This issue of The Midwest Quarterly is a powerhouse, and I am proud to have my poem included in it. My own poem centers on the Viking funeral Tim and I provided, on our anniversary, for the wedding dress, inherited from my great-grandmother and worn at our wedding. It was too tattered and fragile to be worn again, too precious to send to the landfill.
This issue arrived in my mailbox on Friday. I have enjoyed each of the poems, and I would like to call out “Aristeia” by Lynn Glicklich Cohen and “Fathering” by Patricia Clark for special praise. Each poem surprised me with its ending and delighted me with its language.
In the week ahead, I am looking forward to reading the scholarly articles, particularly the one by Daniel Dougherty titled “You Are Now in the Power of Stardust: Crime and Punishment in the Golden Age of American Comic Books.” (Coincidentally, I have been working this week on a rare-for-me poem centered on the figure of Batman, based on a photograph I took last summer of a Gotham-embellished pickup truck tailgage. I was a reader of Batman and Superman comics long ago, so I feel ready for scholarly insights on this topic.)
If you are interested in looking into this issue, copies can be ordered from The Midwest Quarterly’s website.
It is a rare and happy day when an issue of NDQ arrives, and especially so when I am honored to have my own work appear in its pages. I am especially delighted this time, because editor William Caraher said yes to both my lyric, “Something Fishy,” and a prose poem, “Autumn Rain: After Turgenev.” Inspired by Turgenev’s own prose poems, I am still figuring out the parameters and possibilities of the prose poem, and so I am very glad for the validation of my attempt in this form.
North Dakota Quarterly began publishing more than 100 years ago, in 1911, as a vehicle for faculty at the University of North Dakota to publish their scholarly papers. Today, the journal offers a diverse, international mix of essay, fiction, and poetry while remaining strongly rooted in North Dakota history, landscape, and traditions. See, for example, the memoir of the Rev. Dr. Clifford S. Canku, (Sisseton-Whapeton Dakota), an eminent scholar of Dakota language and history, presented in collaboration with his student, John Peacock, (Spirit Lake Dakota), now Professor Emeritus at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore; and the poem, “A Tale of Two Cemeteries,” by UND graduate Bette Nelson.
On the other hand, this issue is rich with the prose and poetry of those from across the U.S. and Canada, and as far away as Sydney, Australia; Liverpool, England; Abuja, Nigeria; Tehran, Iran; and Serbia. Those interested can purchase a paper or digital copy, or a subscription, at the NDQ site.
Here in Northfield, Minnesota, we are bracing for a windy snowstorm coming tomorrow. Today, I shall be taking advantage of the golden sunshine and clear roads to do errands and stock up on groceris. Tomorrow? This issue of NDQ is my passport to armchair travels through the experience and imagination of dozens of others.
The Winter 2023 issue of The Orchards Poetry Journal has just been published online. The winter issue always arrives just when one wants to curl up under a lap robe with a cup of hot tea and read the grey afternoon away. (Here in Minnesota as I write, we are still waiting for snow, making do with rain, so this entrancing cover is, in more than one way, a promise of things to come.)
Because this issue was just posted yesterday, I have not read it from end to end yet–that would just be plain greedy! What I have looked at so far online makes me anticipate even more being able to read the paper copy coming in the early days of the new year.
Perusing the table of contents, I was struck by the title,”Lake of the Isles, March 2017.” Surely this must refer to the place I know very well in Minneapolis! It does. The poet, Paula Reed Nancarrow, is a Minnesota poet, as I discovered. After reading her eloquent elegy, a masterful villanelle filled with the lights and shadows of the season, I subscribed to her blog.
Another title that jumped out at me was “Yachats,” a poem by Jennifer Stewart. The title caught me because it was a new word to me but it whisked me back to the world of my girlhood on the Oregon coast. (“Yachats,” I discovered, is the name of a small coastal town whose name means “dark waters at the foot of the mountain” in the Siletz language.) This free verse poem was powerfully evocative of both place and the language that fixes it in consciousness. I could smell the salty fogs and feel the smooth undulations of driftwood. I also learned that she reviews her favorite Asian movies at youtube.com@dramajen.
Hoarfrost in Sun (Leslie Schultz, 2016)
I am also pleased to see a lovely poem from friend Sally Nacker, entitled, “Geese,” on page 38!
You can read the issue online or down load a PDF copy for free; finely printed and bound paper copies are available for $17.00 a copy at the Kelsay Books webite. (My own poem appears on page 104.) It always feels like a real achievement to be published in the pages of this journal. Reflecting back, I am pleased that the title poem for my first collection of poetry, “Still Life with Poppies,” appeared in The Orchards inaugural edition in August 2016. In the seven years since, though I can hardly believe it, they have accepted 19 poems (and rejected scores of others, of course!) Even more important, this journal has introduced me to the art and craft of dozens of poets I respect.
(Bromide Print from the National Portrait Gallery, 1949, by Angus McBean)
Today is the 133rd birthday of the best-selling and most translated writer of all time, Dame Agatha Christie. Born in the English countryside 1890, Christie was homeschooled and brought up to enjoy the arts and the sciences, nature and family. Later, she opined One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is, I think, to have a happy childhood.
When I first saw this quote, painted on the wall of the Minnesota Children’s Museum I was there because I had been engaged to do some writing for them. The quote struck me as very true, and I trusted the author, so I stopped on the staircase,I pulled out my legal pad and pen, and noted it down.
Christie had come into my own life at a disruptive juncture, when I needed a fictive port in a storm. I bought a copy of her collection, 13, thirteen stories centering on Miss Marple in the tiny village of St. Mary Mead, in a shop in the airport of Portland, Oregon. Turning the book’s pulpy pages under the light over my airplace seat, the inky black Pacific Ocean below, calmed me. As I crossed the International Dateline for the first time, this massmarket paperback stabilized the flight for me away from the known and into the unknown.
That January of 1972, when I was just barely twelve, our family emigrated from Beloit, Wisconsin to (eventually) Melbourne, Australia. In the next twelve months, I attended four different schools in Australia, and the feeling of dislocation continued, heightened, no doubt, by the internal changes wrought by puberty. Fortunately for this book worm, every school library was well-stocked with titles by Christie, and the formulaic quality of her novels–where evil breaks out but justice and answers are always delivered–was welcome, indeed. (I even sought out her titles under the psuedonym, Mary Westmacott, and liked them very much.)
Then, and still today, my favorite of her titles draws on her experience in the archaeological digs of her husband, Sir Max Malloran. It is called, Death Comes as the End, and is set in ancient Egypt, in a land far, far away, in a time before dectectives or even the printing press. My second favorite must be the psychologically complex, And Then There Were None. Though neither of these titles has a reigning dectective or amateur sleuth, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot both have permanent places in my affections, too. It startles me to think that all this was so long ago that Christie was still alive. (She died in January of 1976.)
As one who is joyfully contending with writing fiction these days, I am amazed at Christie’s sheer output–sixty-six detective novels, fifteen collections of short stories, and six novels of literary fiction (as Mary Westmacott.) I am also interested in how her work is translated, not only into more than 100 languages but into movies and television. Christie continues to cast a spell for me, one that I am very grateful for, and so today, I want to salute her.
Below is my poem from 2014, inspired by Christie’s life and work. (I included it in 2017 in my second collection, Cloud Song.)
Agatha Christie at Work
I love to think of you sifting through
potshards, carefully cataloguing broken bits
of lives shattered long ago.
You would have held the brush lightly, the fragment
firmly. The disillusioning dust of many ages--
encrusting the contours, disfiguring the design,
muddying the inscription—would have been no match
for your careful hands,
your patient heart, your clear eye.
In the unambiguous desert air, where
now drones patrol the dry rivers
and dusty bazaars,
you slacked your thirst
for order, for history, for
the struggle to make sense of the way
life smashes our assumptions, flings us
partial but still recognizable under its hooves.
I imagine the red sun sinking,
you, easing your shoulders, turning
your face to the currents of rising breeze:
a reliable evening, tidying the work tent,
admiring the silhouette of the tell and
your husband’s loved profile.
The two of you retire, slipping into your tent,
quiet as fish. Later, you will light the lamp,
plumb the murderous depths of the human heart,
allow each piece of the mystery to slide into place.
Leslie Schultz
The brand-new issue of Mezzo Cammin: An Online Journal of Formalist Poetry by Women has just been published. I have been sampling poems–rather like bon bons but with a lot more substance–all day. I have to say that I love the cool and fresh image of the fish. For me, it is a perfect evocation of summer–makes me want to slide my feet into a freshwater lake.
Volunteer Hollyhocks on the Site of the Razed Archer House Hotel, Northfield, Minnesota
It is an honor to have two poems in a journal I admire and to be in such good company, especially those poets who make the formal constraints they embrace look natural and easy. A tip of the hat to two in particular: Barbara Lydecker Crane and Jean Kreiling, both Powow River Poets centered in Newburyport, Massachussetts, and both have been awarded more than one prize in the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest. In this issue of Mezzo Cammin, I liked Lydecker Crane’s terza rima poem, “Caving in Slovenia,” very much, with its descriptions of entering and exiting a curated dark space. I was also very drawn to Kreiling’s different take on the terza rima form’s end, and I loved the subject matter of “Young Reader: For Tommy.” This poem succinctly captures the joy of seeing and helping a very young reader to embark on a lifetime of power and pleasure that the act of reading offers.
One final poem I cannot help mentioning here is “‘Thelma and Louise:’ Alternate Ending” by Californina poet Kathleen McClung. A third terza rima (always a dazzling form when it works, as it does in the three poems I mentioned here) and this one packs a powerful punch of timely reimagining, positing an updating of legal and cultural assumptions and options.
This issue’s feature artist’s work, too, is powerful and intriguing, combining as it does text and images. Maureen Alsop is a celebrated poet, fiction writer, reviewer, and translator, as well as being skilled in the graphic arts.
My own two poems, “Action,” and “Bands of Brass” are different versions of Shakespearian sonnets. I am just thrilled that they found publication in this special journal.
