April 25, 2018 NaPoWriMo Challenge Poem: “Opinion Piece: Afternoon Interlude”

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

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April 24, 2018 NaPoWriMo Challenge Poem: “Good Weather in Rice County”

Good Weather in Rice County

No smog here or typhoons
or salt-baked land.
This is blizzard country.
Occasions of roof-splintering hail.
Some weeks, acres of grey drizzle,
lingering fogs,
molds and toadstools jubilant.

Sudden afternoons, skies turn
eerily green, lindens utterly
still, poised
for the slash of twisters,
snap of downed power lines,
barricades of trees
unnaturally horizontal.

Or the usually placid
Cannon River, turns
torrential, runs
out of bounds,
floods our ears
like the foaming rhetoric
of fascist orators.

Soon the stench of manure,
drifting from fields circling
the town, will cling to everything;
Asian beetles will infest
our roses and wainscoting;
and it won’t be just the heat
but the humidity.

Today, though, mild April
sun exhilarates. Girls don
flimsy dresses. Daffodils shoulder
up through muddy duff,
and Siberian scilla wash
through scuffs of dry leaves,
wave after wave.

Today, it is as if blue
shadows from these inert mounds
of snow have run away,
stolen from sidewalk margins
to limestone building edges; as if pale
suggestions are leaping into
heart-cracking, chromatic tune.

Leslie Schultz

All the images in this post were taken in this month within walking distance of my home. I still can’t get used to the sight of bare legs and spaghetti straps!

Hoping your internal and external weather today is heavenly! Leslie

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April 23, 2018 NaPoWriPo Challenge Poem: “Half-Moon Set–Sonnets for William Shakespeare”

Half-Moon Set
for William Shakespeare

I  Oxford English Dictionary

Sir James Murray, caught fast in webs of word,
sought the earliest spinners of our pages.
You, Will, our most daring, can still be heard
in hundreds of words you gave to the ages.

I recall that long table holding green,
heavy volumes in the main library
where I first pondered: What did Falstaff mean
by “dwindle?”  In tiny print, the O.E.D.

cited you as coiner. From Scottish, “dwine,”
(“to waste away, to fade”) you gave a twist,
conjoined it to “kindle,” and made new wine
with a flick of your vintage plume, your wrist.

Thank you for “Zany.” “Green-eyed.” “Howl.” “Moonbeam.”
“Grief-shot.” “Honey-tongued.” “Madcap.” And “academe.”

II  Tinkerer’s Damn

Sometimes it’s finding the right word. Sometimes
it’s making it. Fit an old stem with ends
we know. Solder nouns onto bright verbs. Rhymes
and rhythm and thought give old words twists and bends

with ease. They please us, these shiny new toys
cobbled and seamed, buckets and kettles sturdy
yet handy, able to transport vast joys,
woes, or curses without being wordy.

In this sublunary world, can we know
where perfection exists or if we make it?
Poets, anyhow, keep tinkering under moonglow,
willing to be fooled, or to fool, or to fake it.

Our half-dark, half-light moon—inconstant sphere—
urges whatever it takes to make things clear.

Leslie Schultz

Yesterday, a friend asked me what makes a poem a poem, and I could think only of partial answers to that keen question. This morning, I was lucky enough to be awake when the half-moon set in the early hours of one of the high holidays on my calendar, Shakespeare’s birthday, so I am  thinking about what I have received from Shakespeare’s poetry–and, by that, I mean all of his inventive language whether crafted in sonnets or for the stage. I realize that it is the exhilaration of his verbal dexterity (marrying sound and sense with flair) and his daring in creating new (or new-ish) words when the one he wanted did not exist…His converting, disconcerting, diverting achievements–at the level of one word at a time–in service of the sonnet, the scene, or the play. That inventiveness gives us all new raw material and new license to dismantle and reassemble language.

