Tag Archives: Mezzo Cammin Poetry Journal

MEZZO CAMMIN’s Summer Issue (2023) is Out! It Includes My Poems, “Action,” and “Bands of Brass”

Posted on by

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.

Happy reading, writing, and cogitating! LESLIE

April 3, 2023 Spotlight on Sylvia Plath’s “The Moon and the Yew Tree”; The Poet’s Tarot by Two Sylvias Press; and Context for My Poem, “Almost Morning”

Posted on by

Sylvia Plath has been an important influence on my own work since I first began reading her poems when I was sixteen. I have in mind to write some more about how I stumbled over her body of work and how dazzling I found it in a later post. For now, a little about a specific poem. (For a wonderful essay on Plath by Kim Bridgford, visit the Women Poets Timeline Project at Mezzo Cammin.)

For so many years, Plath’s poem, “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” has remained with me, as powerful art will do. Written in 1961, “The Moon and the Yew Tree” was published that year in The New Yorker, and was one of seven poems published together in The New Yorker in the August 3, 1963 issue, about six months after her untimely death. I first read the poem in my treasured first edition copy of The Collected Poems: Sylvia Plath (Ted Hughes, editor; Harper and Row, NY, 1981).

“The Moon and the Yew Tree” begins with these lines:

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.

As I understand it, the surface imagery was inspired by the view of a tree in the churchyard neighboring her dream house-turned-prison in the English countryside in Devon, but most of the description draws deeply from Plath’s own inner terrains.

In the decades since my first encounter with this poem, I have also discovered a light-hearted but serious creative tool, “The Poet’s Tarot,” published by Two Sylvias Press. On the last day of March, I idly drew one card from the deck, the major arcana card XVIII dedicated to Plath. Not surprisingly, this card correllates with The Moon in more traditional tarot decks, and is an indicator of deep emotions and psycholgical constructs, powerful but often at least partly submerged from conscious awareness. In other words, the card most attuned to Plath’s way of working as a poet. And I can tell her seminal poem was at the very back of my mind when I arose this morning to a view of the moon through tree branches.

Context for the Poem, “Almost Morning”:

Well, this is an absolutely accurate description of the setting moon this morning, seen from an upstairs window at my house in Minnesota, though only I would have seen it that way. The look of the actual moon was inflected through memories of my long-gone Grand Aunt Isabel, my paternal grandfather’s youngest sister, whose mittens of white rabbit fur I inherited during my last year of high school. (They were very warm. Two years later, they were consumed with relish by my roommate’s yearling beagle whose name was Karma.) Isabel’s generation vied with each other over furs, I recall, something I half-understood but that also terrified me in some kind of inarticulate way. I think this poem was an attempt at articulating that complicated not-quite nostalgia.

(To receive my poem via email, send me word at winonapoet@gmail.com.)

Until tomorrow morning,

LESLIE

News Flash! The Newest Issue of MEZZO CAMMIN Is Out! It Includes My Poems “A Song for Sarah Winchester” and “Goddess of Forgetting”

Posted on by

The online journal of formalist poetry by women, Mezzo Cammin, was founded by the late Kim Bridgford and is now under the editorship of poet Anna Evans. The first issue under new leadership has just been published! It contains twenty-six well-crafted poems on a variety of themes by a baker’s dozen of skilled poets, arranged in alphabetical order by the poet’s last name: Kris Beaver, Catherine Chandler, Mary Cresswell, Catherine Fitzpatrick, Nicole Caruso Garcia, Katie Hartsock, Jean L. Kreiling, Diane Lee Moomey, T.R. Poulson, Catherine Esposito Prescott, Carolyn Raphael, Claudia Schatz, and Leslie Schultz.

To read the issue for yourself, and see the work of featured painter, Holly Trostle Brigham, whose newest work on Pre-Raphaelite muse Elizabeth Siddal is paired with poems by Kim Bridgford in the artist book I Wake Again, here is the link. Red hair is one focus of the collection. (If you are near Delaware, you can see the life-sized paintings from February 26 to May 29, 2022 at the Delaware Art Museum.)

I was especially taken with the understated and highly relatable humor in “Uxorious Sonnet #4 by Catherine Fitzpatrick; the timely updating of a poem Julia and I used to recite all the time (Emily Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody!–Who Are You?”) in “After the Associate Poetry Editor Tweets That Submissions Are Still Open” by Nicole Caruso Garcia; the trick-taking, stunning final line in the skillful poem, “Dealing”, by Jean L. Kreiling; and the startling imagery of Catherine Esposito Prescott’s “The World”. You will have your own favorites.

Double-web Window at the Winchester Mystery House (Leslie Schultz, 2012)

My own poems are both recent work that draw on reading and traveling and thinking done over the past decade. The sonnet, “Goddess of Forgetting”, showed up as a surprise during the April 2021 challenge of writing a new poem each day. It was inspired by a book that my Book Group chose to read together some years ago called In the Garden of Evening Mists by Malaysian novelist Tan Twan Eng, specifically by the epigraph from Richard Holmes. The sestina, “A Song for Sarah Winchester”, is a poem I have been working on for some years and finally completed in 2020. It had as its catalyst a visit in 2012 to the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California.

Winchester Rifle circa 1946

Finally, the Mezzo Cammin website also offers the deep pleasures of a video celebrating the life and work of Kim Bridgford at the 2021 Poetry by the Sea Conference and the Women Poets Timeline Project with essays on dozens of women poets in many traditions from and essay by Pat Valdata on Sumerian poet Enheduanna (2285-2250 BCE) to Kim Bridgford’s essay on contemporary poet A.E. Stallings (1968- )

Happy reading and writing! LESLIE

Large Spider Web, Winchester Mystery House (Leslie Schultz, 2012)
Dreaming of Someday–My Refrigerator Door in the Dead of Winter

News Flash! Mezzo Cammin Publishes “Song of the Mad Lithographer” and “Anniversary” (Poems)

Posted on by
Looking west over the Cannon River

The newest issue of Mezzo Cammin is up! I am so happy to have two sonnets included in this issue, which also includes exciting work by a number of formalist poets, including my friend, Sally Nacker. This issue’s feature poet, Jane Satterfield, contributes a group of seven poems astonishing in their range of subject, formal deftness, and emotional depth.

As a prelude to the pleasures of National Poetry Month, I can imagine nothing more enjoyable than dipping into this new offering by Mezzo Cammin.

Happy Reading! Let me know what you think!

LESLIE

News Flash! MEZZO CAMMIN Publishes Two of My Poems, “Encased in Amber” and “A View from Vista Drive”

Posted on by

Nothing takes my mind off looming cabin fever like reading surprising new work, and so in this chilled time of the year I am especially grateful for something new to capture my attention. If you, too, feel this way, here is some good news–

The new issue of Mezzo Cammin: An Online Journal of Formalist Poetry by Women has been published. As usual, it is full of work that inspires me with its deftness and insight. In this issue, I especially enjoyed Barbara Crooker’s paean to some of the currently eclipsed arts that take up much of my time–baking, soup-making, working with yarns–called “Obsolence.”

Two of my own poems, a sonnet and a set of tercets, can also be found here. Both are drawn from an as-yet-unfinished collection of poems about mothers and daughters.

Happy reading! Leslie