Tag Archives: Leslie Schultz photography and poetry

April 20, 2021: Spotlight on THE LOST WORDS: and Context for the Poem “Japanese Maple”

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When a dear friend gave me this book for Christmas this year (thank you, Ann!) I learned another aspect to the lexicographical arts. Here is another facet of the fascinating and knotty and language-and-culture-rich issues faced by those who work to keep dictionaries alive to language as it is used.

The Lost Words by poet Robert Macfarlane and illustrator Jackie Morris (Hamish Hamilton imprint of Penquin Books, 2017) is a brilliant, “Hey! Wait a minute!” response to the announcement in 2015 that the Oxford Children’s Dictionary planned to drop a number of words that evoke the natural world (such as “acorn,” dandelion,” “ivy,” “starling,” and “wren”–all denizens of urban areas in Britain) to make way for such terms as “broadband” and “cut and paste.” For a great summary of this publication and the impetus for it, please take a look at the coverage given it by the excellent website, Brainpickings.

Macfarlane and Morris did not simply object and protest, they translated their advocacy to words and the natural world into some of the most beautiful illustrations and poems (or “spells”) that summon the magic of these endangered forms in a way that is unforgettable. This book would make an excellent gift for any adult or child logophile, and a portion of the royalties are going to Action for Conservation, a charity dedicated to inspiring young people to take action for the natural world, and to the next generation of conservationists. (www.actionfor conservation.org.) In addition a free “Explorer’s Guide to the Lost Words“, written by Eva John and intended for teachers and others is available at the John Muir Trust website.

Regarding the Poem “Japanese Maple”:

Stream, Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, 2019

I have long been an admirer of the drawf Japanese maple trees, ever since I first saw them at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. Yet in our garden of mature trees, we have not been able to find a place where one might thrive.

Note to self: take cameras to Chaska and take lots of photographs of these beautiful trees, in all four seasons!

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE

April 18, 2021: Spotlight on THE LIGHT WITHIN THE LIGHT; and Context for the Poem, “Lemon-Lime”

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This slender volume, The Light Within the Light: Portraits of Donald Hall, Richard Wilbur, Maxine Kumin, & Stanley Kunitz by Jeanne Braham, with engravings by Barry Moser (David R. Godine, 2007) is a joy to hold, to look at, and to read. Braham’s prose is both polished and lively, and she succeeds in her aim of creating short (twenty pages or so) portraits of four New England poets whose work matters to her. It is a difficult and precise art, knowing what to include and what to leave out, and Braham knows unerringly which lines to include. This concision makes her prose a natural companion with the engravings of master engraver and book illustrator Barry Moser, a transplant to Massachusetts. (See some of his ambitious projects at the site of his Pennyroyal Press.)

I came to this book already knowing the poetry of Hall, Wilbur, Kumin, and Kunitz, but I think that this fine portraiture (which includes poems and excerpts from interviews for each poet profiled) would make a good introduction to this quartet of complex writers, too, for someone who did not know much about them but wanted to know a little more and was uncertain where to begin a new acquaintance.

Regarding the Poem “Lemon-Lime”: Today’s poem is a fictional conflation of memories of being young and often mute, about the pain that comes from uncertainty and not knowing when, whether, or how to speak out, and how to know if speaking up helps or perhaps might cause more damage, even if the right words can be found in the right moment. Today, when I am no longer young (older than the Wife of Bath!), the pendulum has swung the other direction, and the more difficult thing, at times, is to bite my tongue. Same problem and same pain of uncertainty.

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE

April 17, 2021: Spotlight on A CONCERT OF TENSES: ESSAYS ON POETRY; and Context for Poem “Mizzling”

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My copy of poet Tess Gallagher’s A Concert of Tenses: Essays on Poetry (The University of Michigan Press, 1986; part of the Poets on Poetry series, Donald Hall, Editor) was a gift from my friend, Doris, in 1994 from the now-closed Hungry Mind Bookstore in St. Paul. It is heavily underlined, particularly under eloquent passages connecting poetry and memory, as in the essay titled “My Father’s Love Letters.” Gallagher grew up, as I did, for a time, amid the logging-fishing-papermaking landscape of the Pacific Northwest, and she also suffered the death of a brother when she was twenty. (I was just turned twenty-one when my own brother died.) When I read this passage, I felt she was speaking for me:

“After my youngest brother’s death when I was twenty, I began to recognize the ability of poetry to extend the lives of those not present except as memory. My brother’s death was the official beginning of my mortality….It was as though memory were a kind of flickering shadow left behind by those who had died.”

This collection of essays is filled to bursting with thoughts that catch me up. Definitely time to read these essays with the even stronger sense of my own mortality and joy in poetry that I have now, a quarter-century later!

I have to confess that looking over this list engenders “poetic essay lust,” if such a term exists. I don’t have many of these, but I have a long-standing reverence for the poetry of Amy Clampitt and a fairly recently kindled blaze of admiration for the poetry of William Matthews, so perhaps I will be filling in the gaps of my shelves later this year. For now, I will simply say “Thank you, Donald Hall and the University of Michigan Press” for assembling this chorus of thought on a subject important to us all!

Regarding the Poem “Mizzling”:

As an early responder noted, this poem emerged from a painful memory, not one I recall very often but evoked by thinking about that word, “mizzling,” and the near constant rain of my grade school days in Oregon. I remember that walk to school, and that my shoes were almost always wet. I remember losing the coins and being plunged into despair, and that it was lightly raining. I don’t remember if I found them or which coins, exactly, I was allowed to take, but my amateur coin-collector dad had all of those mentioned in the poem in his collection. We did spend hours discussing and examining coins (and also currency), an enthusiasm that Dad had gained from his first job as a paper boy. He also had a vast collection of WW II “steelies,” the subject of a poem during my first year participating in the April poem challenge.

