Tag Archives: Poet Richard Wilbur

April 26, 2024 Newburyport Music Festival and the Melopoeiac PASSAGES CD

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“Passages”–a compilation by Rhina P. Espaillat, Alfred Nichol, and John Tavano

As regular readers know, I am interested in the relationships between poet and other art forms, in how the works in one art form inspire or converse with each other. A few years ago, a friend, Beth Clary, gave me a copy of a remarkarble recording that draws connections between poetry and melody, that explores the ways in which sound and sense align: the country of “melopoeia.”

As Ezra Pound had it, “Melopoeia or melopeia is when words are “charged” beyond their normal meaning with some musical property which further directs its meaning,[1] inducing emotional correlations by sound and rhythm of the speech.”

In 2018, a trio comprised of poet Rhina P. Espaillat, poet Alfred Nicol, and composer John Tavano recorded a remarkable CD in their arts-rich city of Newburyport, Massachusetts called “Passages”. This recording was an outgrowth of the renowned Newburyport Chamber Music Festival, and a product of that vibrant arts community. The cover art, by Alan Bull, is from a painting called, “Memorial Day, Newburyport;” the graphic design was contributed by Elise Nicol; and the CD was recorded at Thomas Eaton Recording in Newburyport.

As you can see, the readings are shared by poets Espaillat and Nichol, and include not only their own poems but one each by A. E. Stallings and Richard Wilbur. The music is all performed by Tavano, and most is composed by him , but he also includes effective arrangements of “Packington’s Pound,” a British broadside ballad; “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg; and “Yesterday,” by John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

Listening again recently to these many-layered recordings has made me more aware of the melodic qualities of individual words and of how much enjoyment I derive from the sound of language as well as its sense. In fact, while others might disagree, I conclude a poem requires at least as much attention to the sonic quality of the lines (the artistic deployment of such elements as rhythm and meter, alliteration, assonance, dissonance, and rhyme) as it does in its “reason” or arguement or sense.

While this is not a brand new thought for me, listening again to “Passages” makes me realize afresh that a large share of the joy of reading and writing (and memorizing!) a poem comes from sound itself.

I hope today that music, in any of its many forms, flows into your world, embellishing it and carrying you away, if only for a moment! LESLIE

(Photo: Leslie Schultz)

April 16, 2023 Spotlight on “The Writer” by Richard Wilbur and Context for My Poem, “Self as Portraits”

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Richard Wilbur

It wouldn’t be April if I didn’t return to the poems of Richard Wilbur (1921-2017), traditionally formal work marked by ” wit, charm, and gentlemanly elegance.” Today, I am thinking of a the aural portrait he created sparked by listening to his daughter, in another room, typing a story of her own creation. The clatter of old-fashioned typewriter keys is a pivotal device in this poem. “The Writer” is gorgeous on every level to me–it contains its own revision–and quietly speechs volumes of the love the parent has for the child trying hard to fledge. The link above as the full text as well as a voice clip of Wilbur reading the poem in his deep and sonorous voice. Here are a few favorite lines of mine, the poem’s second stanza: 

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.
Wyoming Typewriter (Leslie Schultz)

Context for My Poem, “Self as Portraits”:

After Wallace Stevens’s Poem “Anecdote of the Jar” (Leslie Schultz, 1980)

In the March issue of Vogue, I read a profile, by Dodie Kazanjian, titled “Vision Quest,” of a young graphic artist that held me mezmerized. The artist’s name is Sasha Gordon, and the article describes how this young person is painting self portraits to gain personal and cultural perspective. I am often moved by” the art spirit,” to use Robert Henri’s term, when I read Vogue. The clothes seem sculpture and theater, both, rather than garments, and the coverage of contemporary artists across all genres is something I am grateful for, since mostly popular culture presses forward far ahead of me. Not that I always am drawn to the van guard or even understand it, but still, it is useful to know a little of the explorations, dictions, and preoccupations of what is à la mode, as well as currently celebrated names. I had not heard of Sasha Gordon’s work before, but to my surprise it instantly spoke to me. Today’s poem, “Self as Portraits,” is dedicated to Gordon and derives from the descripton of the way Gordon applies paint to the canvas slowly and methodically and intutively, as well as to her subject matter. Not wanting to violate copyright, I have not included images of Gordon’s work here, but it can be seen online and is worth a look. Someday, I hope to view her canvases themselves.

As I recorded in a poem, “I Wanted to Be a Painter,” published in One Art two years ago, I have often wondered if I am a poet because I don’t have the skill to be a painter! Just this morning, I learned that the Academy of American Poets curates a section called Self-Portrait Poems–in case you’d like even more poetry on this Sunday in April!

P.S. Here are two scraps from my erstwhile dream of becoming a visual artist…

Self-Portrait, 1980 (Leslie Schultz)

Until tomorrow, LESLIE

April 17, 2022: Spotlight on “April 5, 1974” by Poet Richard Wilbur; Context for My Trio of Poems, “Cinquains for Easter Morning”

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April 5, 1974

The air was soft, the ground still cold.
In the dull pasture where I strolled
Was something I could not believe.
Dead grass appeared to slide and heave,
Though still too frozen-flat to stir,
And rocks to twitch and all to blur.
What was this rippling of the land?
Was matter getting out of hand
And making free with natural law,
I stopped and blinked, and then I saw
A fact as eerie as a dream.
There was a subtle flood of steam
Moving upon the face of things.
It came from standing pools and springs
And what of snow was still around;
It came of winter’s giving ground
So that the freeze was coming out,
As when a set mind, blessed by doubt,
Relaxes into mother-wit.
Flowers, I said, will come of it.

“April 5, 1974” by Richard Wilbur from Collected Poems. © Harcourt, 2004.

Bloodroot and Scilla, April 12, 2017, Northfield (Photo: Leslie Schultz)

Flowers will come of it, eventually. That is the promise of spring, even in the years, like this one, when it arrives on the slow boat. Richard Wilbur is a perennial favorite poet of mine. I return over and over to his surprising, supple, but never facile formal poems. He died in 2017 but in his work he lives on.

Context for My Trio of Poems, “Cinquains for Easter Morning”:

I chose the cinquain form this morning because of its containment. To me, the syllabic canvas of 2/4/6/8/2 creates an egg-like shape on the page and in the mind, too.

Happy Reading! Happy Writing! Happy Easter! LESLIE

April 25, 2021: Spotlight on LET US WATCH RICHARD WILBUR and Context for Poem “Elegances”

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My admiration for the poetry of Richard Wilbur is longstanding and just about unbounded. I don’t rank the poets whose work I love, I just wonder at and cherish them. For me, the fact that I can and do make the same statement about several dozen poets’ work, at least, whose lives spanned centuries of poetic currents in the English language, doesn’t diminish the regard I feel. And what I appreciate about today’s Spotlight book is that it helped me understand the kind of person Wilbur was, and, as it happens, he was just the kind of sane, decent, vastly talented, and very human in his foibles as I imagined him to be.

Robert and Mary Bagg‘s accomplishment in the literary biography, Let Us Watch Richard Wilbur (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017) is remarkable for its sensitivity, range, and timeliness, appearing as it did the same year of Wilbur’s death. It is a rare thing for a biographer (or, in this case, a team of biographers) to have a cooperative subject whose trust, the result of years of collegial friendship and mutual regard, provided access to interviews and documents (including unpublished journals; private correspondence with many people, including some of the giants of twentieth century literature such as Bishop, Lowell, Berryman and Merrill; family archives; and a series of interviews with Wilbur, and with his wife, Charlee (1922 to 2007), to whose memory the biography is dedicated.)

Richard Wilbur (1921 to 2017) published his first in a string of distinguished collections of poetry (as well as essays and translations) in 1947. When poet and critic Louise Bogan reviewed that debut volume, The Beautiful Changes, for The New Yorker Magazine, she concluded, “Let us watch Richard Wilbur. He is composed of valid ingredients.”

Indeed. Wilbur’s accolades are numerous, lofty, and deserved. (Two Pulitzer Prizes, a term as Poet Laureate of the United States, and too many prizes and publications to count for his own poetry and prose, as well as distinguished teaching and incredibly accomplished translations of French writers, especially successfully with Moliere’s plays.) What most impresses me is his formal skill, deep humanity, and sense of order and humor. Such poems as “A Hole in the Floor”, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World”, “Junk”, “Cottage Street, 1953”, and “Advice to a Prophet”, among many, many others, along with his translation of “Tartuffe” make him a perennial teacher of mine, even though I never met him. His restraint, artistry, extensive learning worn gracefully and lightly, and his sense of humanity make his poems always current favorites with me.

Context for Poem “Elegances”:

The poem today is an homage to Richard Wilbur, a writer whose verse is as elegant and muscular as any I have encountered.

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE