I am thrilled to be reading from my new collection of poems, Cloud Song, on May 21, 2018, at 7:00 p.m. at the Northfield Public Library. If you can make it, I would love to see you there!
And for those of you who have looked into the collection already, I’d welcome your ideas: which poem is the one you’d most want to hear if you could be there?
Wishing you a month filled with flowers, sun, (occasional rain), bird song, but no more snow!
Leslie
Recycled Glass Path (photo: Karla Schultz)
Whooping Crane Vocalizing (photo: Karla Schultz)
Opinion Piece: Afternoon Interlude
Yesterday, perched on a chair,
in a friend’s lofty house,
knitting a sock of maroon wool,
discussing difficult new fiction,
I dropped my knitting, half-rose to stare:
down through the wide, clean window.
Over tufts of straw-bleached grass
and a partly thawed pond,
the low, long, elegant swoop
of a lone sandhill crane
flowed to its conclusion
oblivious of utterance. Full
of its own light and syntax,
punctuated only by wing
and pinion, it appeared to be made
solely of cadence, of insight.
Leslie Schultz
Whooping Crane Preening (photo: Karla Schultz)
Sadly, I have no photographs of Sandhill Cranes. These photos were all taken at the International Crane Foundation in Baraboo, Wisconsin. (The last image is one I took; the others are all by my accomplished sister!)
May you soar today in your daily rounds! Leslie
Check out other participants in the NaPoWriMo Challenge!
My poem, “Sunday Dinners,” inspired by memories of meals served in her tiny but immaculate dining room by my Grandma Schultz, has just been published in The Midwest Quarterly. (I am including this poem, along with many other poems inspired by family and friends, in my third collection of poems (currently in manuscript form.)
This is a journal I am savoring–scholarly prose and poetry alike. I was especially taken with the analysis what might be called a “double doppleganger” –human and architectural — in Henry James’ eerie story, “The Jolly Corner;” and a moving, pointed, yet funny poem by Nathaneal Tagg, about our responses to extinction of other species, called “Photo Ark.”
It is a particular delight that this came to my mailbox during National Poetry Month!
LESLIE
Enchantment
for Karla
Remember those pajamas with feet we padded in,
how we sat near the television, clutching
each other in fear when Dorothy’s house
pinned down the first witch and her striped stockings
shriveled? We shivered as the tiny silver
screen shimmered with image after image.
Most magical of all, that sudden wash
of color, of eyes opened at last
to besetting wonder: beauties and dangers.
As I see it, sister, you carry Oz
with you everywhere. Fields of bright poppies
wake you up, and you bring us all to light.
Leslie Schultz
For Karla,
You scatter pixel dust with practiced hand,
transport me to a rare magical land.
The measure of your magic is to show
beauty abounds and seeing makes it grow.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, KARLA! MANY HAPPY RETURNS OF THE DAY!
A number of older posts feature Karla’s incomparable photographs, from vistas to insects and everything in between. Just search on “Winona Media Karla Schultz” to find dozens, each one amazing!
Check out other participants in the NaPoWriMo Challenge!
Last June, while I was in Decorah, Iowa, touring the Vesterheim Museum with my friend, Ann, I got an email informing me that the manuscript for my second collection of poems, Cloud Song, had been accepted for publication by Kelsay Books. As you can imagine, I was ecstatic! I asked Ann to take a photograph of me in that moment. Here it is:
(Photo by Ann Wilson Lacy)
It is fitting, perhaps, that behind me is the twenty-five foot, hand-built ship, TradeWind, that Harald Hamran and his brother, Hans, sailed from Norway to New York in 1933. According to the logbook Harald kept in English, ““Our chances are slim, but no matter. It’s great to take chances when all things are against one.” That is certainly the way it can feel when one sends out a single poem–like a message in a bottle–or a collection of poems–a buoyant but fragile bundle of reeds lashed together into a raft. It certainly feels like a small species of miracle to see one’s poems bound together into the form of a book.
Cloud Song is arranged into three sections–poems inspired by the sea; poems inspired by landscapes, gardens, and plants; and poems inspired birds, ,sky, weather, and constellations. I suppose there is a sense of journeying underlying them all–journeying inward or outward bound.
I think Harald Harman sums up the hazards and the excitement of the creative process: “It hurts…especially when admiring the silvery moon, and thinking of a dream girl ashore, to be rudely awakened by a flying fish in the eye.” But that flying fish…that’s what’s memorable!
If you would like to locate your own copy of my new book, it is available locally at Content Bookstore or at Amazon. Here is a poem from the collection:
The Best I Have to Offer
I make my poems into little paper boats,
put a light in each, a small votive candle,
then sail them into the dark.
They are borne on my experience, over
shoals and snags, the salt and cold rot,
monsters and sinuous beauty rocking deep beneath.
Poets always know that their fragile vessels
may never reach the other shore or
even see the morning, but
what else can we do?
Poems are precious;
the light they carry is
the inestimable treasure of witness.
Together, flotilla of millions,
they form new constellations,
fling back radiance into the ocean of stars.
Leslie Schultz
HAPPY SAILING! HAPPY READING! LESLIE
(Author Photo by Atia Cole)
Norwegian Book Case; Vesterheim