Tag Archives: Leslie Schultz photography and poetry

News Flash! The Newest Issue of MEZZO CAMMIN Is Out! It Includes My Poems “A Song for Sarah Winchester” and “Goddess of Forgetting”

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The online journal of formalist poetry by women, Mezzo Cammin, was founded by the late Kim Bridgford and is now under the editorship of poet Anna Evans. The first issue under new leadership has just been published! It contains twenty-six well-crafted poems on a variety of themes by a baker’s dozen of skilled poets, arranged in alphabetical order by the poet’s last name: Kris Beaver, Catherine Chandler, Mary Cresswell, Catherine Fitzpatrick, Nicole Caruso Garcia, Katie Hartsock, Jean L. Kreiling, Diane Lee Moomey, T.R. Poulson, Catherine Esposito Prescott, Carolyn Raphael, Claudia Schatz, and Leslie Schultz.

To read the issue for yourself, and see the work of featured painter, Holly Trostle Brigham, whose newest work on Pre-Raphaelite muse Elizabeth Siddal is paired with poems by Kim Bridgford in the artist book I Wake Again, here is the link. Red hair is one focus of the collection. (If you are near Delaware, you can see the life-sized paintings from February 26 to May 29, 2022 at the Delaware Art Museum.)

I was especially taken with the understated and highly relatable humor in “Uxorious Sonnet #4 by Catherine Fitzpatrick; the timely updating of a poem Julia and I used to recite all the time (Emily Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody!–Who Are You?”) in “After the Associate Poetry Editor Tweets That Submissions Are Still Open” by Nicole Caruso Garcia; the trick-taking, stunning final line in the skillful poem, “Dealing”, by Jean L. Kreiling; and the startling imagery of Catherine Esposito Prescott’s “The World”. You will have your own favorites.

Double-web Window at the Winchester Mystery House (Leslie Schultz, 2012)

My own poems are both recent work that draw on reading and traveling and thinking done over the past decade. The sonnet, “Goddess of Forgetting”, showed up as a surprise during the April 2021 challenge of writing a new poem each day. It was inspired by a book that my Book Group chose to read together some years ago called In the Garden of Evening Mists by Malaysian novelist Tan Twan Eng, specifically by the epigraph from Richard Holmes. The sestina, “A Song for Sarah Winchester”, is a poem I have been working on for some years and finally completed in 2020. It had as its catalyst a visit in 2012 to the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California.

Winchester Rifle circa 1946

Finally, the Mezzo Cammin website also offers the deep pleasures of a video celebrating the life and work of Kim Bridgford at the 2021 Poetry by the Sea Conference and the Women Poets Timeline Project with essays on dozens of women poets in many traditions from and essay by Pat Valdata on Sumerian poet Enheduanna (2285-2250 BCE) to Kim Bridgford’s essay on contemporary poet A.E. Stallings (1968- )

Happy reading and writing! LESLIE

Large Spider Web, Winchester Mystery House (Leslie Schultz, 2012)
Dreaming of Someday–My Refrigerator Door in the Dead of Winter

THIRD WEDNESDAY MAGAZINE Publishes Winter 2022 Issue; My Poem, “Dandelion,” is Included!

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Photo taken in front of City Lights Bookstore, haunt of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and site of many poetry readings (Leslie Schultz 1988)

You can read the digital version at no cost HERE

To purchase a paper copy or subscribe (or submit your own work, check out the Third Wednesday Magazine website.)

My poem, “Dandelion,” I just learned, is the winning “50/50” poem for this issue! Such a surprise and such a delight to me because I know the competition is stiff. In fact, this issue is jam-packed with 73 poems from 65 poets. It just arrived today, and you know that I will be curled up with it tomorrow. Fortunately it is predicted to be a snow day here.

(Please note that full biographies of poets are available on the earlier broadside posts the magazine published as each poem was accepted, and they are accessible on their website. As an example, here is what you find if you go to the right-hand search bar over “Posts” and search on my last name. You can do the same for any poet in this issue. You can also subscribe, free of charge, to receive posts of newly accepted poems for future issues.)

