Postcard: Easter 2021
Category Archives: Poems & Stories
April 3, 2021: Spotlight on THE POETRY LIFE by Baron Wormser; and Homage for Standish Henning
Library Spotlight
I love to read fiction about the writing life. This collection of short stories, The Poetry Life (Cavankerry Press, 2008), offers ten short stories by poet and novelist Baron Wormser. Each one gives the reader the sense that she or he is part of the imaginative and physical world of a poetry you want to know better. I think only a poet who is also a gifted prose writer, as Wormser is, could have rendered so vividly these portraits how the work of William Blake, William Carlos Williams, Elinor Wylie, John Berryman, Weldon Keyes, Anne Sexton, Gregory Corso, Sylvia Plath, Audre Lorde, and Joe Bolton have affected their readers. And I suspect that this will be one of my summer re-reads!
Regarding Today’s Poem
We all have moments of seizing up, especially when a blank mind greets a blank page. Sometimes relaxing into memory helps. During my junior year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I was extremely fortunate to have had two back-to-back semesters under the tutelage of renowned English professor Standish Henning. These two classes covered the entire canon of Shakespeare’s plays, along with a healthy slice of his sonnets. I not only learned about Shakespeare’s work, I learned how to write academic prose.
Last month, I learned of Mr. Henning’s death from a friend (who still lives in Madison and who thoughtfully sent me his obituary.
Rarely does a short obituary sum up a life so accurately. He was, indeed, “…a man of great depth, humor, and decency, a man much loved.” Clearly, he lives on in the many, many lives he affected, including my own.
That same junior year of college was the time I first encountered singer-songwriter-musician Tom Waits (Memorably at a live concert–for free, because I was an usher at the University Theater. I had no previous awareness of his work, but I promptly went out to by his Blue Valentine record album.) And it was while living in Madison that I first fell into the life-changing poetry of William Butler Yeats. In writing this poem today, I was thinking of his “Lines Written in Dejection” (one I memorized a few years ago in a zeal of memorizing poems I love) and “The Circus Animals Desertion.”
I hope none of these esteemed gentleman–Henning, Yeats, Waits–mind my slender effort titled “No Poem Today.”
Until tomorrow,
LESLIE
April 2, 2021 Spotlight on THE WILD BRAID: A POET REFLECTS ON A CENTURY IN THE GARDEN by Stanley Kunitz
It is warmer here, today, and windy. If the wind abates, we are thinking of having a fire in the garden at dusk to relax after a long but productive week.
Library Spotlight on
A poet whose work I care deeply for, Stanley Kunitz, famously wrote that “a garden is a poem that is never finished.” And I feel that I am never finished reading and rereading his prose autobiography by way of a garden narrative, The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden. This account of the making his East Coastal garden in Provincetown, Massachusetts was published by W.W. Norton in 2005, when Kunitz was celebrating his 100th birthday by still tending to and enjoying his garden. It is lushly illustrated with photographs and adorned with excerpts from Kunitz’s work as a poet, but the focus is on the nitty gritty of gardening, the exhilaration and the heartbreak of amending soil and amending airy ideas by making room for the ideas your own patch of earth has to offer.
Born on July 29, 1905, Kunitz lived a life active in mind and body, winning the National Book Award in 1995 and serving as our national Poet Laureate — for the second time — in 2000.
This volume opens up in many directions, making it a wonderful gift for anyone who delights in gardens, poetry, photography, and thoughtful autobiography highlighting persistence, integrity, and a willingness to listen to what is and what might be.
REGARDING TODAY’S POEM:
These two sonnets, “The Exchange,” show the two points of view and are twins, in a way. After hours of writer’s block this morning, all it took was one old uncomfortable memory, an iambic pentameter first line, and the hope of exorcising the memory. The second sonnet was the gift, seeing the whole encounter from the other side, at least in my imagination! Both turn on questions and self-questioning.
Until tomorrow!
Leslie
April 1, 2021: Welcome to National Poetry Month! Spotlight on DON’T READ POETRY by Stephanie Burt; & An Overview of My Plan for Sharing Poems This April
Welcome to National Poetry Month, when discriminating readers everywhere celebrate our most ancient and ever-new literary art form! As many of you know, I am modifying the way that I share a new poem written each day this month, a challenge I have enjoyed taking on each April since 2016. (Details can be found HERE.)
In addition to writing and sharing new poems, I am planning here to spotlight one book each day from my personal library, something that has deepened my knowledge of and pleasure in this most ancient of literary art forms. I am inspired this year by a quote from Marcus Tullius Cicero, first brought to my attention by former neighbor and passionate reader and writer, Barbara Bonner in 1985–a pithy bit of wisdom that I think of almost every day:
“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
(For those who prefer the original, ” Si hortum in bibliotheca habes, deerit nihil”)
And for an interesting commentary on clarifying that clarifies the translation and provides a sense of historical context for the quote, please take a look at this lovely blog post at Lost and Found Books.
In that spirit, I am today sharing a few photographs of our inner and outer gardens, and will post updates on April 30, 2021. It is always such a transformation in Minnesota, those weeks from the end of March until the beginning of May. Here is what it looks like at the moment, inside our house and out.
We have had blooms inside recently from the plants we have wintered over in our east and south windows. A good thing, as now that the snows have receded, it still looks quite bare outside.
Yet, upon closer inspection, there is some greening of the grass this week, and even a few hardy blooms.
We are currently watching the emerging spears of our stalwart daffodils, daylilies, and newly planted spring bulbs, including an assortment of tulips and Asiatic lilies, along with white scilla. Yesterday, we saw our first returned robin of the year. Soon we will be raking away last year’s mulch of leaves, watching the new leaf buds open into green canopies, hanging the wren houses, repatriating the indoor plants to their preferred outdoor locales, planting seeds, purchasing starter tomato and pepper plants, and cutting a few pussy willow wands to bring inside. Stay tuned!
LIBRARY SPOTLIGHT for April 1, 2021
Tim found this intriguing book at Dragonfly Books in Decorah, Iowa two summers ago, and we are reading it together slowly. The chapters open with an introduction and then tackle the overlapping categories of poems: “Feelings,” “Characters,” “Forms,” “Difficulty,” “Wisdom,” and “Community.”
The prose is lucid, instructive, and, at times, laugh-out-loud funny, and we are enjoying Burt’s excerpts and selections from a wide range of poems–old favorites to the new-to-us examples–to illustrate her arguments. (For example, she compares and contrasts Wordsworth’s much anthologized “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” often called “Daffodils,” with Jennifer Chang’s snarky, modern-day take-off, “Dorothy Wordsworth.”)
REGARDING TODAY’S POEM:
I am mixing it up this year. Instead of (as in 2019 & 2020) choosing titles to inspire each day’s poems in alphabetical order, followed by four free-choice poems for April 27-30, I am beginning with three free-choice poems, proceeding to poems with titles in reverse alpha order, and concluding with a final free-choice titled poem on April 30. Wish me luck 🙂
Today’s poem, “April 1: Raspberry Fools,” revisits Bayfield, Wisconsin, the place where Tim and I first attempted gardening. (Incidentally, it was Barbara and Bob Bonner’s kind and timely advice that prevented the plumbing disaster alluded to in the poem!) We hope to revisit Bayfield again before too long, perhaps catch site of a rainbow there in 2022. Meanwhile, I plan to try a new dessert recipe over Easter weekend with these raspberries.
The raspberries were a gift from Julia, and I am inspired also by her introducing me to the concept of “cottage core.” This recipe is from “The Pioneer Woman” website.
That’s it for today!
Happy April 1, 2021! LESLIE
Postcard: March 29, 2021