Image for 1943 Lincoln Head Cent from Littleton Coin Company
Newly balmy Northfield, April 17, 2021

Until tomorrow, yours from a sunny and sweet April day in Northfield, Minnesota,

LESLIE

April 16, 2021: Spotlight on POETS AT WORK INTERVIEWS; and Context for Poem “Nuance”

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This collection of interviews, Poets at Work (Penquin, 1989), conducted over of many years under the auspices of The Paris Review and the editorial eye of George Plimpton and introduced by Donald Hall, is a repackaged subset of the larger and more well known, multiple volume Writers at Work series (I-VI). The several interviews with poets in series VII and VIII (Philip Larkin, May Sarton, John Ashbery, Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcot, and Robert Fitzgerald) are, lamentably, not included here. What is included, however, allows the reader to eavesdrop on conversations concerning the nuts and bolts of writing practice, as well as broader topics of biography, temperament, craft, subject, and theme for a diverse group of highly accomplished poets of the twentieth century.

Almost as interesting as the interviews are the interviewers and what they bring to the conversation. For instance, Donald Hall, an esteemed poet himself was a founder of The Paris Review, and was a true man of letters, winning kudos not only in his poetry but in his many books for children, and prose writings, as well as for his prolific work as an editor. Hall was the interviewer for these conversations with T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound. Elizabeth Spires, another acclaimed poet, whose books for children include The Mouse of Amherst, interviews Elizabeth Bishop. (Hall posits, in his introduction, that this interview might be the best of all, because Bishop knows how to tell a story well, and shares a story of a poetry reading by young Robert Lowell.)

The interviews stand alone, but taken together they add up to a sum greater than their parts. It is not mere gossip, but rather the multiple points of view toward each other, and toward the employment of an exacting (yet hazy, too) craft at a particular time and place in world history. Hall concludes his introduction by musing about this sense of generosity and community that underlies the literary enterprise in poetry, exploding the stereotypes of alienated loners working in isolation. He writes, “This community is not–or it need not be–the sordid business of favor trading; nor is it merely a series of acts of kindness, like Boy Scouts helping old folks across the streets. It resembles more nearly the DNA that uses human bodies to replicate itself. This collaboration supports a mutual and enduring endeavor. Poets do not take turns helping each other over difficulties. They work together to build the house of poetry.”

Regarding the Poem for April 16, 2021, “Nuance”:

Today’s small poem comes from pondering the letter “N” and from wondering about the boundaries between defined thises and thats. When does a cloud become rain or snow? Or dew? Or fog? The beautiful and mesmerizing shifting between one state and another (when does ripening become decay? Or blossom become fruit?) applies to states of perception and identity, too, of course, and this indeterminancy seems hard-wired (?!) into the fabric of the universe, and so into us. Who knows what we will each do next?

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE

April 14, 2021: Spotlight on THE POETRY HOME REPAIR MANUAL; and Context for Poem “Pumas”

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Iowa-born Nebraska-transplant Ted Kooser’s prose is as lucid as fresh, cold well water. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry (for Delights & Shadows, 2005) and Poet Laureate/Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (2004-2006), his poetry is both deep and accessible, sophisticated and plain-spoken. He has worked as a publisher, the Vice President of Lincoln Benefit Life Insurance Company, and as a university professor. If you haven’t read a Kooser poem lately, this short one, “A Jar of Buttons,” is one of my favorites, and has permanently changed the way I think about small repairs, small gestures. Video clips, news, and more can be found on his personal website. Though he has recently passed the torch to poet Kwame Dawes, who continues the popular weekly poetry email series, “American Life in Poetry,” that Kooser established in 2005, now, in his vigorous early eighties, Kooser is still very much an active working poet.

This book, which focuses most closely not on generating new poems but how”…the craft of careful writing and meticulous revision…” in order to communicate with readers in the most effective way, is one I return to regularly. The twelve chapter titles begin with: “The Poet’s Job Description,” “Writing for Others,” “First Impressions,” and conclude with: “Fine Tuning Metaphors and Similes” and “Relax and Wait.”

As much as I enjoy (and benefit from) Kooser’s technical advice, I even more taken with his shared thoughts about his own life and reading, the background that informs his opinions. I am engaged whether he is assessing and refining classic advice (perhaps on discussing the willingness to risk “sentimentality” as poet Richard Hugo counsels in his seminal work, The Triggering Town–Kooser is of the mind that “sentimentality” can’t be defined but “gushiness” is easier to identify–or disclosing his earliest motivations for wanting to be taken for a poet without writing a poem. He writes of his very young self, longing to look like, if not actual be a cool chick magnet, “Being a poet was looking the part. I was an artificial poet, a phony, when, by rubbing shoulders with poetry, I gradually became interested in writing it.”)

All this volume has the subtitle “Practical Advice for Beginning Poets,” it is no secret that we are all beginners each time we embark on trying to create something new. For poets and writers, that means facing the blank page, messing it up, and then fixing up the mess without losing the excitement. Although I have published hundreds of poems and written hundreds more that might never be published, which might qualify me as an intermediate professional, I have never outgrown the need for the comfort of wise counselors at my elbow, and through this volume and his own poems, Kooser is one of them.

Regarding the Poem for April 14, 2021, “Pumas”:

Yes, you get the picture. “The Blur” we called her. Two minutes before, she was a puma. Two minutes before that, an entirely different puma, with a different name and backstory. Two minutes after, she was sleeping like a floating cloud.

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE