, just over five years old, originally from Houston. She has brought new liveliness into our house, and she just adores Julia and Julia’s guinea pigs, Peaches and Pancake. Although she hates the cold (not being used to it), she loves her walks. She will leap into the air like a trained dolphin whenever anyone dons a jacket. We look forward to warmer weather when we can take her to a local dog park and let her run to her heart’s content. (We have learned that Stella does enjoy sitting on a pillow on a garden chair when we make a fire outside, but she did NOT enjoy the recent spate of hail, pictured above.)
The air was soft, the ground still cold. In the dull pasture where I strolled Was something I could not believe. Dead grass appeared to slide and heave, Though still too frozen-flat to stir, And rocks to twitch and all to blur. What was this rippling of the land? Was matter getting out of hand And making free with natural law, I stopped and blinked, and then I saw A fact as eerie as a dream. There was a subtle flood of steam Moving upon the face of things. It came from standing pools and springs And what of snow was still around; It came of winter’s giving ground So that the freeze was coming out, As when a set mind, blessed by doubt, Relaxes into mother-wit. Flowers, I said, will come of it.
Bloodroot and Scilla, April 12, 2017, Northfield (Photo: Leslie Schultz)
Flowers will come of it, eventually. That is the promise of spring, even in the years, like this one, when it arrives on the slow boat. Richard Wilbur is a perennial favorite poet of mine. I return over and over to his surprising, supple, but never facile formal poems. He died in 2017 but in his work he lives on.
Context for My Trio of Poems, “Cinquains for Easter Morning”:
I chose the cinquain form this morning because of its containment. To me, the syllabic canvas of 2/4/6/8/2 creates an egg-like shape on the page and in the mind, too.
Poet, essayist, and environmentalist Wendell Berry has long been acknowledged as an artist as well as a seminal thinker in reimagining human interactions with the lands we all depend upon. His poem, “The Sycamore,” is not one with which I was acquainted until after I finished writing my own this morning. I find them in harmony with each other.
Sycamore, UW-Madison Arboretum, June 2018 (Photos: Leslie Schultz)
Background for My Poem “Fun Fact”:
Today’s poem caused me to return (via the internet) to Winterthur, which I explored early this month to refresh my memory about the plantings there. I kept recalling a short and charming video made by the horticulturalists and an arborist on staff there called “The Top 10 Trees at Winterthur.” In particular, I was mulling about tree #2, the Sycamore.
When I lived in Lake Charles, Louisiana, there was a very tall sycamore in the back garden of the house I rented. It offered welcome shade. I loved to look at its bark. Sometimes long peelings of bark would drop on the tin roof of the porch with a melodic crash, rather like windchimes. The only sycamore I have seen in the Midwest is in the Arboretum on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I think the harsher climate of Minnesota they would not survive long here.
What really made me think about sycamores in general, and about the denizen of Winterthur, is that way that careful shoring up of its innate tendency to hollow out in maturity is thought to have extended its life. The shoring up (concrete and metal rods) does not show from the outside, and the tree appears healthy and stable. Is there a cost to the tree for this intervention? I cannot know, only wonder.
Here are a few more fun facts about sycamores:
Sycamores are sometimes called plane trees, buttonwood trees, or water beech.
An American sycamore tree can often be easily distinguished from other trees by its mottled bark which flakes off in large irregular masses, leaving the surface mottled and gray, greenish-white and brown. The bark of all trees has to yield to a growing trunk by stretching, splitting, or infilling. The sycamore shows the process more openly than many other trees. The explanation is found in the rigid texture of the bark tissue which lacks the elasticity of the bark of some other trees, so it is incapable of stretching to accommodate the growth of the wood underneath, so the tree sloughs it off
The trunks of large trees are often hollow.
The sycamore tree is the largest deciduous trees in the Eastern United States. It grows to 30 meters tall and lives nearly 600 years.
Etymology: Middle English: from Old French sic(h)amor, via Latin from Greek sukomoros, from sukon ‘fig’ + moron ‘mulberry’.
