Category Archives: Poems & Stories

April 12, 2021: Spotlight on EMILY DICKINSON: THE GORGEOUS NOTHINGS and DICKINSON: SELECTED POEMS AND COMMENTARIES; and Context for Poem “River Town”

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Our last day to linger in Amherst, and then (as today’s poem context makes clear,) returning to Northfield with a catapulting snap of the rubber band! Tomorrow, likewise, we’ll survey scenes very close to (my) home, indeed.

Published in 2013 by critic Marta Werner and artist Jen Bervin, Emily Dickinson: The Gorgeous Nothings (New Directions Publishing Corporation), this big, bold tome was the subject of an insightful article by Dan Chiasson of The New Yorker (December 5, 2016.) It highlights in a way not seen before Dickinson’s process by reproducing and analyzing her “envelope poems,” poems written on whole envelopes and scraps and flaps. These drafts in pencil (and sometimes ink) adapt to and are inspired by the triangular and rectangular shapes of the “scratch paper” that Dickinson carried with her in her pocket while she went about her daily chores in kitchen, pantry, and garden. What for most of us is hardly regarded, quickly discarded ephemera became in Dickinson’s frugal, nimble hands and through her lyrical, sometimes febrile brain something SUBSTANTIAL, that has gained monumental stature since she wrote them.

I love looking at these artworks as much as reading them. They make me think of Dickinson’s poem that starts, “This is my letter to the world/that never wrote to me.”

Indeed. Gorgeous Somethings.

Eminent to the point of inspiring awe, critic Helen Vendler prefaced her Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Harvard with an A.B. degree in chemistry from Emmanuel College, followed by a Fullbright Fellowship in mathematics. In Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), Vendler once again brings her precise and incisive intellect to bear on 150 of Emily Dickinson’s poems so as to highlight Dickinson’s perennial themes of “nature, death, religion, love, and the workings of mind and thought.” (So states the introduction, “Dickinson the Writer.”) This work is designed to browse, rather than to read cover to cover. I have discovered here poems I had not known before, as well as thoughtful commentary on ones I know well and love. My only wish is that more of the poems that I have committed to memory and love to tatters might have received here the benefit of Vendler’s thought.

Regarding the Poem for April 12, 2021: “River Town”:

Today’s poem is a kind of hymn to civic life, I suppose, centered on Northfield’s Cannon River and Bridge Square. Here are a few photos, the seamy side and the hopeful side–where I want to reside.

Capstone Event, Sidewalk Poetry, Bridge Square, Northfield, MN (Photo by Timothy Braulick)
“Peace Wager” (Spotted last April outside the local Armory two blocks from Bridge Square.)
Cannon River, Northfield, Minnesota (looking south, toward the dam and falls of Bridge Square)

April 11, 2021: Spotlight on POETRY FOR YOUNG PEOPLE: EMILY DICKINSON and THE MOUSE OF AMHERST; Context for the Poem “Seattle Weather in Northfield, Minnesota”

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Since we travelled to Amherst yesterday, I thought we’d tarry a while. These two books have delighted our whole family for many, many years. (When Julia was young, she loved poetry so much (especially Francis, Dickinson, and Frost, that Amherstian triad) that we’d recite poems in the car together to while away the time. I have videotape of her reciting, almost flawlessly, Emily Dickinson’s poem “Hope is the Thing with Feathers” when she was two and a half while she danced around the living room. (It is a good thing that the video has a date stamp or I would think I made that up.) The book above is a fabulous introduction for even the very young, as it is sturdy and is full of color illustrations. For those who are beginning to read (and draw) on their own, the little gem below offers a wainscot-eye view from Emmaline the Mouse. The young child can imagine what it might have been like to share quarters with Emily Dickinson herself, and what it could be like to become, in a small way, as Emmaline does, a poet oneself.

Regarding the Poem for April 11, 2021: “Seattle Weather in Northfield, Minnesota”:

Today’s silly poem is a new version of my annual preoccupation with the April weather, an emphatic but impotent fist-shaking at lowering grey skies and a celebration of the variability of our local weather here.

Judy’s Prairie, 2020

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE

April 10, 2021: Spotlight on TRAVELLING IN AMHERST and THE TROUBLE WITH FRANCIS; and Context for the Poem “Turbulence”

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Today, when I am longing to travel, and thinking of a pilgrimage place I have not yet been–Amherst, Massachusetts–I decided to highlight two prose works from one of Amherst’s radiant poets, Robert Francis. Though less lime-lit than Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, Francis wrote luminous plainsong prose drawn from the intense convictions and quiet rhythms of his daily life in a house he himself built and named “Fort Juniper” (because it was juniper is low to the ground and therefore resistant to damage in stormy weather. You perceive the metaphor: fame won’t blow this impoverished, vegetarian-music teacher poet off course because he is dug in.)

His poetry is, likewise, peerless.

Here is one of my favorite poems of his, and of all time. I love it so much that I have it memorized, and will, if asked, recite it at the drop of a hat–and sometimes all unasked! It is called “Sheep.” Some day I plan to write an essay about its perfections. For now, I will just say be sure to keep your eye and ear on that last sublime line.

There is so much lyrical beauty in the work of Francis, and he is also mordantly funny, a master of mock self-deprecation like Emily Dickinson. (Perhaps something in the water near Amherst?) For instance, his titles. Can a resident “travel” in the tiny orbit Francis occupied in the woods outside a small town in western Massachusetts? Yes, but not in the obvious, board-the-tour-bus ways.) And he draws the title of The Trouble with Francis (University of Massachusetts Press, 1971) from a less than favorable review of his work by the Chicago Review, to whit:

“The trouble with Francis is not that he is too happy as that his happiness seems to lack weight.” (Dyspeptic reviewer’s name unknown to me.)

Wait. What? A reviewer is weighing in on the gravitas of someone’s happiness? Preposterous and presumptuous! Hrumph, I say.

Francis had a much better response. I love how this proud and prodigiously talented Quaker-minded poet claim this critique as his own by doing the typographical equivalent of tattooing it on his forehead.

Someday, I will procure a copy of his third prose collection, The Satirical Rogue on Poetry. Absolutely worth waiting for.

Regarding the Poem for April 10, 2021, “Turbulence”

After a bout of morning writer’s block, this memory of a teen-age school trip to Tasmania came floating back to inspire a short poem of travel of the geographic and biographic sort.

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE

Orchard on Mississippi River Bluff (April 2020)

April 9, 2021: Spotlight on THE ODE LESS TRAVELLED: UNLOCKING THE POET WITHIN by Stephen Fry; and Context for the Poem “Unicursal”

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Stephen Fry is a man of many talents, that much is clear. Four years ago, during NaPoWriMo on April 21, 2017, I included a video clip of him as Jeeves, instructing his employer, Bertie Wooster, in how to accentuate the syllables of Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz” to add context to that day’s poem, “A Question of Style.

I often reach for Stephen Fry’s  peerless book on prosody, The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within (Gotham Books, 2005). Like his perfectly realized Jeeves, Fry is a master of rhythm and rhyme. Fry’s book is filled with lucid and succinct summaries of elements of poetic form presented with Fry’s devastating wit, with each poetic form illustrated by custom-made examples by Fry that edify as they amuse. (The occasional screamingly funny but x-rated quips make it unsuitable for the under-sixteen set, in my opinion, except in excerpted form.) If you are of voting age and curious about the ins and outs of iambs, or want to distinguish meter from rhythm, or crave an algorithm describing the sestina–this is the go-to book.

This book is not only a treasure trove of prosodical pearls, it is page-turning prose. No one has mastered the concept of “voice” on the page in quite like Fry. In sum, this gem is never dry, often wry, always totally “Fry.”

Regarding the Poem for April 9, “Unicursal”

Me, in the center of the now-vanished labyrinth at 114 Winona Street

Given today’s unlooked for poem, perhaps labyrinths are done with me yet!

Wishing you a lovely day,

LESLIE

April 8, 2021: Spotlight on LOVE UNKNOWN: THE LIFE AND WORK OF ELIZABETH BISHOP by Thomas Travisano; Context for the Poem “Vapid”

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Elizabeth Bishop has been an important poet for me for a long time, yet she was famous reticent about her personal life. In this beautifully written and authoritative literary biography, critic Thomas Travisano helped me to understand the intersections between her personality and life and the work these gave rise it. Understanding the person Elizabeth Bishop was has deepened my love for the work. Love Unknown (Viking, 2019) was a book I treated myself to last spring, when I knew that the pandemic would curtail many activities and open up more time for reading. (Little did I think reading it, and Bishop’s own work, would inspire me to write an homage poem to her “In the Waiting Room” while actually in my own dentist’s waiting room! But that is another story.) If you are interested in understanding Bishop’s life and work, this is the biography for you!

In future posts, I plan to share more volumes from my library on Bishop and by Travisano, just when the mood strikes. For now, on this rainy Thursday, it is time for a bracing cup of tea and some housework that requires coordination, determination, and an apron!

Regarding the Poem for April 8, “Vapid“:

Over the past twenty years, I have enjoyed many “reality” television shows. Favorites have included “The Old House” and “A Chef’s Life,” “What Not to Wear” (British and American versions), and “Project Runway.” This past week, however, I hit the wall. “Love Island”? Well, let’s just say I am not the right demographic. Time to tune in to the semi-final episode of the latest season of “The Great British Baking Show”–after, of course, brewing a cup of tea. Be still, my heart!

Until tomorrow!

LESLIE