Category Archives: Poems & Stories

April 17, 2021: Spotlight on A CONCERT OF TENSES: ESSAYS ON POETRY; and Context for Poem “Mizzling”

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My copy of poet Tess Gallagher’s A Concert of Tenses: Essays on Poetry (The University of Michigan Press, 1986; part of the Poets on Poetry series, Donald Hall, Editor) was a gift from my friend, Doris, in 1994 from the now-closed Hungry Mind Bookstore in St. Paul. It is heavily underlined, particularly under eloquent passages connecting poetry and memory, as in the essay titled “My Father’s Love Letters.” Gallagher grew up, as I did, for a time, amid the logging-fishing-papermaking landscape of the Pacific Northwest, and she also suffered the death of a brother when she was twenty. (I was just turned twenty-one when my own brother died.) When I read this passage, I felt she was speaking for me:

“After my youngest brother’s death when I was twenty, I began to recognize the ability of poetry to extend the lives of those not present except as memory. My brother’s death was the official beginning of my mortality….It was as though memory were a kind of flickering shadow left behind by those who had died.”

This collection of essays is filled to bursting with thoughts that catch me up. Definitely time to read these essays with the even stronger sense of my own mortality and joy in poetry that I have now, a quarter-century later!

I have to confess that looking over this list engenders “poetic essay lust,” if such a term exists. I don’t have many of these, but I have a long-standing reverence for the poetry of Amy Clampitt and a fairly recently kindled blaze of admiration for the poetry of William Matthews, so perhaps I will be filling in the gaps of my shelves later this year. For now, I will simply say “Thank you, Donald Hall and the University of Michigan Press” for assembling this chorus of thought on a subject important to us all!

Regarding the Poem “Mizzling”:

As an early responder noted, this poem emerged from a painful memory, not one I recall very often but evoked by thinking about that word, “mizzling,” and the near constant rain of my grade school days in Oregon. I remember that walk to school, and that my shoes were almost always wet. I remember losing the coins and being plunged into despair, and that it was lightly raining. I don’t remember if I found them or which coins, exactly, I was allowed to take, but my amateur coin-collector dad had all of those mentioned in the poem in his collection. We did spend hours discussing and examining coins (and also currency), an enthusiasm that Dad had gained from his first job as a paper boy. He also had a vast collection of WW II “steelies,” the subject of a poem during my first year participating in the April poem challenge.

Image for 1943 Lincoln Head Cent from Littleton Coin Company
Newly balmy Northfield, April 17, 2021

Until tomorrow, yours from a sunny and sweet April day in Northfield, Minnesota,

LESLIE

April 16, 2021: Spotlight on POETS AT WORK INTERVIEWS; and Context for Poem “Nuance”

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This collection of interviews, Poets at Work (Penquin, 1989), conducted over of many years under the auspices of The Paris Review and the editorial eye of George Plimpton and introduced by Donald Hall, is a repackaged subset of the larger and more well known, multiple volume Writers at Work series (I-VI). The several interviews with poets in series VII and VIII (Philip Larkin, May Sarton, John Ashbery, Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcot, and Robert Fitzgerald) are, lamentably, not included here. What is included, however, allows the reader to eavesdrop on conversations concerning the nuts and bolts of writing practice, as well as broader topics of biography, temperament, craft, subject, and theme for a diverse group of highly accomplished poets of the twentieth century.

Almost as interesting as the interviews are the interviewers and what they bring to the conversation. For instance, Donald Hall, an esteemed poet himself was a founder of The Paris Review, and was a true man of letters, winning kudos not only in his poetry but in his many books for children, and prose writings, as well as for his prolific work as an editor. Hall was the interviewer for these conversations with T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound. Elizabeth Spires, another acclaimed poet, whose books for children include The Mouse of Amherst, interviews Elizabeth Bishop. (Hall posits, in his introduction, that this interview might be the best of all, because Bishop knows how to tell a story well, and shares a story of a poetry reading by young Robert Lowell.)

The interviews stand alone, but taken together they add up to a sum greater than their parts. It is not mere gossip, but rather the multiple points of view toward each other, and toward the employment of an exacting (yet hazy, too) craft at a particular time and place in world history. Hall concludes his introduction by musing about this sense of generosity and community that underlies the literary enterprise in poetry, exploding the stereotypes of alienated loners working in isolation. He writes, “This community is not–or it need not be–the sordid business of favor trading; nor is it merely a series of acts of kindness, like Boy Scouts helping old folks across the streets. It resembles more nearly the DNA that uses human bodies to replicate itself. This collaboration supports a mutual and enduring endeavor. Poets do not take turns helping each other over difficulties. They work together to build the house of poetry.”

Regarding the Poem for April 16, 2021, “Nuance”:

Today’s small poem comes from pondering the letter “N” and from wondering about the boundaries between defined thises and thats. When does a cloud become rain or snow? Or dew? Or fog? The beautiful and mesmerizing shifting between one state and another (when does ripening become decay? Or blossom become fruit?) applies to states of perception and identity, too, of course, and this indeterminancy seems hard-wired (?!) into the fabric of the universe, and so into us. Who knows what we will each do next?

