Tag Archives: Leslie Schultz photography and poetry

April 24, 2023 Spotlight on “Stanley Kunitz” by Mary Oliver, and Context for My Poem, “Fairy Tale Quilt”

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Garden Magic (April 24, 2023)

I have shared my love of Stanley Kunitz and Mary Oliver separately before on this blog. Today, I want to share one of my favorite poems of Oliver’s about her friend. Certainly gardens and poems are magic places. Maybe those who succeed in creating something transporting do have a little bit of the magician in them, at least in a fleeting way, to participate in the everyday magics of growing plants and shaping words.

Stanley Kunitz 

I used to imagine him
coming from his house, like Merlin
strolling with important gestures
through the garden
where everything grows so thickly,
where birds sing, little snakes lie
on the boughs, thinking of nothing
but their own good lives,
where petals float upward,
their colors exploding,
and trees open their moist
pages of thunder -
it has happened every summer for years.

But now I know more
about the great wheel of growth,
and decay, and rebirth,
and know my vision for a falsehood.
Now I see him coming from the house -
I see him on his knees,
cutting away the diseased, the superfluous,
coaxing the new,
know that the hour of fulfillment
is buried in years of patience -
yet willing to labor like that
on the mortal wheel.

Oh, what good it does the heart
to know it isn’t magic!
Like the human child I am
I rush to imitate -
I watch him as he bends
among the leaves and vines
to hook some weed or other;
I think of him there
raking and trimming, stirring up
those sheets of fire
between the smothering weights of earth,
the wild and shapeless air.

Mary Oliver (Dreamwork, 1986)

Context for My Poem “Fairy Tale Quilt”:

Little Red Riding Hood

This quilt, as the poem makes clear, was made by my grandfather’s mother, Mary Houghton Pressel, in Detroit in 1930, when she was a young and active mother. To shape the poem, I transformed history, since, as you can see, I had different images framed. To share these with you this morning, I decided to photograph them in our garden.

If you look closely, you can see the old flannel sheets peeking out on the right-hand side. As a quilter myself, and one who spent two hours yesterday in a losing battle to mend one of my own recent quilts, I am really happy to know that in some sense quiltmaking has a history in my own family.

Until tomorrow, LESLIE

The Three Bears

April 23, 2023 Spotlight on SHAKESPEARE AFTER ALL by Marjorie Garber and Context for My Poem, “Shakespeare in a Park”

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For anyone who needs occasional clarification and context on Shakespeare’s plays and the Elizabethan world that gave rise to them, this reference by critic Marjorie Garber is a welcome resource. Readable and well-researched, Shakespeare After All (Anchor Books, New York, 2004) weighs in at nearly two pounds and nearly 1,000 pages, but its enlightening scholarship is presented with clarity and occasional levity. It gives twenty-first century readers a sense of how the plays were first received as well as how their merits and qualities have weathered over the centuries. Today, the traditional day when we celebrate the birth of William Shakespeare, bardic wellspring of so many English words and linguisitc vivacity, I wanted to share my regard for this perennial companion to the plays.

Context for My Poem, “Shakespeare in a Park”:

This morning, I was thinking about my first experience with Shakespeare. I already knew his name but until third grade I had not experienced his work directly. Naturally, I found it baffling, opaque. But also oddly compelling. In writing this poem, I began thinking also of how baffling I found what I heard on the television news, saw in headline form in magazines and newspapers, and overheard in snippets of adult conversation. I am still baffled by politics and popular culture most of the time but still find seemingly random juxtapositions, like silk of one apparent color shot under with another color, another set of meaning.

The poem, “Shakespeare in a Park,” tries to give voice to that preoccupation as well as to a childhood memory. Portland, Oregon is known as the City of Roses, and the production to which I allude, “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” was held in the city’s International Test Rose Garden in Washington Park. I could no more make sense of the humor in this “Civilian Comedy” (thank you, Marjorie Garber, for this term) than I could understand why Ernest Borgnine of McHale’s Navy was supposed to be funny–he frightened me more than the Big Bad Wolf, and almost as much as descriptions that began surfacing the next year (1969) of the My Lai massacre. I couldn’t make sense of why people talked about burning flags and burning bras. I do know that I had loved meterical language (“Twas the Night Before Christmas,” “Madeline’s Rescue,” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee”) as a very young child, and 1968 was the year I first began to write my own poems. Perhaps the impulse was (and still is) an ongoing attempt to make sense of the worlds inside and around me.

Until tomorrow, LESLIE

April 22, 2023 Happy Earth Day! Spotlight on THE NORTON BOOK OF FRIENDSHIP (Edited by Eudora Welty and Ronald A. Sharp) and Context for My Poem, “Friendship”

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White Crocus (Photo: Leslie Schultz, 2023)

This anthology is one of the treasures of my library, not least because it was a gift from someone whose friendship I treasure. (Thank you, Bonnie Jean!) It contains two thoughtful introductions, one by each editor, who are, most appropriately, good friends. Most of its more than 600 pages are arranged in sections reflective of genre. Sections include such categories include Letters; Poetry; Essays; Legends, Fables, and Folktales; Affinities; Invitations; and Farewells. (Shakespeare has his own section.) Within each section, the reader finds excerpted gems from a wild array of humans writing on friendship across the millenia of human history. The index of Authors at the back ranges from Aesop (6th century B.C.E.) to Akmatova (1888-1966), from Wang Wei (768-833) to Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855).

For all the variety in voice, genre, and expression, the unifying theme is the human truth that all of life’s sweetnesses are amplifed by sharing them with a friend, and all sorrows consoled, as much as can be, when received by a friend.

This volume is one for dipping into, rather than reading straight through, and for not only its contents but for the chorus of testement of our human heritage of heartfelt regard, freely given, openly received.

Context for My Poem, “Friendship”:

The epigraph from The Norton Book of Friendship is: “We are a pair of moles burrowing away in the same direction.” (Ivan Turgenev to Gustave Flaubert, 26 May 1868)

This quotation, as well as the book’s central subject, inspired today’s Earth Day poem. Fellow creatures are innately isolated but also consoling connected with lines of sympathy. I believe that humans and other species, and indeed the whole of the planetary web are similarly connected, at all times. The best times are when we sense these connections and pause to savor them. I know that I am grateful every day for my own friends of every species!

Until tomorrow, LESLIE

White Crocus with Purple Stem (Photo: Leslie Schultz, 2023)

April 21, 2022 Spotlight on THE TEACHERS AND WRITERS HANDBOOK OF POETIC FORMS Edited by Ron Padgett and Context for My Poem, “Letter to Our Furnace”

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This reference book, edited by Tulas-born New Yorker Ron Padgett, is arranged alphabetically by topic and is unfailingly clear and concise. Sometimes I find it holds just the right level of detail and example to remind me of options and clarify formal considerations. I was very glad to have it this morning.

Context for My Poem, “Letter to Our Furnace”:

Waking up to a warm house this morning was a delightful thing to experience after the opposite yesterday. That, and dipping into and out of Ron Padgett’s handbook today, inspired today’s poem, ripped from domestic headlines, if you will. I am delighted that the form of this poem is a epistle rather than an epitaph!

Until tomorrow, LESLIE

April 20, 2023 Spotlight on MINNESOTA’S NATURAL HERITAGE: AN ECOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE by John Tester and Context for My Poem, “Startled by Pelicans”

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One welcome consequence of living in Minnesota for many decades has been a growing appreciative for the land itself, and, more and more, I see this fascination with local nature reflected not only in my photography but in my poetry and fiction. Still, science is not my first language, and so I am so grateful that one of our permanent library denizens is a remnant of our homeschooling days. Acquired as a textbook for part of our fifth-grade homeschooling focus on Minnesota history and ecology, John Tester’s Minnesota’s Natural Heritage: An Ecological Resource (University of Minnesota Press, 1995; Mary Keirstead, Editor) is a gracefully written overview of the many biomes found within the borders of our state, and it is lushly illustrated with photographs, maps, and charts that make the detailed information readily absorbable. The text is organized into ten chapters that stand alone yet flow naturally. (A second edition was published in 2020.)

1.  The Landscape
2.  Climate and Weather
3.  Principles of Ecology
4.  Deciduous Forest
5.  Northern Coniferous Forest
6.  Tallgrass Prairie
7.  Wetlands
8.  Lakes
9.  Streams and Rivers
10. The Future

John Tester (1929-2019) was born in the tiny town of Gibbon, in south-central Minnesota. At age nine, he helped a group of scientists to plant burr oak trees to restore an historical savannah. While working on his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, Tester worked also for the Minnesota Department of Conservation and the Bell Museum of Natural History on the University of Minnesota campus. Later, he helped to found the University’s Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior within the College of Biological Sciences.

John Tester

Context for My Poem, “Startled by Pelicans”:

Last week, southbound about ten miles south of Northfield, between the two exits for Faribault, I saw a flock of American White Pelicans, a group of about 100 birds. Though I had seen brown pelicans before along the Gulf Coast, I had never seen white pelicans, nor any pelican in Minnesota. I wondered if I had been mistaken, but some research confirmed that they are not only frequently seen in our region but their numbers, once dwindling, are on the rise, according the Minnesota DNR. Cheers for this resurgant boreal songbird, at home on water and on the wing! And who knows on any seemingly drab day, flying about on routine errands, what we might see? This encounter was a good reminder to me to look up and look out. And, who knows? If I am alert and very lucky, perhaps one day I shall hear their song.

Until tomorrow, LESLIE