I have just learned that tomorrow evening’s reading at Content Bookstore in Northfield, Minnesota will be livestreamed, and anyone can be in the audience long-distance, as it were. To join me, simply click on this link: https://www.facebook.com/ContentBookstore tomorrow evening (Thursday, October 24, 2024) at 7:00 p.m. Central Daylight Time. The event will last about an hour.
Wishing you a splendid week,
LESLIE
I am very happy to share the news that this book, which has been a long time in the making, is now out in the world. I am just back from the Post Office after mailing some inscribed copies.
Stay tuned for more information on readings and a few other things in the days to come.
For now, just wanted share the good news with all of you!
LESLIE
You can look at the issue online for free by clicking HERE.
The print version of this issue will soon be available for public purchase for $9 at amazon.com.
The beautiful cover–which I wasn’t able to render here–has a photograph by editor Barry Harris called “Summer Shadows”. (You can see it online!)
This issue is backed with other interesting poems and reviews of two new collections of poetry. I am looking forward to sitting in the sun and reading it all in the days ahead!
Wishing you all a happy close to summer as the shadows of the season lengthen and deepen,
LESLIE
I wrote this poem, “Journey” away from home but thinking of it, this past weekend when we were staying for the first time overnight at our daughter’s house. Now we are back, in the place we first arrived in April of 1996, in the place where I feel more rooted than anywhere else on earth.
Traveling has its attractions, its benefits. It is most valuable, though, when one can return to the place journeyed from and see home afresh against the memory of other places. Below the poem are two snapshots from recent trips to Wisconsin in the past few days and, last, an image greeting us when we arrived home yesterday–something we planted years ago, blooming like never before, and a second poem, inspired by roots.
Journey Michigan—Wisconsin—Minnesota. My life’s stone has skipped over a great lake, over the mightiest river, to land, plonk! in the middle of this green prairie. Spring evenings bring the smell of manure freshly ladled onto the farmers’ fields just outside of town. You just get used to it, think of growing corn instead of sewers. Close to the house, flowering everywhere, sturdy Siberian scilla paint green grass over with washes of tiny blooms, starry, sky-blue. It’s as if a glacial lake had wandered, in flowing miniature, into the garden, swallowed its center, claimed this part-acre of river hill, swirling here where I am planted, where I bloom. Leslie Schultz
Thank you for your company on this month-long journey through April. Wishing you joy in the season ahead,
LESLIE
Advice from a Snake Lily
for Ann Wilson Lacy
Don’t despair.
I was thrust into dark earth
like an upside-down lightbulb,
like a bad idea. Grub-white,
I was covered by thin, brown paper
no one wanted to read.
Relax.
I was shunned for a long, cold
season but I did not cry. I dreamed
my involuted dreams
of sturdy roots and leaves
greener than money.
Wait.
I was not seduced by January thaws
or hurried by nudging earthworms.
I waited until my cue. Warmed awake,
that is when I knew. I made my entrance
by inches. No strip tease. An emergence.
In your moment, do not doubt.
This is my moment in the sun,
my chance to wave checkerboard blooms
like flags urging spring to race forward.
I am not bright. I do not rise very high,
yet some who see me gasp in charmed delight.
You must dive up
into the world
before you can dazzle it—
before you can leap
into who you really are.
Leslie Schultz (2017; included in Concertina)
A true highlight of this National Poetry Month happened yesterday afternoon for me in Red Wing, Minnesota. I read my poem, “A Gesture of Peace,” at the juried 23rd annual Poet-Artist Collaboration hosted by Red Wing Arts. On a rainy April day, the rooms of the Depot were filled with light and color and energy and good will–and amazing art, both literary and visual, all in conversation with each other.
Below is the text from my poem, along with a few snaps from the afternoon. The full-color chapbook for the event, featuring all the poetry and images of the visual art, and statments by poets and artists is splendidly designed and printed. Contact Red Wing Arts if you would like to purchase a copy–it is a lovely showcase and a keeper. And if you are in Red Wing, you can see the poems and art displayed, side-by-side, anytime the Depot Gallery is open, through June 9, 2024.
A Gesture of Peace For Kazuhiko Watase My friend has been folding cranes. Prayer flags of thin colored paper transform under his fingers into gentle shapes of longevity. Walking in the mountains above Albuquerque, he finds dried cactus spines—light, hollow, strong—brings them home. Now he is threading a needle, stringing lines of cranes into trembling flocks, each hanging from the thinnest support, each flock an aerial ballet of yellow and blue birds fluttering— like the silk of the Ukrainian flag, alive in the war-tattered sky. Leslie Schultz
I was impressed by the design and great skill of Sandy Bot-Miller’s art, inspired by my poem, as well as by her words: “Ironically and sadly, I completed this weaving on the exact anniversary date that Russia invaded Ukraine two years ago. I primarily concentrated on using the symbolic and meaningful cultural blues and yellows in the Ukranian flag, as well as the folded origami crane shape, as I created a response to the poet’s “A Gesture of Peace” poem. The poet’s haunting, but moving, image of yellow and blue birds fluttering…alive in the war-tattered sky”is what I emotionally focused on while creating this 23-inch circular weaving.”
Upcoming Poetry Reading:
Next Sunday, I will participate in a reading with seven other poets who participated in the 2024 Poet-Artist Collaboration. I am so excited to hear more of each person’s work and to be able to share ten minutes of my own. The event will flow as follows: Introductions by Heather Lawrenz, Assistant Director of Red Wing Arts, and then readings by Paul Schaefer, Ira Frank, Bill Quist, and Elizabeth Weir; following a short break, readings will continue with me, Jorie Miller, Walter Cannon, and then end on the high note, with poems by Joyce Sutphen. Joyce, a former Poet Laureate for Minnesota, was the poetry juror for the Poet-Artist Collaboration this year and opened yesterday’s event with a reading of one of my favorite poems, “Naming the Stars.” She is also the author of the poem on the banner displayed on the outside of the Depot, “Chickadees.”
If you can join us, that would be amazing! You can find directions on the Red Wing Arts website.
Along Red Wing’s river drive, I spotted this amendment to a traffic sign–some of my favorite graffiti ever. I hope today you spot some unexpected sign of love, hope, and peace. LESLIE