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE

April 15, 2021: Spotlight on HOLDING ON UPSIDE DOWN: THE LIFE AND WORK OF MARIANNE MOORE & MARIANNE MOORE AND THE VISUAL ARTS; and Context for Poem “Orison”

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This biography of Moore begins with the pivotal trip she made at age 28 in 1915 to New York City, a trip that included a visit to 291, the gallery and studio of photographer of Alfred Steiglitz, headquarters for the magazine, Camera Work, and a gathering place for young modernists of all genres. The biographical study contains all the elements one would wish in the life of an artist (extensive notes, appropriate concision to enhance the reader’s pleasure, a detailed family tree, ample photographs, and a good and balanced treatment of the details of domestic life, friends and family influences, broader cultural milieu, and the intersections of art and life. Of particular pleasure in this work is the judicious use of excerpts from letters to and from Moore.

Moore’s often-anthologized poem, “Poetry,” supplies the title for this biography. (Knowing of her love for animals, see if you can spot the reference!)

Suffice to say, this was a superb literary biography, and it is helping me to read Moore’s poetry with more understanding than I could muster on my own. I have always been a little afraid of her work, somehow (those daunting syllabics!) Yet, I was a little sad to finish it last month, and so, on the strength of that experience, and to prolong it, I sought out a copy of Leavell’s first book, Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts: Prismatic Color (Lousinana State University Press, 1995.) I am keeping it for a treat, to read this summer.

In addition to helping me toward new understanding of Moore’s work, Leavell has helped me understand the modern art movement, more broadly, and its questioning of traditional forms, its exploration of shards and jarring juxtapositions and collage and pastiche–in music, the visual arts, popular culture, and the literary arts.

(I am also wondering, but have not established, whether Linda Leavell might be the sister of poet Ava Leavell Haymon of Louisiana. If so, how lovely to have a powerful scholar of poetry and a powerful poet in the same family.)

Modernist Self-Portrait, 2020

Regarding the Poem for April 15, 2021: “Orison”:

My office, looking south, with chaise longue
Looking west from my office: trellis, wren houses to be hung; green gingko tree
Yesterday–scilla under a dusting of snow

Until tomorrow!

LESLIE

April 14, 2021: Spotlight on THE POETRY HOME REPAIR MANUAL; and Context for Poem “Pumas”

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Iowa-born Nebraska-transplant Ted Kooser’s prose is as lucid as fresh, cold well water. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry (for Delights & Shadows, 2005) and Poet Laureate/Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (2004-2006), his poetry is both deep and accessible, sophisticated and plain-spoken. He has worked as a publisher, the Vice President of Lincoln Benefit Life Insurance Company, and as a university professor. If you haven’t read a Kooser poem lately, this short one, “A Jar of Buttons,” is one of my favorites, and has permanently changed the way I think about small repairs, small gestures. Video clips, news, and more can be found on his personal website. Though he has recently passed the torch to poet Kwame Dawes, who continues the popular weekly poetry email series, “American Life in Poetry,” that Kooser established in 2005, now, in his vigorous early eighties, Kooser is still very much an active working poet.

This book, which focuses most closely not on generating new poems but how”…the craft of careful writing and meticulous revision…” in order to communicate with readers in the most effective way, is one I return to regularly. The twelve chapter titles begin with: “The Poet’s Job Description,” “Writing for Others,” “First Impressions,” and conclude with: “Fine Tuning Metaphors and Similes” and “Relax and Wait.”

As much as I enjoy (and benefit from) Kooser’s technical advice, I even more taken with his shared thoughts about his own life and reading, the background that informs his opinions. I am engaged whether he is assessing and refining classic advice (perhaps on discussing the willingness to risk “sentimentality” as poet Richard Hugo counsels in his seminal work, The Triggering Town–Kooser is of the mind that “sentimentality” can’t be defined but “gushiness” is easier to identify–or disclosing his earliest motivations for wanting to be taken for a poet without writing a poem. He writes of his very young self, longing to look like, if not actual be a cool chick magnet, “Being a poet was looking the part. I was an artificial poet, a phony, when, by rubbing shoulders with poetry, I gradually became interested in writing it.”)

All this volume has the subtitle “Practical Advice for Beginning Poets,” it is no secret that we are all beginners each time we embark on trying to create something new. For poets and writers, that means facing the blank page, messing it up, and then fixing up the mess without losing the excitement. Although I have published hundreds of poems and written hundreds more that might never be published, which might qualify me as an intermediate professional, I have never outgrown the need for the comfort of wise counselors at my elbow, and through this volume and his own poems, Kooser is one of them.

Regarding the Poem for April 14, 2021, “Pumas”:

Yes, you get the picture. “The Blur” we called her. Two minutes before, she was a puma. Two minutes before that, an entirely different puma, with a different name and backstory. Two minutes after, she was sleeping like a floating cloud.

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE