Tag Archives: Leslie Schultz photography and poetry

April 30, 2021: Spotlight on CAN POETRY MATTER? ESSAYS ON POETRY AND AMERICAN CULTURE; and Context for Poem “Wondering…”

Posted on by

Context for Poem “Wondering… “:

Have you ever felt frustrated by the need to check just one answer when the truth is more complicated? If so, you will resonate with this usual and beautifully written article by a young scientist, Ariana Remmel, published in the young digital magazine, Catapult. Reading it this morning was the catalyst for my poem today. The article can be found through the link below.

“Organic Chemistry Taught Me to Fully Inhabit My Mixed Identities

I am not half of anything. I am only me, a single whole with multiple truths.”

This is Better Living Through Chemistry, a column by Ariana Remmel on how atoms and molecules can help us explore our lives.

Why should we need to choose between science and art? Prose or poetry? Sunlight, lamplight, moonlight, insight? Why not claim it all?

Garden Sky (April 2021)
April 30, 2021
April 30, 2021

It is gratifying to be rereading these seminal essays, published by Minnesota’s own Graywolf Press in 1992, nearly thirty years later, now for me half a lifetime ago. The questions the essays raise are still valid and compelling to me, the light they cast still true. Beginning with the cosmic question of “Can Poetry Matter?” in the broadest context, considering trends and contributions of several poets, and concluding with speculation about “New Formalism” as a cultural force, the collection stands the test of time. I am grateful to Dana Gioia for putting it out into the world for all of us to consider.

All of this month, I have been thinking about the ways that poetry has made my life better.

The generosity and startling abundance of poetry shapes my every idea of the world–how it can be at its best, and how it often is. My circle of friends and associates is much wider and richer due to poetry, the “birds of a feather” principle at work. Some friendships have been sparked directly by poetry and others have been deepened by them. Below, just a few examples of relationships not just with the poems themselves but with other people that would not be as deep, or exist at all, without a mutual love of poetry.

A woman I met on a plane more than a decade ago is now a friend; though she lives in another city, she has traveled to two of my readings, and we have shared tea and poems by other poets. Through sustained contact with certain editors, I have learned about their own poetry and the labor of love it is to edit a journal. I am lucky enough to have worked with talented young writers to study poetry, then write and publish their own. My own neighborhood is rich with other poets whose energy and talent amaze me. Through the National Poetry Writing Month activities in April and this blog, I have “met” some amazing poets in other cities and countries whom I consider friends. The City of Northfield has in many ways been open to civic and educational poetry projects, and on some of these I have had rewarding work as a volunteer. One of my dearest friends, a talented writer but not herself a poet, was moved through our conversations about the art form to write her own poem to say the unspeakable grief she felt to a friend who was dying. Another friend asked me to read a favorite poem by John Donne at her husband’s funeral, which I was honored to do.

Some mornings, being active in poetry just brings a smile I was not expecting. After the Earth Day post this year, I received a comment in the form of verse from a friend in Winona, Ted Haaland. I met Ted through the Maria W. Faust Sonnet competition, named in memory of his late wife, and I share comment here with Ted’s permission.

Dear Leslie –
– Thanks for your increasingly interesting emails. Yesterday’s inspired a little 5-liner, which I’m attempting to include herewith.

Every day on which we meet,
holds further increase as a treat –
I await each day’s receipt, and view it before
I hit the AM street –
Your skills as seen make a day complete. Ted

More importantly, I, myself, am richer and have grown a more capacious mind, heart, and imagination through encountering the poetry of others, and from attempting to write it myself.

So, does poetry matter? For me, the answer is an unqualified assent.To quote from Seamus Heaney’s 1978 lecture on “Yeats as an Example?, “…he reminds you that art is intended, that it is part of the creative push of civilization itself….”

