Tag Archives: National Poetry Month 2023

April 15, 2023 Spotlight on GOD BE WITH THE CLOWN: HUMOR IN AMERICAN POETRY by Ronald Wallace and Context for My Poem, “See You in the Funny Pages.”

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Rusty Rustic Rooster (Leslie Schultz)

Lately, I have been doing some deep cleaning and sorting of the books on my poetry shelves, letting some go and keeping some, but giving each a real perusal before deciding. One I am not only planning to keep but am quite eager to reread is a collection of essays by Ronald Wallace called God Be With the Clown: Humor in American Poetry, (University of Missouri Press, 1984). Ronald Wallace was the director of the Creative Writing Program during my time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a poet who has a true funny bone, as well as deftness with every other poetic tone and key. I agree that it is swimming against mainstream currents to rank poems that are light-hearted and funny as higher (and sometimes higher) than angsty and dark poems. Certainly, to do anything like reflect the world we need scads of all kinds. (I do not forget the middle ground of the quiet lyric, for example.) Wallace asks the question of why Eliot’s “Wasteland” is exalted by critics when little analytical ink is spent on his “Old Possum” cat poems. Wallace has a cogent mind, an engaging prose style, and a true understanding of the crying need for humor at times. (As an example, consider just the title of one of the many poems he wrote for his father, paralyzed for decades with Multiple Sclerosis: “After Being Paralyzed from the Neck Down for Twenty Years, Mr. Wallace Gets a Chin-Operated Motorized Wheelchair,” from his first collection of poems, Plums, Stones, Kisses & Hooks, (University of Missouri Press, 1981).

Context for My Poem, “‘See You in the Funny Pages'”:

Ronald Wallace cites Emily Dickinson as one of his earliest influences, and to that I can say “Ditto.” In looking over his collection of essays, I was struck by how the title is drawn from Dickinson’s poem “A Little Madness in the Spring” (1356). And then, I remembered a collection of humorous sketches, Without Feathers, by Woody Allen that my best friend, Traycee, and I rolled with laughter over back in high school. It, too, draws its title from a poem by Emily Dickinson, “Hope–is the thing with feathers” (314). I encountered the Allen before the Dickinson, odd as that is to recall.

Today, I was thinking about humor in general, specifically how about how it seems to me to be at once very personal and also generational. My poem isn’t humorous but it looks back to the times in childhood and then in high school when I was learning how there can be a gap between what is held up as humor seems either strained or bafflingly pedestrian or simply crass or even downright cruel to one without the right frame of reference to receive it. (For me, the old films of The Three Stooges fall into all of these categories, while the Marx Brothers often transcend them through grace, with, and wordplay surprises. My own personal “list poem” today might cause you to think about your own favorites. If so, I would be delighted to know what strikes you as “funny Ha-Ha.”

Until tomorrow, LESLIE

Happy Dog (Leslie Schultz)

April 14, 2023 Spotlight on THE TRIGGERING TOWN by Richard Hugo and Context for My Poem, “A Sense of Place”

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Poet Richard Hugo

Richard Hugo (1923-1982), was a poet of the Pacific Northwest. Born in White Center, Washington, near Seattle, he served as a bombadier in the Mediterranean during WW II, before returning to the Seattle area. He used the GI Bill to earn a BA (1948) and an MA degree (1952) in English at the University of Washington, where he studied under Theodore Roethke. For nearly a decade, he worked as a technical writer onsite at the industrial campus of Boeing aircraft manufacturers while he concentrated on writing his own poems. Then, after the publication of his first book of poems, A Run of Jacks, in 1961, he began to teach creative writing at the University of Montana at Missoula where he worked for nearly eighteen years before returning at the end of his life to Seattle.

Hugo’s work is known for its concision, its found metaphors polished into startling imagery, and its vivid sense of place. Versatile in many genres, including a memoir and a mystery novel, Hugo published twelve books during his lifetime; three more were published posthumously. Perhaps his two most well known works at the collection of poems titled The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir (1975) and the collection of essays titled The Triggering Town (1979). As a citation on the website of the Academy of American Poets states: In his book about writing, The Triggering Town, Hugo encourages younger poets to recognize their true subject matter beneath the surface, but above all, to ignore advice about writing and find their own way. His own poems often celebrate the abandoned towns, landscapes, and people of the Pacific Northwest. William Stafford wrote, “A part of the West belongs to Hugo,” and, certainly, a territory of poetry as well.

My own copy of The Triggering Town, acquired when I was a senior in college, is well thumbed. I am especially found of the title essay. I had been wondering if there would be a natural pairing of it with a poem written this April, and, this morning, I decided today is the day. Here is a favorite sentence: “So you are after those words you can own and ways of putting them in phrases and lines that are yours by right of obssesive musical deed.” Indeed.

Context for My Poem, “A Sense of Place”:

I would say that a sense of place always matters to me as a reader and as a writer. Today’s poem makes that concern overt.

Downtown Northfield, Minnesota

Until tomorrow, LESLIE

A View of the Cannon River, South of Bridge Square, in Northfield, Minnesota

April 12, 2023 Spotlight on “Triangles” by Pablo Neruda and Context for My Poem, “Attic Story”

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Pablo Neruda

The always-inspiring Chilean poet and statesman, Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), wrote in Spanish but his work translates well into English. I have already shared (April 2022) on this blog my love of his poem, “Ode to My Socks,” and, indeed I think of that poem often when I wear the socks I knit for myself or when I am at work on a pair for someone I love. Today, I want to share a poem of his I discovered this morning as I thought about the shape of the triangle.

Triangles


Three triangles of birds crossed
Over the enormous ocean which extended
In winter like a green beast.
Everything just lay there, the silence,
The unfolding gray, the heavy light
Of space, some land now and then.
Over everything there was passing
A flight
And another flight
Of dark birds, winter bodies
Trembling triangles
Whose wings,
Frantically flapping, hardly
Can carry the gray cold, the desolate days
From one place to another
Along the coast of Chile.
I am here while from one sky to another
The trembling of the migratory birds
Leaves me sunk inside myself, inside my own matter
Like an everlasting well
Dug by an immovable spiral.
Now they have disappeared
Black feathers of the sea
Iron birds
From steep slopes and rock piles
Now at noon
I am in front of emptiness. It-s a winter
Space stretched out
And the sea has put
Over its blue face
A bitter mask.

Pablo Neruda

While I am unable to read the original, and I could not find a citation for the translator, I find this poem effective and evocative. (If you know more about this poem’s publication and/or translation history, please let me know, and I shall update this post.)

Context for My Poem, “Attic Story”:

Attic Window (Leslie Schultz)

Some of you might recall that last year there were lots of basement poems in April. Today it was this photograph I took in 2012 that inspired the poem, “Attic Story.”

Until tomorrow, LESLIE

Thai Pavillion, Olbrich Gardens, Madison, WI

April 11, 2023 Spotlight on “A Riddle” by Kelly Cherry and Context for My Poem, “What?”

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Photo by Meg Theno

Kelly Cherry (1940-2022) was one of my teachers at UW-Madison. We had not remained in touch directly, but I continue to read and admire her work. After writing my own poem for today, which takes the form of a riddle, I thought one of her short poems that I have read so often that, without even trying to, I have committed it to memory. I was saddened to learn this morning that Kelly Cherry died last year. (Her own website is kellycherrybooks.com.)

This favorite poem of mine is from her book, Relativity: A Point of View (Louisiana State University Press, 1977). 

A Riddle

My beauty is beyond compare
And easy reach. No man would dare
To comb my loosed effulgent hair.
I keep my distance but on rare
Occasions condescend to bear
Eight things that move a man to prayer
(Yet none a child), then disappear
In broad daylight beyond blue air.
Man's grasp still falls just short of there.

Answer

A comet. Coma means hair. According to a verse
published in the seventeenth century, the comet was
thought to bring "wind, famine, plague, death to kings,
earthquake, floods, and direful change."

Context for My Poem, “What?”:

The answer to my riddle is rather obvious, I think: thwarted ambition.

Lately rejections from editiors have flown in thick and fast, making me realize that the roots of my amibitions for my work, which I tend to think of as modest, must run deeper than I usually care to acknowledge. An iceberg structure, perhaps, with 9/10s below the level of consciousness? In any case, it helps to attempt to pin the emotion to the page in the form of a poem.

Now, to dust off my hands and move from black and white into the colorful, uplifting space of the garden!

Crossed Purpose (Leslie Schultz)
Approaching the Buddha (Leslie Schultz)

Until tomorrow, LESLIE

April 10, 2023 Spotlight on “My First Poems” and Context for My Poem, “A Story of Student Art”

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Everybody has to start somewhere. For me, with poetry, that was in Third Grade when I was eight years old. That was when, under the kindly encouragement of a beloved teacher, Mrs. Mumford, I went from being entranced by poetry’s music into trying to make my own poems.

After I wrote today’s poem, “A Story of Student Art,” I couldn’t think of anything that would make a suitable spotlight. And so, I thought I would share a bit of raggedy evidence of the blessing of having a really good teacher. (While I know these scraps are laughable, I don’t disown them because they remind me of how exciting it was to write each small set of lines, embellish each as best as I could, and put it in the basket for Mrs. Mumford to see. I can’t recall a single verbal comment that she offered but I know that I felt she beamed approval on me nonetheless. This gave me my first experience of an author reaching an audience. If I wanted to, I could draw a through line from “My First Poems” to this blog, embellished not by wildly erratic crayon lines but with the hasty snaps of an amateur photographer.

May we be tender with our early efforts!

Context for My Poem, “A Story of Student Art”:

This poem (Prose poem? Flash fiction?) evolved from a very vivid dream last night. After writing it, I decided to share this earliest work, above. I am still pondering this newest poem, thinking of how important teachers are to us but at the same time that they can never see what we see. I have been fortunate enough to know several wonderful teachers–as a student and now as treasured friends–and their work and steady kindness fills me with awe. Their encouragement, like the warmth of the spring sun, makes it possible allow the seeds within us germinate, grow, and flower, and eventually be shared. And I know that students, too, are teachers, even when they don’t know it.

There is something here, too, that speaks to the need to edit and revise. And that we can never tell it all, no matter how big the canvas, how epic the poem, how long the novel.

Nonetheless, it is important to allow the work to emerge fully before we get to work with the scissors. Here’s to allowing those planted seeds to flourish. Reaping will come in its own season.

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE