Tag Archives: Leslie Schultz photography and poetry

April 11, 2021: Spotlight on POETRY FOR YOUNG PEOPLE: EMILY DICKINSON and THE MOUSE OF AMHERST; Context for the Poem “Seattle Weather in Northfield, Minnesota”

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Since we travelled to Amherst yesterday, I thought we’d tarry a while. These two books have delighted our whole family for many, many years. (When Julia was young, she loved poetry so much (especially Francis, Dickinson, and Frost, that Amherstian triad) that we’d recite poems in the car together to while away the time. I have videotape of her reciting, almost flawlessly, Emily Dickinson’s poem “Hope is the Thing with Feathers” when she was two and a half while she danced around the living room. (It is a good thing that the video has a date stamp or I would think I made that up.) The book above is a fabulous introduction for even the very young, as it is sturdy and is full of color illustrations. For those who are beginning to read (and draw) on their own, the little gem below offers a wainscot-eye view from Emmaline the Mouse. The young child can imagine what it might have been like to share quarters with Emily Dickinson herself, and what it could be like to become, in a small way, as Emmaline does, a poet oneself.

Regarding the Poem for April 11, 2021: “Seattle Weather in Northfield, Minnesota”:

Today’s silly poem is a new version of my annual preoccupation with the April weather, an emphatic but impotent fist-shaking at lowering grey skies and a celebration of the variability of our local weather here.

Judy’s Prairie, 2020

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE

April 8, 2021: Spotlight on LOVE UNKNOWN: THE LIFE AND WORK OF ELIZABETH BISHOP by Thomas Travisano; Context for the Poem “Vapid”

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Elizabeth Bishop has been an important poet for me for a long time, yet she was famous reticent about her personal life. In this beautifully written and authoritative literary biography, critic Thomas Travisano helped me to understand the intersections between her personality and life and the work these gave rise it. Understanding the person Elizabeth Bishop was has deepened my love for the work. Love Unknown (Viking, 2019) was a book I treated myself to last spring, when I knew that the pandemic would curtail many activities and open up more time for reading. (Little did I think reading it, and Bishop’s own work, would inspire me to write an homage poem to her “In the Waiting Room” while actually in my own dentist’s waiting room! But that is another story.) If you are interested in understanding Bishop’s life and work, this is the biography for you!

In future posts, I plan to share more volumes from my library on Bishop and by Travisano, just when the mood strikes. For now, on this rainy Thursday, it is time for a bracing cup of tea and some housework that requires coordination, determination, and an apron!

Regarding the Poem for April 8, “Vapid“:

Over the past twenty years, I have enjoyed many “reality” television shows. Favorites have included “The Old House” and “A Chef’s Life,” “What Not to Wear” (British and American versions), and “Project Runway.” This past week, however, I hit the wall. “Love Island”? Well, let’s just say I am not the right demographic. Time to tune in to the semi-final episode of the latest season of “The Great British Baking Show”–after, of course, brewing a cup of tea. Be still, my heart!

Until tomorrow!

LESLIE

April 6, 2021: Spotlight on THE CRAFTY POET by Diane Lockwood and Context for Poem “X = ?”

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This book, The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop by Diane Lockward (Wind Publications, 2013) is a handy resource for when I want a fresh approach to writing a poem. Lockward, poet laureate of West Caldwell, NJ since 2009, offers a free monthly poetry newsletter and helms a small publishing arm called Terrapin Press. The Crafty Poet (which now also has a sister-sequel volume) is a composite work dreamed up and coordinated by Lockward but containing craft tips and sample poems from a host of interesting contemporary poets (see contributors’ names below) thoughtfully arranged by topic–from “Generating Material/Using Time” to “Writer’s Block/Recycling” and many gems in between. Material was generated from and originally shared on her Poetry Newsletter.

Regarding Today’s Poem: “X = ?”:

As you know, I have been traveling through the alphabet backward this year. Backwards or forwards, it doesn’t matter: the letter “X” is a daunting prospect. Today, it was Lockward’s book, above, that helped me see the challenge from a fresh vantage point. From the chapter on “Voice,” which suggests locating one’s own voice by internalizing other voices through deep study and frequent reading of a poem (or poems) you love, I used the prompt by Jeanne Marie Beaumont that uses her own poem, “After” as an illustration. Her poem is inspired by Robert Frost’s “After Apple-Picking,” using the first word of his title for her title, then weaving two stanzas out of an acrostic use of the second word in Frost’s title. I am drawn to memorize and recite the poems of other poets anyway, so for me the springboard into my own poem was the idea of creating an acrostic, playing with the ideas of “X” as the unknown quantity and of mysteries encountered at crossroads.

If you would like to know more about this acrostic form, there is a wealth of information online. It is an old form, beloved of children (they enjoy making up poems based on their own names!) and poets of all ages. The trick, I think, is to balance the body of the poem carefully against the seed letter at the beginning of each line. Best of all is when the reader encounters the poem first without realizing it is an acrostic (as happened with me as I read “After.”)

Thanks for reading this! Hope you enjoy today’s construction project!

LESLIE

April 5, 2021: Spotlight on NINE GATES: ENTERING THE MIND OF POETRY by Jane Hirshfield and Context for Poem “Yellow”

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This collection of essays by poet Jane Hirschfield has been in my library for nearly a quarter of a century, and it still pulls me back in every so often to reread and mull over Hirschfield’s quiet but authoritative wisdom. (I also love the cover image, all that bright citrus partially obscured and in different stages of revelation and accessibility.)

Here are the two sentences that open the preface:

Poetry’s work is the clarification and magnification of being. Each time we enter its word-woven and musical invocation, we give ourselves over to a different mode of knowing: to poetry’s knowing, and to the increase of existence it brings, unlike any other.

A longtime practitioner of Zen Buddhism, Hirschfield’s prose and poetry reflects the values of spare elegant surface opening the mind to penetrating depths. Nobel Laureate Czesław Miłosz has written of Hirshfield’s “profound empathy for the suffering of all living beings,” another hallmark of Buddhism’s emphasis on compassion.

Nine Gates is equally appealing whether approached as a reader of poems or as a maker of poems, exploring as it does the enlarging function of poetry for both the reader and the writer. (Her other collection of essays, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, is one I still have not read, but I am looking forward to dipping into it. As a well-regarded translator of poems from Japan and India, she is well qualified to ponder this. I am also hoping to explore more of Hirschfield’s body of work in poetry. If you have a favorite among her volumes, please let me know!)

Regarding today’s Poem: “Yellow”

Today’s poem, “Yellow,” cohered around a memory of homeschooling days, when Julia was gaining new confidence as a cook and baker in a circle of friends that extended out from her peers through multiple generations and across state lines–gifts that matter in the moment and linger in the heart and mind. In this case, a yellow gingham apron, practical and beautiful, made especially for her with love, the gift of a grandmother who extended her caring beyond her own grandchildren to their friend, our daughter.

I think the combination of the prompt of the letter “Y” and maybe the cover of Hirschfield’s collection were the catalysts for the poem.

Until tomorrow, maybe you experience increased existence! LESLIE

April 2, 2021 Spotlight on THE WILD BRAID: A POET REFLECTS ON A CENTURY IN THE GARDEN by Stanley Kunitz

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It is warmer here, today, and windy. If the wind abates, we are thinking of having a fire in the garden at dusk to relax after a long but productive week.

Library Spotlight on

A poet whose work I care deeply for, Stanley Kunitz, famously wrote that “a garden is a poem that is never finished.” And I feel that I am never finished reading and rereading his prose autobiography by way of a garden narrative, The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden. This account of the making his East Coastal garden in Provincetown, Massachusetts was published by W.W. Norton in 2005, when Kunitz was celebrating his 100th birthday by still tending to and enjoying his garden. It is lushly illustrated with photographs and adorned with excerpts from Kunitz’s work as a poet, but the focus is on the nitty gritty of gardening, the exhilaration and the heartbreak of amending soil and amending airy ideas by making room for the ideas your own patch of earth has to offer.

Born on July 29, 1905, Kunitz lived a life active in mind and body, winning the National Book Award in 1995 and serving as our national Poet Laureate — for the second time — in 2000.

This volume opens up in many directions, making it a wonderful gift for anyone who delights in gardens, poetry, photography, and thoughtful autobiography highlighting persistence, integrity, and a willingness to listen to what is and what might be.

REGARDING TODAY’S POEM:

These two sonnets, “The Exchange,” show the two points of view and are twins, in a way. After hours of writer’s block this morning, all it took was one old uncomfortable memory, an iambic pentameter first line, and the hope of exorcising the memory. The second sonnet was the gift, seeing the whole encounter from the other side, at least in my imagination! Both turn on questions and self-questioning.

Until tomorrow!

Leslie

Garden tags that I use as book marks for The Wild Braid