To quote from my own poem of 1990, an elegy for Joy Scantlebury (1919 to 1992), a poet three times as old as I was (more Yeats contemporary than mine, it seemed) when we met in graduate school, whose passion for life and poetry were unmatched even as she lay dying of lung cancer, “…we are free to intend/if not always to do….”

As anyone who has set out to knit a pair of socks or make a life or make a mark or write a different poem every day and share it knows, without the intention it is all a swirl of dreams or a gnat-cloud of what ifs. All the intention guarantees in following it is…something. Not always what was imagined, rarely like as good, but nevertheless real, both the product and the experience of the process of making. The blank page or screen makes daily beginners of us all. We stand before the blank canvas, pick up the brush, burn to paint the Mona Lisa. Perhaps we end up with a child’s scrawl? No matter. The vulnerability and the venturing forth are what count. Poetry is at once a cultural treasure house (daughter of the OED) and an ever-changing obstacle course we run alone but always in the best company.

Thank you, all, who shared this month of poetry appreciation with me. In closing, I would like to say a special thank you to all who elected to receive this year’s April poems via email. Your comments from time to time cheered me on, and it was an enormous help to know that you were there, listening. From “Raspberry Fools” on April 1 until “Wondering…” today, I am certain that I am lucky to know you!

All my best,

LESLIE

Lanesboro, Minnesota (2015)

April 27, 2021: Spotlight on MIDCENTURY QUARTET: BISHOP, LOWELL, JARRELL, BERRYMAN, AND THE MAKING OF A POSTMODERN AESTHETIC; and Context for Poem “Christmas Pantomime”

Posted on by

I have mentioned the highly readable scholarship of Thomas Travisano before. This book, Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman, and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic, is a new addition to my library. I splurged on it last March, when I also bought his excellent biography of Elizabeth Bishop. Ever since, I have been slowly reading it and digesting its ideas and details. As of this writing, I am no where near finished, but I am thinking not only about “modernism” (as in Marianne Moore) but “postmodernism”. What are its characteristics? How is it a development from what came before? How do the midcentury assumptions of poets, whose work I read with such pleasure, influence my own work, in my own historical era, whatever it might be called by future critics?

One of the most helpful sections I have encountered so far–and one I will reread often, I suspect–is Travisano’s rigorous examination of the (confusing and cringe-worthy) term “confessional poet”. I appreciate that knowing more about its roots and implicit (faulty) assumptions, I can safely and firmly set it aside most of the time. In that faddish linguistic attic, it can molder along with the bustle and the poke bonnet, if you ask me!

Regarding the Poem “Christmas Pantomime”:

When writing from the imagination, we are all ages at once, and every season is nested, one inside the other. As I composed “Christmas Pantomime” I was listening to the recording of a broadcast made by the BBC on September 7, 2015 in which YoYo Ma played all of Bach’s cello suites by memory in Albert Hall. Not sure if there was any direct influence, but it was an enjoyable experience under the light of the Super Moon in the wee hours of the morning. Who can sleep with a moon so bright? Might as well be sipping tea and noodling around with a an idea for a poem all in the company of a genius cellist interpreting a genius composer’s exalted yet earthy works! Life is good.

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE

April 25, 2021: Spotlight on LET US WATCH RICHARD WILBUR and Context for Poem “Elegances”

Posted on by

My admiration for the poetry of Richard Wilbur is longstanding and just about unbounded. I don’t rank the poets whose work I love, I just wonder at and cherish them. For me, the fact that I can and do make the same statement about several dozen poets’ work, at least, whose lives spanned centuries of poetic currents in the English language, doesn’t diminish the regard I feel. And what I appreciate about today’s Spotlight book is that it helped me understand the kind of person Wilbur was, and, as it happens, he was just the kind of sane, decent, vastly talented, and very human in his foibles as I imagined him to be.

Robert and Mary Bagg‘s accomplishment in the literary biography, Let Us Watch Richard Wilbur (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017) is remarkable for its sensitivity, range, and timeliness, appearing as it did the same year of Wilbur’s death. It is a rare thing for a biographer (or, in this case, a team of biographers) to have a cooperative subject whose trust, the result of years of collegial friendship and mutual regard, provided access to interviews and documents (including unpublished journals; private correspondence with many people, including some of the giants of twentieth century literature such as Bishop, Lowell, Berryman and Merrill; family archives; and a series of interviews with Wilbur, and with his wife, Charlee (1922 to 2007), to whose memory the biography is dedicated.)

Richard Wilbur (1921 to 2017) published his first in a string of distinguished collections of poetry (as well as essays and translations) in 1947. When poet and critic Louise Bogan reviewed that debut volume, The Beautiful Changes, for The New Yorker Magazine, she concluded, “Let us watch Richard Wilbur. He is composed of valid ingredients.”

Indeed. Wilbur’s accolades are numerous, lofty, and deserved. (Two Pulitzer Prizes, a term as Poet Laureate of the United States, and too many prizes and publications to count for his own poetry and prose, as well as distinguished teaching and incredibly accomplished translations of French writers, especially successfully with Moliere’s plays.) What most impresses me is his formal skill, deep humanity, and sense of order and humor. Such poems as “A Hole in the Floor”, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World”, “Junk”, “Cottage Street, 1953”, and “Advice to a Prophet”, among many, many others, along with his translation of “Tartuffe” make him a perennial teacher of mine, even though I never met him. His restraint, artistry, extensive learning worn gracefully and lightly, and his sense of humanity make his poems always current favorites with me.

Context for Poem “Elegances”:

The poem today is an homage to Richard Wilbur, a writer whose verse is as elegant and muscular as any I have encountered.

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE

April 24, 2021: Spotlight on SYNTHESIZING GRAVITY: SELECTED PROSE; and Context for Poem “Goddess of Forgetting”

Posted on by

A friend and neighbor who is a poet and a scholar, alerted me last year to Kay Ryan‘s magnificent collection of essays, Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose,(Grove Press, 2020). While she generously offered to lend it, (Thanks, Susan!) I knew I needed my own copy. Reading these essays (or gobbling them down like bon-bons) got me through the early weeks of the pandemic. Reading passages aloud to Tim resulted in his picking up the collection, finding his own favorites, and reading passages aloud to me. One can really begin anyway and wander with pleasure (as with Ryan’s justly celebrated poetry!) I leaped first into “On a Poem by Hopkins” because it considers his “Spring and Fall to a Young Child”, a poem I have memorized and say aloud rather more often than I should and feel I know well. Someday, I plan to compose my own essay on its perfections. When I do, I will be grateful for the new aspects of the poem to which Kay Ryan alerted me (and I shall be careful not to plagiarize!)

I truly enjoyed each of this essays, but if forced to select particular favorites to recommend, I would offer “Notes on the Dangers of Notebooks,” “Inedible Melons” (about the poetry of Marianne Moore), and the four-page gem, “Do You Like It?”, which opens “How a person becomes a poet is a mystery before which one must simply bow down.” This essay recounts Ryan’s own Damascene moment of conversion to the poetry life on a bicycling trip across the U.S. when she was thirty, but, being Ryan (gifted with a capacious sense of wonder and a steely intellect), she also offers universal musings as well personal anecdote.

Regarding the Poem “Goddess of Forgetting”:

Today’s poem has a bit of a back story. The above image was the promotional postcard for a joint show I had at The Crossings Gallery in Zumbrota many years ago–my photographs and paintings by Ann Tristani. I sent dozens of them out, in advance of that show, but recently in sorting through office papers I discovered a small cache of them. I have begun using them as bookmarks, and have sent one to a couple of avid-reading friends.

