Category Archives: Poems & Stories

April 11, 2024 Delightfully Difficult Dactyls, Part I: Considering Longfellow’s “Evangeline”

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AT-mos-sphere

Yesterday, a friend’s question reminded me of the classic epic poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: “Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie.”

CAN-dle-light

Longfellow is a poet of great accomplishment. His works, once wildly popular, enabled him to support his large family. Though rarely read today, his poetic achievements still reverberate, nonetheless, in popular culture. Robbie Robertson of The Band wrote and recorded two songs inspired by “Evangeline.” Sung by Emmylou Harris, with The Band, in The Last Waltz, “Evangeline,” recounts the basic plot of Longfellow’s poem in summary form. Another song, The Band’s “Acadian Driftwood,” expands the poetic license originally taken by Longfellow in expounding upon the history of how the Acadian people were forceably driven (between 1755-63) from Nova Scotia, during “Le Grand Derangement.” Years later, some of these refugees arrived in the countryside of what is now Louisiana. Here, the French-speaking, Catholic Acadians created the distinctive Cajun culture. (A tour of Louisiana yields many instances of Evangeline as a place name–from a whole parish to a dormitory on the LSU campus. In a few places, sculptures of Evangeline can be found.)

(In Minnesota, where Longfellow set the action of a subsequent epic, rendered in another rare-in-English form, trochaic trimeter, “The Song of Hiwatha,” we have a replica of Longfellow’s house, built in the early 1900s by an admirer, Robert “Fish” Jones. It stands in Minneapolis, near the top of Minnehaha Falls. I have never managed to visit–it is often closed–but perhaps this summer I shall be successful. If not, I can hike down and look up to see the slender but stunning cascade.)

CUM-u-lus

My own mind is filled with iambs, that two-part poetic “foot” so common in English, said to mimic the heartbeat: da-DUM. I love it. Still, I am curious about what I might learn from studying the dactylic form, the three-part poetic “foot” more common in Greek and Latin than in English. (As many of you know, the name of this meter comes from the Greek word for “finger.”) It goes DUM-da-da (or as I think of it, recalling Ballroom Dance lessons, “Long-short-short.” This is the structure of a human finger, considered from the palm to fingertip.

In recent months, I have making lists of words and phrases that hold this dactylic arrangement of stresses. (See photo captions above.) Yesterday, I committed to memorizing the Prelude–the first 19 lines–of “Evangeline” and to reading over the next few weeks or months–yes, aloud!–all five archaic-sounding Cantos of the poem. I don’t know whether I shall ever be able to write a stanza in dactylic hexameters (lines that contain six more-or-less dactylic feet) but I know I will have a lot of fun trying.

Who knows? I might even move on to “The Song of Hiawatha” and the challenge of trochaic trimeter!

Tomorrow, a bit more on the modern use of dactylic meter.

LESLIE

April 10, 2024 Announcing a Poetry Reading on 7:00 p.m. Tuesday, May 7, 2024 at the Northfield Public Library–I Will Read with Poet Scott Lowery

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A big thank-you to Tyler Gardner of the Northfield Public Library for constructing this banner, and to Raymonde Noer for my author photo!

One of the best things about having other poets as friends is that when they publish books filled with thoughtful, insightful, musical poems you can be delighted for them. I met Scott Lowery many years ago in his then-home city of Winona. It was the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Competition that brought us together. We both have had winning entries. Scott’s work–whether in traditional forms, like sonnets, or in more organic shapes–is truly stand-out. I am delighted that he arranged for a reading to showcase Mutual Life (Finishing Line Press, 2023) here in Northfield so that you can meet him, too.

Scott’s work is topical yet timeless. Each of the twenty-three poems in his new collection shimmers with specific observation and language that manages to be at once flinty, spare, and distilled, yet also lush,  filled with melody, and extravagantly memorable. Taken together, these poems ponder how humans struggle through turbulent times, awash with keen (but often unarticulated) hungers for individual relevance and connection. This collection invites us to broaden our humanity, to look up and out, as well as deep within.

In addition to a selection of poems from Mutual Life, Scott will also share some of the poems in his award-winning collection, Empty-Handed, originally published in 2013 and recently reissued by its publisher, Northfield’s own Red Dragonfly Press. In fact, Scott’s idea is to make the event a little more “Northfield.” Scott and I realized that our work shares some key themes, including hometown life, a Minnesota sense of place, inspiration from the art of others, climate anxieity, and the lessons gained from family. When he asked me to share the podium for this event, we saw an opportunity for a reading in which our poems might have a kind of conversation with each other. It will be an experiment for us, and it is one I am looking forward to!

I hope that you can join us on Tuesday, May 7 to meet Scott and hear him read his wonderful poems. LESLIE

April 9, 2024 Writing Poems for Fictional Characters, Part Two

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Many thanks to those readers who took the time to wrestle with my question about whose (fictional) poetic voice shone through the hatchling poems for fictive characters that I shared on April 6. I truly appreciate your help–you know who you are!

It helped me to get your thoughtful responses. One such response, from a very accomplished writer of fiction, I will share here, since she shared it publically in the Comments Field:

“The age of a poet is always young. The place from which a poet creates can exist in all ages. I can’t discern the work of an elderly artist of any genre except maybe in skill and sophistication, both of which I see and read here. I wouldn’t have said “This is Leslie Schultz’s work” if you hadn’t told me it was, but knowing, I recognize your mind and heart and intellect in the compact poems packed with internal rhyme and evocative imagery. Which isn’t to say you can’t/didn’t write in other voices. If we can create characters, we can think and write and feel in their experiences, however close to or foreign from our own (if anything is).” Jan Newman

As to the fictive authorship of the six shared poems?

Older Poet?
Younger Poet?

“Study of Cloud Rapture from the Shore” Older Poet

“Jenny Stubtoe” Younger Poet

“Candlelight at Point Reyes” Older Poet

“My First Shasta Soda” Younger Poet

“The Geode” Younger Poet

“White Egret, Green Field” Older Poet

Wishing you clear directions for your own day’s journey, wherever and however you are headed–LESLIE

April 8, 2024 Eclipse Thoughts

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Garden Sunflower, 2021

What kind of event is it when a solar eclipse is, itself, eclipsed by cloud and rain? That is our situation here today. Elsewhere in the world, people are gathered for the rare show of the Moon passing in front of the Sun, a stately and celestial pas-de-deux.

To mark the occasion, I am publishing a poem that has not yet, I think, seen the light of day, but it was inspired by the solar eclipses in 2013, and by the Northfield Sidewalk Poetry competition held that year.

Is the Moon afraid
of its dark side?
Is the Sun proud 
of its flare?
Can I accept
my whole, wild heart
when it holds 
too much to bear?

Leslie Schultz

(I submitted three poems that year, including this one, and a different one–a celebration of pollination–was chosen, which can be seen below.)

Last week, I spotted this (below) posted in the Northfield Public Library–always a place for community and timely programming! Of course, wherever you are, when you look up into the sky, do protect your eyes from direct views into the sun.

May you see something rare today!

LESLIE

April 7, 2024 Playing with Words and Colors

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Since last summer, I have been reading about color at the same time I have been working on a new quilt. It is important for me, as a literary artist, to have something engaging that is mostly non-verbal. Gardening, quilting, knitting, cooking, and especially the instant gratification of photography offer resting places when I feel myself growing overly heady and wordy. Nonetheless, words inform my understanding of all of these other fields and help to sharpen my visual perceptions.

Last December, my friend, poet Barbara Geary Truan, introduced me to the work of painter, teacher, and color theorist Josef Albers. She had recently seen an exhibition of his work, a slice of his famous “Homage to the Square,” which challenges what the viewer knows about color with startling and subtle juxtapositions. Recently, she and I had a conversation that made us realize that we had both been pondering an idea from color theory–that colors aren’t stable, that they shift depending upon what other tones, hues, tints, colors to which they are adjacent–and applying it to language. Words, too, shift. Meanings shade and nuances, as well as connotations, bloom and change depending upon context.

This book not only has intriguing content, it is wonderfully designed, and it includes a “Glossary of other interesting colors.” (Yes, I have inked in even more color names!)

For me, the shuttling back and forth between visual beauty and verbal art weaves through the texture of my days, gives my life more depth and delight. I suspect that this is the same for you, too. (Add in scent and sound and motion and there is never a moment not to be engaged by the offerings of the world and the thoughts of how one might engage with life and art.) For me, this is the fountain head of Poetry-with-a-capital-P, not only the words arranged on the page in an individual poem to summon the inner and outer worlds, but everything that makes the kalidascopic page possible.

Enough words for today! Below are a few more images.

Wishing you all the joy of your senses today, and all the reverberations it brings to your thoughts,

LESLIE

Inspiration for the Christmas Quilt–a card we sent years ago from the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Center block of the quilt under construction
American Swedish Institute, Exterior, 2016
American Swedish Institute Exhibit, 2026