We can’t know exactly which late April day on which William Shakespeare was born in 1564, only that it was near and before the recorded day of his baptism on April 26. (Since he died on April 23, 1616 there is a fitting symmetry in celebrating his birth on April 23–a kind of calendrical couplet encapsulating the shape of his work and life, like the way he chose to conclude the sonnets he wrought.) Similarly, we cannot know exactly how many words he invented on the spot and how many he simply seized on, used effectively and memorably, and is now credited as their coiner. Even conservative estimators, though, acknowledge more than one thousand “neologisms.”

I learned the term “neologism” during a magical undergraduate year when I studied Shakespeare’s canon at the University of Wisconsin under Professor Standish Henning. He directed students through the portals of Memorial Library, past the carved dictum, “The truth will set you free,” and into the Reference Room toward the incomparable resource of the Oxford English Dictionary. (As soon as I could afford it, after graduate school, I purchased my own copy of the condensed print version, complete with magnifying glass.– I didn’t used to need that, but now it comes in handy!–and I have yet to fulfill my intention of acquiring a copy of Caught in the Web of Words, the biography of Sir James Murray, chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary,by his granddaughter, K.M. Elizabeth Murray, but it is comforting to know that pleasure shimmers before me.)

Image result for university of wisconsin memorial library

Coming back to my friend’s question, I think the essence rests in the desire to make something new, to enrich the given language in some way. “Poet,” I understand, comes from the Greek word for “Maker.” I know I am inspired by what I have read and heard–surely millions of words–and by such delightful local twists as Northfield’s Sidewalk Poetry motto “Make Your Mark” and Paula Grandquist’s coinage for the name of her show on KYMN, “ArtZany.” (Tune in this Friday at 9:00 a.m., by the way, to hear Paula talk with this year’s winning poets and hear them read their work–or find it on the KYMN online archive after Friday, April 27, 2018.)

What do you think? What is the essence of poetry? How do you know something is a poem? Have you recently invented a word or phrase? Is there one you wish you had? (I wish I could take credit for “Snafu,” “Kludge,” and “Glitch.”)

As Paula says, “Enjoy your imagination today.” Best, Leslie Schultz

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April 22, 2018 NaPoWriMo Challenge Poem: “Sunday Postcard to the Past”

Sunday Postcard to the Past
Earth Day, 2018

Sited by Giotto, best viewed from the east,
as sun rises over the green-rimmed bowl
of Florentine hills, you, bell tower, stand
alone in your old, sacred neighborhood,
lofty as a basketball player or
factory chimney. Sonic silo, housing
seven named bells, we climbed your four hundred
steps sometime in the last gone century.

It was early. We were happy, younger,
open to every view. You, campanile,
dressed in spumoni marble appliqué
without, were rough-hewn within: gritty, dim,
stronger than centuries or human life.
I remember—at each stage, as we climbed—
looking down through your center: your timbers
black as iron with age, your bells silent.

Leslie Schultz

Wishing you a warm and relaxed Earth Day! Fittingly, this first Siberian scilla bloomed today, along the rough edge of our limestone foundation. May new ideas bloom for you today, whatever your climate.  Leslie

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April 21, 2018 NaPoWriMo Challenge Poem “Ragnarok”

Ragnarök

Father, you handed me the rough sphere
about the size of a tennis ball.
In my small hands, I turned it over.
You took it, placed it on concrete,
struck like Thor with your heavy sledge.

It was, you said, a thunderegg,
or might be. You loved Oregonian
geology, the tide pools and lava flows.
This disappointing specimen
crumbled like ash under your blows.

No frozen moonscape/seascape/
landscape inside, no milky eye.
You gave a sigh and turned
for a swig of beer, a rare one,
then crushed the empty can in your hand.

We lived, that year, across the rush
of traffic, from a park
with civic tennis courts,
swings, and childish slides,
frequent thunk-thunk of hit balls.

They look ordinary, you’d explain.
Not agate or geode exactly but some
mysterious matrix of confluence
from those firey thrusts of the dim past,
the slow drip of underground rivers…

You’d tell the tale you did not
remember—pale mammal, scientist,
half-blind like Odin—as if you were there,
and I can still see you, hefting your lightning,
striding the now-riven world.

            Leslie Schultz

 

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