This issue’s cover (as you will see from the link above) is a splendid visual arts collage by editor-in-chief David Jibson called “No Strings Attached.” It is an homage to the famed City Lights Book Store in San Francisico and one of its celebrated poets, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Here is a link to the Poetry Foundation’s website post on the famous (an perennially delightful) poem referenced, “Don’t Let That Horse…”)

I was unable to figure out how to reproduce the cover image for the Winter 2022 issue from the pdf provided, and I was unwilling to wait until my own print copy arrived in the mail, so I am sharing two images from my own pilgrimage there many years ago. These were taken from inside the bookstore looking out. Only in San Francisco! (Or maybe Ann Arbor!)

Also City Lights! (Leslie Schultz, 1988)

Happy Reading!

Mini Readings on THIRD WEDNESDAY’S New YouTube Channel!

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This past summer, Third Wednesday Magazine began posting mini readings by poets affiliated with the magazine on their brand new YouTube Channel. Yesterday, David Jibson, Third Wednesday’s editor, and I taped a segment in which I was able to read several poems from my published collections. The whole recording is about twelve minutes long.

To watch other short readings by TWM poets, go to the magazine’s YouTube Channel. Currently there are readings posted by TWM editor emeritus Lawrence Thomas and by Buff Bradley, Paul Bernstein, and Nancy Jo Allen. More will be added in the future.

A big “Thank You!” to Third Wednesday Magazine for everything they do to support readers of poetry (and fiction!), as well as visual and literary artists like me!

ONE ART Publishes My Poem “The Amaryllis”

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I am so pleased the ONE ART: A Journal of Poetry has published my poem, “The Amaryllis.” This poem is based on a very vivid memory of my time in Lake Charles, Louisiana nearly a lifetime ago. This online journal is one I check often, discovering new favorite poems and poets whose work I have not previously known. Take a few minutes to scroll down their archives to make your own particular discoveries of new voices and visions. (Recent favorites of mine include “My Late Husband Speaks to Me in Flute” by Faith Shearin and “In Darkness” by Ted Kooser.)

Note: One Art posts a new poem most days, so you might need to scroll down a bit, to October 17, 2021 to locate the poem. (Scroll slowly so you can read the newest poems by other poets!)

Happy Reading! Leslie

ONE ART Publishes My Poem “I Wanted to Be a Painter”

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Last spring, when a poet friend, Sally Nacker, told me about the online publication, ONE ART: A Journal of Poetry, brainchild of poet Mark Danowsky, I was reading the biography of Elizabeth Bishop by Thomas Travisano. (I posted a bit about this biography, Love Unknown, in April.) Bishop’s splendid poem, “One Art”, has been on my refrigerator, where I see it several times every day, for a long time now.

(Last week, The New York Times honored it with a close-up and succinct analysis: “19 Lines That Turn Anguish Into Art” by Dwight Garner and Parul Sehgal.)

In May, I made my first submission to ONE ART, and was delighted when I learned that Mark had accepted my poem, “I Wanted to Be a Painter”, for publication on June 22, 2021–today! I have always yearned for the visual arts, doing my best with quilting and photography, but (though dabbling) never gaining much skill with the brush myself. (Indeed, even quotidian painting tasks can cause crises of confidence for a time, as my partially painted basement stairs project, started last June, stands witness at the moment!) I wrote this poem last fall, coincidentally (or not) when Tim and I were staying in the Art Loft apartment in Lanesboro, Minnesota, (above the local Arts Guild), the same apartment where I first stayed with my friend, Ann Lacy in 2015, and where I took my cover photograph for my first collection of poems, and then, the next foggy morning, wrote the final poem (and title poem). (Below is a photograph I look from the Art Loft window that July.)

And ONE ART itself celebrates the interconnectedness of all the arts (perhaps their common root) on its home page with a superb banner photograph of an Esso station. Not only is the imaging compelling in and of itself, it recalls, with a clean twist, one of the poems of Elizabeth Bishop that I love most, “Filling Station,” from the “Elsewhere” section of her 1965 collection, Questions of Travel. The interconnectedness of the arts (and their entanglement in all of life) is much on my mind this week as I finished reading Rebecca West’s marvelous 1965 novel (autobiographical fiction of her childhood) titled The Fountain Overflows, and it has prompted me to send off for a copy of her 1928 collection of essays on art The Strange Necessity.

As I look back over my own photographs, I find few of filling stations, but I did take this one up on the North Shore when there on a trip with my friend, Jan, some years back, outside a restaurant (a different kind of filling station).

Wishing you an art-filled day! LESLIE

From the Art Loft Apartment Window, 2015)