Author Archives: Leslie Schultz

My Chosen Birthday–June 21, 2023

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Sometimes Life really is a bowl of cherries!

It was an enchanted day here yesterday, with time in the garden, many communications of the best kind, dinner with special friends, and, walking home with Tim, the sight of Venus and the Crescent Moon floating in a golden post-sunset sky.

Thank you, all my dear family and friends, who created a day for me that was a cascade of kind wishes and beautiful surprises. You will be hearing from me individually, but today I wanted to send a heartfelt message of gratitude to you all.

This year, the longest day was also the sweetness.

BLUE UNICORN Has Published Its 46th Issue #2 (Spring 2023) and Includes My Poem, “Conception”

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Blue Unicorn always holds delights and surprises for me. With this issue, my delight started on the cover, with the photograph by Helen Schoenhals Hart taken at Black Lake, Michigan. Artistic, perfect for the journal, and it made me laugh out loud! I can’t recall when another cover of a literary journal has elicited that multivalent response from me!

Among the poems between the covers are a host of intriguing translations — including English versions of work by Antonio Macchado (Spanish), Guilliame Apollinaire (French), Ch’ Oui or Uisun (Korean) — as well as work by contemporary poets who write in English. Of these, I was drawn to many, particularly “Pink Moon” (a deft and multifacted evocation of the Supermoon we all experienced in April of 2020) by Dion O’Reilly of Sorquel, California, and “Who Cooks for You?” (an existential riff on hearing the cries of nearby barred owls) by Gary Metheny of Greensboro, North Carolina. I am so glad that my poem, “Conception,” is in their company.

April 30, 2023 Spotlight on THE ENGLIGHTENED HEART by Stephen Mitchell and Context for My Poem, “The Beauty of Emptiness”

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Poet, writer, and prolific translator Stephen Mitchell is learned and lucid in his translations. This volume, which has been in my library for nigh on three decades, feels to me as timeless as anything I have read, and I return to it again and again because it stresses the joy to be found through the shift in focus that comes through giving up stressful thoughts–through meditation, sudden insight, or through dawning awareness of the impermanence the imbues everything, through embracing “the dance.” I also appreciate the range of voice and culture represented by this slim volume. It seemed a good last offering with which to bring these “April Spotlights” to a close.

Stepehn Mitchell

Context for My Poem, “The Beauty of Emptiness”:

I suppose that this last poem for the month–and the 240th one for me generated in April over eight years–appropriately regards the exhale, the release, the letting go as a natural process and one to be celebrated, rather than mourned.

With many thanks for your kind attention to my posts and poems this April.

Wishing you well,

LESLIE

Norwegian Bookcase, Vesterheim Museum (Leslie Schultz, 2017)