Tag Archives: Leslie Schultz photography and poetry

The Orchards Poetry Journal Publishes My Poems “Tiny Troubadour” and “Dogwoods”

Posted on by

It is always an occasion when The Orchards Poetry Journal publishes a new issue. This issue is something even more special to many of us, since it features the poetry of the late Kim Bridgford. I think it is no exaggeration to say that everyone who knew Kim feels bereft since her death last spring. I certainly do. After meeting her just once, at the AWP Conference in 2015 in Minneapolis, I became inspired by her work as a poet, scholar, and editor, and by her natural, generous, open-hearted way of moving through the world as a full human being. I will be forever grateful for her encouragement of my own work (by accepting a number of poems for her journal, Mezzo Cammin, and for contributing blurbs for my first two collections) and for the inspiration of her own work. (My own particular favorite of her collections is called Hitchcock’s Coffin: Sonnets About Classic Films, but all her work is deft, deep, and indelible.)

This issue of The Orchards contains a beautiful photograph of Kim, a summary of Kim’s many accomplishments and a moving note by her son, Nicki Duvall. Most importantly, it provides a taste of her astonishing work as a poet. I will be reading and rereading all of these for a long time.

This issue also contains a lovely poem, “Saying Goodbye,” from Sally Nacker (whose work is familiar to long-time readers of Winona Media, and who first introduced me to Kim Bridgford), and two of my own poems from the last year or so, “Tiny Troubadour” and “Dogwoods.” I wrote the first, a sonnet, last year after a bachelor wren in our garden during the nesting season of 2019 touched my heart, and I wanted to show it to Kim but that was not to be, so it is dedicated to her. (This wren returned to our garden this past summer of 2020, attracted a mate, and raised two broods.) “Dogwoods” is for my friend, Judy, inspired by her and her love of the natural world–garden, prairie, and woods.

You can read this issue online HERE, and order your own paper copy HERE.

Happy reading! Wishing you a peaceful and artistic winter season!

LESLIE

MockingHeart Review Publishes My Poem “Gone”

Posted on by
Banner of MockingHeart Review

The Summer 2020 issue of Mockingheart Review is now up, and I am pleased to have one of my own poems included in it. MockingHeart Review is an online literary journal. Founded as an poetry magazine in 2015 by Louisiana poet Clare L. Martin, MHR is now under the editorship of poet and critic Tyler Robert Sheldon. Their site highlights this quote from a former U.S. Poet Laureate that resonates with me:

“Poetry provides us with a history of the human heart.” -Billy Collins

I haven’t yet had time to read all this new work in Volume 5, issue 2, but of the poems I have read, I particularly like “The Woman in an Imaginary Painting” by Tom Montag and “The Trouble with Billy Collins’ Poetry” by Andrew Ball.

I am also intrigued by the first mysterious image by the featured visual artist, Lynda Frese.

(Navigating tip from my in-house tech guru: use “Control -” to make the display smaller; this will allow you to access the bottom of the list of poets & poems.)

April 29, 2020 Poem “Crossing”

Posted on by 
 
 
 

 Crossing
  
  
 From Port Clyde, Maine, you board on foot.
 Maybe your belly is full of clams or lobster.
 It is windy onboard, so you hold onto your hat.
  
 Five miles out, the mainland slips away,
 Christina’s world, all that mid-century reaching,
 Sarah Orne Jewett, too, old pointed firs and talk, talk, talk.
  
 The ferry lulls you into calm, alert solitude.
 Passing little Manana Island, perhaps you spot a goat.
 You step onto the wooden dock at Monhegan,
  
 find your legs a little land-sick at first,
 but they recover. You walk along the rocks,
 savor the shingle-sided buildings weathered
  
 to that silvery-grey like the breasts of doves, note
 cresting swells, white embellishing blue waves.
 There is a local museum, a petite library,
  
 a pay-toilet, but you want to leave this age
 behind for an hour, so you head away from town,
 hike up to Cathedral Woods, enter the windless hush
  
 of spruce needles underfoot, quiet soaring of rough bark.
 Your pulse slows. Pungent tannins hang in the air.
 You hear insects, a Golden-winged warbler. At your feet,
  
 as your eyes adjust, you perceive tiny doorways, flagstones
 of shells, palisades of broken twigs. As you lean, curious
 but respectful, toward one fairy dwelling you tumble
  
 headlong into the true magic of this place: clouds
 of tiny white moth wings over greening moss; pink
 mushrooms, smaller than fingernails, still spangled 
  
 with last evening’s rain; and red spruce seedlings 
 mere inches high but protected in the filtered light. 
 You allow yourself to kneel, just for one breath, long
 enough to notice your breath becoming song.
  
  
 Leslie Schultz

My thanks to Maine writer Kristin Lindquist, and to the Stuart-Cole family who introduced our family to the magic of Monhegan in 2011.

April 28, 2020 Poem “Empyrean”

Posted on by 
 
 

 Empyrean
  
 
“It is easy to forget that you live in the sky—not beneath it, but within it. Our atmosphere is an enormous ocean, and you inhabit it. The ocean is made up of the gases of the air rather than liquid water, but it is as much of an ocean as the Atlantic or the Pacific. You may think of yourself as living on the ground, but all that means is that you are a creature of the ocean bed. You still inhabit the atmosphere like a sea creature does the water.”
  
             Introduction, A Cloud a Day, by Gavin Pretor-Pinney
  
 “No matter where you go, there you are.”
  
             Mary Englebreit greeting card
  
  
 At the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, 
 back before the first black-and-white lunar landing, 
 painted dioramas tried to teach me 
 tried to teach me a smidgen of evolution, 
 how sea creatures leapt or wriggled 
 onto the barren beaches of the world,
 trading fins for limbs, gills for lungs.
  
 I could not comprehend such leaving of home.
  
 First proto-centipedes; then, a hundred million years later,
 simple plants had the first field day, colonizing
 rocks and dust. At last, lagging
 by another thirty million years, fish broke through,
 climbed into the place of burning, and were changed
 by their yearning, their hunger for something
 beyond easy reach. That July of the Apollo 11 
  
 I was nine years old. I watched the grainy broadcasts
  
 with my best friend, Brenda. She lived on a farm. 
 We climbed ladders in the old barn, raided 
 the stone cellar for bottles of homemade root beer,
 walked dusty garden rows to claim gooseberries,
 tiny cherry tomatoes, and shiny black currents.
 Her mother set up T.V. trays to we could swim
 in the flow of history while noshing on popcorn.
  
 Later—-bored—-we put on swimsuits, screamed
  
 as we sprayed each other with ice cold water
 from the garden hose. Before the next summer,
 migrant again, my family sought a different climate,
 climbed into a rattling van, burst through
 December fog at the top of the Rockies. Descending,
 my ears popped. Time passed, I grew taller, grew
 breasts, learned I carried a salty ocean inside me
  
 even as I burned for the far-off idea of my own home.
  
  
 Leslie Schultz
  

My earliest ambition was to have a home I would not have to leave, yet in the intervening years I have come to know how leaving home is important to understanding it. How do we develop if we do not explore–mentally, physically, emotionally–at least a little bit of what else is out there? The protective shell is essential but is always, at some point, outgrown, perhaps just when it was getting comfortable. I suspect I shall always struggle with this paradox, meaning photographing clouds and shells over and over.

April 27, 2020 Poem: “Sakura”

Posted on by 
 
 

 Sakura
  
  
 It was a tune, a light air,
 in the second or third piano book.
  
 You practiced all that wet spring,
 young girl with vast imagining.
  
 I recall how you would look
 out through the glass door
  
 at the April rain streaming,
 turn back to practice, to dreaming
  
 of pink blossoms, of blooming.
  
  
 Leslie Schultz


I found the image above yesterday. Tim and I took a walk downtown. I carried an umbrella which I needed on the way home as we encountered one of those delightful brief storms when it rains as the sun is shining. We sheltered for a few moments under the awning of the Blue Monday Coffee Shop, where I saw these other umbrellas in two- and three-dimensions.

(Photo: Couleur of Pixabay )
Before a Piano Lesson