In Northfield, as I write this, snowbanks still prevent clear visibility for drivers, but in the past few days the thaw has begun. Perhaps one reason that April is especially appropriate for National Poetry Month is that it is a month so full of swift changes in weather, landscape, and growth, at least in these temperate zones. I look out now on rotten mounds of snow and growing patches of muddy soil but I know that by April 30 there will be a translation to the sweet smell of green grass, clouds of new green leaves overhead (where currently bare branches stand against the sky), and blooming plants everywhere. A painter’s palatte of color after a loooooong season of blue and white.
Garden of Quiet Listening, Carleton College Campus (2022)
For the eighth–and, I believe, last time–I am going to tackle the Poem-A-Day challenge. As I have done for the past couple of years, I will write a new poem each morning and then email the “catch of the day” to those who wish to receive it. Here on the Winona Media blog, I will spotlight something I love by another poet or writer, and I will also include a note on the back story for that day’s poem.
To receive my poem each day via email, just send me an email at “winonapoet@gmail.com” and I will add you to the list. (If you received the poems last year, then you’ll be on the 2023 list unless you let me know that you want to opt out.)
I hope that you will find a little extra time for nature and art, in whatever form you enjoy most, in this new season of Spring 2023!
Tipton Poetry Journalis based in Indiana and took local root in 2002. Today, it attracts and publishes work from poets not just from the Midwest but from those based nationally and internationally. I am very pleased that the Winter 2023 issue, #55 for this seasonal quarterly, includes my own poem, “Notes on Design.”
The journal can be read online HERE; print copies can be ordered through Amazon. It contains work by 37 poets as well as a Editor Barry Harris’s review of Reckless Pilgrims by Allison Thorpe. Out of so many poems that pulled me in, I was particularly taken with Ted Kooser’s “A Lake of Starlight,” Patricia Joslin’s “Kintsugi,” Wally Swist’s “Looking at Putin,” and “Spectral Bodies,” by Amit Shankar Saha.
I was immediately drawn to this cover art, a collage by Caitlin Rafferty of Foxboro, Massachusetts, called “Badinage.” I think of this word as meaning a kind of teasing repartee, sort of a Spencer-Tracy back-and-forth. At first, I thought the title of the piece referred to the fragments of text echoing the birch trees and table legs, a kind of conversation between trees, wood, and paper, perhaps. Then, when I read the about the other elements, where I expected to see “yarn” instead I read “embroidery thread.” Aha! The scale is smaller than I had realized–the whole piece only 10″ by 8″ and is even small than standard sheet of paper. This wit is actually a perfect objective correlative for the contents of this journal of narrative poetry, since each of the 62 poems by as many poets builds up an entire world within the miniature scale of a short poem.
As I write this, I am reflecting on the contents. I have read every one. All were skillful and made me think. Many, I know, are poems that I shall return to time and again. None were by poets already known to me. It was difficult to select only a few to call out, but I shall limit my spotlight to just six, less than 10 percent!
“Kalia” is by Roderick Bates of Vermont. It deftly draws the gentle exchange of world views between the speaker’s freshman roommate, a young Hindu man, and his mother, a proseltyzing Christian.
“The Stone Woman on the Seawall” by Texas poet Amanda Auchter gives eloquent voice to a sculpture memorializing the devastating hurricane that struck Galveston in 1900. The poem has added resonance due to our world’s accelerating extreme weather in 2022.
“You Were Skittish” by Lorraine Jeffery, a poet from Michigan, a poem about the connections and gulfs between humans and other animals, made me gasp and then tear up at its unexpected ending.
“Union Square” by Don Hogle, accomplished poet and dedicated traveler, holds a bittersweet image in its last lines that I don’t think I will ever forget.
“After Bishop” by Natalya Sukhonos, a poet and educator born in Odessa, Ukraine who grew up and currently lives in the United States. In this free-verse poem, Sukhonos alludes to and echos the elegaic mood of Elizabeth Bishop’s celebrated villanelle about loss, “One Art,” but makes the formal and personal landscapes all her own.
My favorite? If pushed to choose, I would go for “Reclaiming Your Inner Emily Dickinson” by Barbara Unger, recognizing my own rueful-joyful emotions regarding recent quarantine mandates. Ungar, an accomplished poet, translator, and teacher, gets the tone exactly right in this advice that speaks compellingly to my introverted nature.
I think that this issue of Naugatuck River Review is one in which the reader can safely and happily judge the book by its cover.
If writing a poem (or letting a poem flow through you onto the page) is like a flower blooming, then publishing a poem is akin to that flower being pollinated–visited–carried beyond where it is originally planted.
That is certainly my feeling when I look at the most recent cover of this journal I respect and enjoy. I am glad to have my own poem, “Wraith,” included among poems by people whose work I know, such as Ted Kooser (a hero of mine,) Dan Campion, and Allison Hicks, and by other poets with whom this issue of The Midwest Quarterly acquainted me.
Wishing you a late summer filled with lazy dreams and riveting reading!
This morning, the phone rang early. It was Mark Heiberg calling to tell me that Elvin had died, quietly and peacefully, earlier this morning, in his sleep.
Recently, Elvin had had a very trying few years healthwise. For the past few months, at his request, he had been in hospice care. His death was not unanticipated, therefore, but the loss looms large.
The Heiberg family has published his obituary today; a service is scheduled for Wednesday, June 15, 2022 at St. John’s Lutheran Church in Northfield. What follows is a personal remembrance posted with Mark’s permission.
As all who knew Elvin and his late wife, Corrine, are aware, they were both dedicated to Northfield and were also enthusiastic travelers. They met one summer in Glacier Park, and always enjoyed planning, taking, and reliving trips in the U.S., Europe, and to such far-flung places as New Zealand. Elvin, in particular, was fond of train travel–he even read train timetables for pleasure! After Corrine died, Elvin and I took a number of car rides around the Northfield area and spent many companionable hours as armchair travelers. Elvin had a large collection of travel slides (conveniently translated into DVDs by his sons) and it was great fun to hear about these trips. I began to be able to tell which images were taken by Elvin (panoramic vistas) and which by Corrine (close-ups of flowers and people.)
In planning for what turned out to be our last visit together, in February 2022, Elvin alerted me to be certain to look up when I arrived at the lobby of Orchards of Minnetonka where he was living. Why? Elvin was an enthusiastic vexillologist. He had lent some of his collection of flags to be displayed on the balcony in honor of the Winter Olympic Games.
Once I arrived at his assisted living apartment, we looked at slides of Norway and New Zealand, those mountainous landscapes that Elvin told me he loved the most. He wanted to continue on with one more country, but I could tell he was tiring even if he didn’t want to admit it. Always gracious, when I took my leave of him, he said, “We’ll meet again and talk of Switzerland.” When I got to my car, his words were echoing in my mind. I realized the line was a gift of perfect iambic pentameter. Before I turned the key in the ignition, I took out pen and paper and I wrote it down.
I am so very grateful to have known Corrine and Elvin Heiberg. They were kindness itself in welcoming Tim and me, and later Julia, to our neighborhood in Northfield. None of us will ever forget the many, many ways that they made us feel loved, made us feel at home. We are so thankful our lives intersected with their own.
Below are two poems that Elvin inspired this year.
LESLIE
Neighbors
Each morning, for months now,
I write a card and send it to Elvin
my old neighbor, now no longer
in Northfield. We talk on the phone, too.
Yesterday, he told me
the Parkinson’s had advanced.
He awoke paralyzed, his heart
in his throat, afraid to swallow.
I send him image after image
of the old neighborhood
in fall glory. It is all
I can do, these semaphores
of affection, like hanging
bright cloths on the line
of days, hoping
never to reach the end.
Leslie Schultz
Birches Outside Orchards of Minnetonka
On Going
We’ll meet again and talk of Switzerland,
of trains and clear lakes and snowy mountains.
Twenty years neighbors, thirty years friends,
we’ve shared our stories. Now we join our hands.
You made a pleasant life with prudent plans.
You are ready for whatever Heaven sends—
to join your golden bride, Corrine, to stand
with her, in perfect memory again,
and walk without stumbling, fear, or pain
away from earth, into a higher plane:
this is our common journey’s charted end.
My train comes later, but we’ll meet again.
Leslie Schultz
Corrine and Elvin Heiberg, Bridge Square, July 2011
