Category Archives: Poems & Stories

April 3, 2018 NaPoWriMo Challenge Poem “Spring Morning”

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Spring Morning

To approach the poem at the end of your mind
you must keep walking through this new-fallen,

savage-but-sweet April snow. It is, after all,
National Poetry Month all month long, and you

just need to keep going through milky pre-dawn
darks, across the ghostly outline of the labyrinth

to the west of the house, moving without tracks,
without startling the young rabbits grazing

on frost-stiffened grass or halting the rapturous
circling of eagles coursing over black waters

like sails of windmills. Dare to cross over
the Cannon River’s thinnest sheen of renewed ice

on a bridge of concrete and milled steel, knowing
that these cantilevers of form will carry you forever

toward the setting sun at dawn, will guide you
gently, inexorably, down

toward all that waits tangled, unfurled,
glittering but (as yet) unborn.

Leslie Schultz

Thanks to the reader who pointed out yesterday’s missing link to the poem, “A Jar of Buttons,” by Ted Kooser. I have added it to yesterday’s post, and it is also HERE.  One of the books I am most looking forward to reading is Kooser’s The Poetry Home Repair Kit published in 2007 by the University of Nebraska Press.

Check out other participants in the NaPoWriMo Challenge!

Until tomorrow, Leslie

April 2, 2018 NaPoWriMo Challenge Poem “Fate”

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Fate
for Pablo Neruda

A small hole has opened
beneath my foot,
in the dense woven black
of my cotton sock.

I see startled whiteness—
my granular skin,
clean as a peeled
winter onion.

I skin off the sock
with its tiny new eye,
converse of growth
on white potatoes.

I think to fling it
wherever things go,
worn out of service,
imperfect now;

but, seeing my fingers
bearing their marks—
alluvial strata
of weather and woe—

wound round the toe
of the aged sock,
this moves me to find
a spool of black,

to seek a sleek steel,
(slender remedy)
to thread its clear eye.
To blink. To retry.

Leslie Schultz

I have been thinking a lot about socks lately, as I knit along on a new one most days. Yesterday, I discovered a hole in a (mass-produced) sock I was wearing, and that led to this poem. After I wrote it, I thought of two favorite poems, this one by Pablo Neruda, and then this one by Ted Kooser–with clear evidence that his spare style is appreciated in China!

Check out other participants in the NaPoWriMo Challenge!

Hope to see you tomorrow! Leslie

April 1, 2018 NaPoWriMo Challenge “Vernal Verities”

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Vernal Verities

Corn and poppy,
snake and blade,
rise up from seeds
cast in the shade.

Full moon rises—
blood red or blue,
in harvest gold
or ice-white hue.

Eggs are hidden
in wet grass.
Yearly mysteries
come to pass.

Spill jellybeans!
Carve up the ham!
Alert the Tyger
and the Lamb.

Old Sister Ceres
dances still.
Demeter dwells
behind that hill.

Leslie Schultz

Happy Easter! Happy Spring!   Leslie

Check out other participants in the NaPoWriMo Challenge!

Ready? Set? GO! In Anticipation of National Poetry Month 2018!

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Elizabeth Barrett Browning Daffodil from My Garden (2016)

One week from today–Sunday, April 1–is not just Easter Sunday and April Fool’s Day but the first day of National Poetry Month. For the third year in a row, I am planning to take on the National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) challenge to write a poem each morning and then publish it here. If you would like to know more about this annual event, and to see who else has taken up the challenge, take a look at the website generously hosted by Maureen Thorson, a Washington, D.C. poet.

Recently, someone asked me, “Who are your five favorite poets?” Only five? I found I couldn’t answer! Yet the question has been reverberating in me for days now. I have been thinking about which poets’ work I turn to again and again, each for distinct reasons. All of these have influenced my own work and, more importantly, given me great and abiding joy.

So, I am embarking on a maneuver worthy of April Fool’s Day. I am playing a trick on myself in deciding to share here a longish but necessarily incomplete list of those poets who have enriched my life with their own work. These are in no particular order, and have been listed without reference to my book shelves. Some I have met in person, some only through their work. The Universe of Poetry is vast and always expanding, and I am (sadly) limited to English and translations into English. I have included only the poets I return to again and again–and I know as I draft this that it is woefully incomplete. Scroll down, and see if your favorites are here. (I know that your own list will be different.)  If you see any glaring omissions, do let me know! (As new names occur, I am adding them to the list(s) in purple–but still without recourse to the perusal of shelves–a heroic act of self-restraint!)

Happy Reading! Happy Reciting and Declaiming! Happy Writing!

Poets from the Old World

William Shakespeare
Geoffrey Chaucer
Dante
Petrarch
Horace
Virgil
Homer
Basho
William Wordsworth
Edith Sitwell
Alexander Pushkin
William Butler Yeats
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Rumi
Robert Browning
John Clare
John Keats
Wendy Cope
T.S. Eliot
Stephen Fry
Phillip Larkin
Ted Hughes
Seamus Heaney
W.H. Auden
Thomas Hardy
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poets from the New World

Emily Dickinson
Walt Whitman
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Billy Collins
May Sarton
Nancy Willard
Richard Wilbur
Rita Dove
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Natasha Trethaway
Susan Stewart
Maura Stanton
Maxine Kumin
James Wright
Frank Stanford
James Tate
Margaret Atwood
Ted Kooser
Wallace Stevens
Robert Service
Sylvia Plath
William Carlos Williams
Elizabeth Bishop
Robert Lowell
Mary Jo Salter
Marianne Moore
Robert Hass
Anne Sexton
Robert Frost
Robert Francis
Ron Padgett
Naomi Shihab Nye
Amy Lowell
Henry Longfellow
Louise Erdrich
Pablo Neruda
Janet Beeler Shaw
Alfred Nichol
Rhina Espaillet

Poets Whom I Have Been Lucky Enough to Encounter and Share Thoughts About Specific Poems

Amy Clampitt
Kim Bridgford
Karen Kelsay
Sally Nacker
John A. Wood
Doug Green
Stella Nesanovich
Ken McCullough
Rob Hardy
Emilio DeGrazia
Leo Luke Marcello
Ronald Wallace
Kelly Cherry
Janet Beelar Shaw
David Bottoms
Justin Caldwell
W.D. Snodgrass