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

Posted on April 17, 2021 by Leslie Schultz

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

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”

Posted on April 16, 2021 by Leslie Schultz

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”

Posted on April 14, 2021 by Leslie Schultz

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

April 13, 2021: Happy Birthday, Karla Schultz! Spotlight on QUILTS OF AMERICA by Patsy and Myron Orlofsky and THE QUILTS OF GEE’S BEND; and Context for the Poem “A Quilt for Karla”

Posted on April 13, 2021 by Leslie Schultz

First things first! Today is the birthday of Karla, my dear sister, and I am celebrating all day long. In a way, I have been celebrating all year long, and the theme for today’s post centers on the that. First, though, I wanted to share with all of you (and with Karla’s permission) the most recent of the incredible images she sent me as a card in the mail. (As you probably know from other posts, Karla is a gifted photographer and artist. Often, when I talk with her, I hear the birds she feeds on her sixth-floor balcony, and I am in awe of her ability to capture them so unobtrusively and clearly in her photographs.)

Regarding the Poem for April 13, 2021: “A Quilt for Karla”

Since I began participating in the National Poetry Month Challenge in 2016, I have a tradition of making the poem that comes each April 13–whatever other prompt may come into play–centered on the great luck of having Karla as my sister. Today’s poem is no exception: it is inspired by her presence in my life.

The poem is, I suppose, an exploration of how love helps us piece together the scraps of life–whether in a cloth quilt or in a poem–into patterns that, while part of tradition, are also unique expressions of the moment, the individual, and the particular. And pieced in with that is an awareness of the news here and elsewhere that troubles the mind and heart deeply, how we need to balance that awareness with hope, because that is what love says to us, that hope is not empty but at least as real as pain. And that change, making something new, starts with an intention that is added to, day by day, and is not perfect but is still something well meant and useful that was not there before.

As a corollary, and with Karla’s permission, I am sharing photos of my process over the past year’s in designing (with Karla’s input on pattern and color) a special quilt for her sixtieth birthday. She has told me that it arrived safely, and that it does fit her new bed, and that it is not too warm at the moment for Atlanta weather. Check! Check! Check! I am sorry that I cannot be with her to celebrate on this special day, but I am just thrilled that she woke up this morning, and could look down and see something made just for her and know how much she is cherished in this world.

All the cutting, piecing, and quilting was done by hand, but (for the first time) I used a machine (given to me by my friend, Corrine Heiberg, her beloved Elna) to sew some of the long straight seams joining the blocks so as to make it stronger and longer-lasting.

Library Spotlight:

Among the great gifts of my time in the M.F.A. program in poetry at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana was honing my craft as a poet and taking my first hesitant stitches toward becoming a quilter. I had been enamored of quilting for several years when I arrived. No one in my family made quilts–though they sewed and knitted. I still wanted to learn, but, frankly, I had been going about it all wrong. Yes, timid bibliophile that I am, I had bought two books on the subject and read them, along with dozens of photograph-packed issues of Country Living Magazine. I suppose, I thought, that the skill might be absorbed through some from of ink-to-cloth osmosis? I wrote a poem (“The Book of Quilts”) inspired by an illustrated oral history that I have featured in another post, but I didn’t know how to take the first step toward making my own.

That didn’t happen. What did happen was that I mentioned my yearning to a classmate, Tom Ray. He said, “Oh, I can teach you how to quilt.” And he did, in one afternoon. That little kindly one-on-one lesson was all I needed to begin. I was off and running before the week was over, cutting out shapes for my first pieced project, a red and white “Drunkard’s Path.”

Also during my years at McNeese, when I worked at the Library’s circulation desk, I first learned of the compendium of Quilts in America by Patsy and Myron Orlofsky (Abbeville Publishers, 1974.) I checked this scholarly treasure trove out as many times as I could. A few years later, (when I had an income!) I learned it was out of print, but I located a used copy in great shape. (Trust me, this was a bit of a safari before access to the Internet.) I still refer to it, and am grateful for its existence.

Of the many books on quilting that I treasure, consult, and enjoy, this one is at the top of the list. The Quilts of Gee’s Bend (Tinwood Books, 2002) is the exhibition catalog for a dazzling collection of quilts that Karla took me to see almost twenty years ago at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta where she lives. If you don’t know about the Gee’s Bend, Alabama quilt artists, please take a few minutes to savor their artistry, history, resilience, and living tradition of women supporting each other, learning from each other, and delighting in inventing ways to bring beauty into the practical world of daily life.

On that visit with Karla, I was bowled over by what I saw, and no less so when my generous sister then made a gift to me of this magnificent volume.

Until tomorrow!

LESLIE

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

Posted on April 12, 2021 by Leslie Schultz

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.