This morning, Jan sent me a photo of the postcard in its now “forever home”, her copy of Tan Twan Eng’s novel, The Garden of Evening Mists, one I loved when I read it with my book group. That was lovely, but what it was such a gift to be reminded of the epigraph at the beginning of the novel:

There is a goddess of Memory, Mnemosyne, but none of Forgetting.
Yet there should be, as they are twin sisters, twin powers, and walk
on either side of us, disputing for sovereignty over us
and who we are, all the way until death.
 
 Richard Holmes, “A Meander Through Memory and Forgetting”
(Epigraph to In the Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng)

On a day when I was tasking myself to write a poem inspired by the letter “F”, this was divine inspiration for the Petrarchan sonnet that all of you who so graciously agreed to get these April poems via email received. I think that subject is vast, and the sonnet is only the best I could manage in the hour available. I might be able to revise it, and…who knows?…it might end up as a series of poems.

The fact of friends is ever a gift, and I was powerfully reminded of that this morning. Thank you all for the grace notes with which you embellish the simple melody of my life. I am deeply grateful for Memory, as well as for, when happiness depends upon it, Forgetting.

“Goddess” print, shown at The Crossings, now with spider plant blooms, plant a gift from Patty
Close up of Elizabeth Barrett Browning daffodil, gift from Sally

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE

April 23, 2021: “Happy Birthday, William Shakespeare!”; Spotlight on IN RADICAL PURSUIT; Context for Poem “To a Grackle”

Posted on by

One of the best things I learned in graduate school was the work of W. D. Snodgrass. His book-length, Pulitzer Prize-winning poem, “Heart’s Needle,” was published the year I was born but I had never heard of it until I was given a Xeroxed copy of it in a seminar class. (I now have a treasured copy in proper book form!) Snodgrass came to McNeese when I was a student there and read from his then new work, what became the collection, The Death of Cock Robin (University of Delaware Press, 1989). He was a magnificent reader of his own lyric poetry (even singing sections of it, at times, wholly effectively) and, in every way, a big presence.

Not long after encountering his poetry, I was also given a Xeroxed, stapled in the corner, copy of his essay, “Tact and the Poet’s Force,” which I still have, which treats, among several topics, the power of what is not said. I find Snodgrass’s prose to be as lyrical and muscular as his poetry, and I am particularly drawn to read his thoughts on works I know pretty well already, as he always sees new-to-me elements and communicates them with eloquent gusto.

Today, in honor of the global celebration of William Shakespeare’s 457th birthday, I would like to recommend the Snodgrass essay, “Moonshine and Sunny Beams: Ruminations on A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream“, in his collection of essays titled In Radical Pursuit (Harper & Row, 1975). In this essay, Snodgrass begins with all the questions surrounding the title and action of the play–Who is the dreamer? The poet-playwright? Any or all of the characters? The audience?–and who gets dreamed? What is the nature of the phenomenon of dream/nightmare? Throughout the essay, Snodgrass turns over the phrases and assumptions of the drama and keeps coming back to the need to understand, so well as can be done in the strong light of day, the nature of the Moon, symbol of enchantment and illusion, particularly the illusions patriarchal society invests in the power of fathers over children (which, as we remember, launches the action Shakespeare’s comedy). I read this and delight in the insights into the Elizabethan poet and playwright, and I think of Snodgrass’s first masterwork, Heart’s Needle, so autobiographical that it has been cited as a major work of mid-century confessionalism (a term Snodgrass disliked), which is in part a long lament about the powerlessness of the divorced father who sees his daughter growing up and growing away from him.

Signature slip, tucked into my treasured (though water-damaged when I got it) first edition copy of In Radical Pursuit

Regarding “To a Grackle”: Today’s poem features a bird common here, but one which William Shakespeare would not have known. Still the grackle puts me in mind of him, not only of the Chandos oil portrait of him, where he looks a little crow-like to me, but of his testy and protesting “Dark Lady” sonnets, in which the speaker is (often unwillingly) entranced by unconventional beauty. I like to think that had Shakespeare seen a grackle, he would have made at least one sonnet for it.

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE