Always cause for celebration at my house is the biannual publication of The Orchards Poetry Journal. Yesterday, the Summer 2023 issue was released! I am so happy that it contains a poem of mine inspired by the garden Tim, Julia, and I have been making for nearly three decades here in Northfield. The poem, “Consanquinity,” (found on page 77) highlights red flowers and features an ancient pollinator, the little, green-headed sweat bee, Halictidae, the second largest family of bees with more than 4,500 separate species. Above is a photo of said bee in said garden; below, a few others from recent years.
This journal is generously available for free digital download; paper copies can be purchased at Kelsay Books website or on Amazon. It is definitely worth a look. You’ll find your own favorites, of course. A few of mine include,
*Featured Poet Rebecca Brock’s poem, “A Friend Texted to Interrupt This Poem” (page 26);
It has arrived! The newest issue of The Orchards Poetry Journal is here, just in time to bring color, cheer, and interest to darkening winter days.
I am particularly happy to have included in this issue a poem I wrote on April 13, 2022 in honor of my sister’s birthday and my contribution that day to the celebration of National Poetry Month. This poem Karla, inspired by her art, is titled “Stalking Beauty.” It is found on page 121. The poem is fourteen lines, not a sonnet but a variation that I call a “sonnet-like object,” and is a tribute to Karla’s work as a photographer.
This issue–the longest I have seen yet, packed with interesting work, and available on paper in both hard and soft cover, as well as online or in a pdf–offers plenty of indoor diversion for snowy days and evenings. I have enjoyed seeing new work by some familiar names, including fellow Minnesotan Susan McLean (“Takedown” on page 24) and longtime friend Sally Nacker (“Lantern Light” on page 38) from Connecticut and discovering some favorite poems by poets new to me, such as the poem “Photograph” on page 141 by Thomas DeFreitas, a Massachusetts poet, and the masterful sonnet with a marvelous twist on a modern topic, “Selfie,” (on page 88) by Jane V. Blanchard who lives and writes in Georgia.
I hope that you will find something in this issue to brighten your day, no matter how grey or filled with chores is might be! LESLIE
I awoke here in Northfield to snow sifting down this morning. Still dark out, the street and sidewalks were as bright as blank paper. The gardens, trees, and lawns were dark silhouettes and planes of shadow.
Then I discovered that the new issue of The Orchards had been published, always a cause for celebration. I love this wintery cover image of the vintage train steaming along a country track. It reminds me of how the holidays, fully laden with traditions and new surprises, advances upon us every year. It also seems an apt visual metaphor for this particular issue, filled as it is with 98 poems by 77 poets. I have not yet had time to read any of the other poets’ work, but I am looking forward to curling up with a cup of cocoa and slowly turning the pages of the paper copy I have ordered once it arrives. What better oasis of rich calm could I imagine on a snowy winter day?
This issue is available for purchase through Kelsay Books and Amazon, and the digital version is available for free. A link to the digital copy can be found on The Orchards Poetry Journal homepage. You can also publish a paper copy there.
Happy Reading!
Front Door with Square WreathSnow-capped Echinacea on Tim’s Post-stamp PrairieOld Orchard Ladder Supporting a Kiwi Vine
Some things just get better and better. The OrchardsPoetry Journal launched in August 2016 as a twice-a-year online publication. Now, with its eighth issue, not only are the poems available online, but also in a beautiful print format.
And it is chock full of poems I am glad to read and read again. You’ll have your own favorites, of course, but I thought I would mention just a handful of my own.
Molly Peacock, someone whose work I have enjoyed in a number of journals, is the feature poet of this issue of The Orchards. Of the selection here, I am especially taken with her poem “The Shoulders of Women.”
Among the many skillful sonnets in this issue, two–“Abandoned Church in France” by David W. Landrum and “Twilight” by Wendy Sloan–caught my full attention. I know I will return to read them again. Likewise, the very moving (and technically accomplished) villanelle by Allison Joseph, “After Receiving an Unsolicited Mailer from a Monument Company”, used form to soar into a new emotional place.
And I especially enjoyed seeing in print Sally Nacker’s poem for Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Steepletop Museum“, one I read in draft form a while back. Seeing it reminds me of conversation I had with Sally about her visit to St. Vincent Millay’s home near Austerlitz, New York. I, too, have loved St. Vincent Millay’s work since high school. When I worked at Carleton, I taped a photograph of her framed by magnolia branches over my desk in the Development Office, and so I was especially touched that Sally sent me postcards of the famous Remington typewriter and writing shack for my office here at home. Sally’s poem encapsulates the way a life and a place can become intertwined in a way that inspires legend. I am grateful for it because I recently read that the museum is now closed to the public, so it is unlikely I will ever be able to see it for myself.
In closing, I thought that I would offer a little background on the two poems of my own that appear in this issue.
“Blois”
This poem draws on memories of my first visit to the Loire Valley in March 2009, and specifically to a visit to Chateau de Blois.
View of the Loire River taken from the wall of Chateau de Blois.
The chateau has a long history and its history intersected with such fabled people as Jeanne d’Arc (1412 to 1431) and François I (who reigned from 1515 to 1547 and was a patron of Leonardo da Vinci). The chateau occupies the high ground but is linked to the town (and thence to several marvelous patisseries) by a wide and graceful stone staircase, essentially a public street, that envelopes a circular flower bed. It was François I who chose the salamander as his personal emblem.
(As for Images of the famous staircase and a little more on the spectacular chateau, here is a summary. Can’t believe that I was there but neglected to take a photograph of that magnificent architectural detail!)
“All Hallows”
I have been fascinated by owls for decades, at least since Tim and I bought this little bronze replica of an Etruscan statuette on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence back in 1997. Last year, we visited a wonderful new establishment in the small town of Houston, Minnesota, the International Owl Center. So impressed were we with its expansive mission and programming–and by the work of their in-house teaching owls, Ruby (a Great Horned Owl) and Uhu (a Eurasian Eagle Owl), that we returned later in the fall for a field trip Owl Prowl. This year, Tim and I both heard and spotted for the first time an owl in the wild–a Great Horned Owl in the Carleton Arboretum. I have yet to get a clear photograph of an owl–maybe one day. I did, however, find the inspiration for this poem–a meditation on the otherworldly magic of owls–after those visits to Houston, along with real world information on the need to protect owl habitat across the globe.
I hope you, too, will enjoy this watershed issue of The Orchards Poetry Journal!
You can read the issue online HERE. If you would like to order a copy of this first print edition, (as you know I did!) you can do that at the Kelsay Books website HERE.
Pushcarts in January are in short supply in small Minnesota towns. Local readers might recognize the iconic “Book Bike” in the new atrium of the Northfield Public Library, parked under Rob Hardy’s engraved lines celebrating the spirit of our community. I share this image to celebrate another manifestation of community: I learned in the early days of this year that one of the poems I published last year was nominated last autumn for a Pushcart Prize.
When your work is nominated for a Pushcart Prize you know two things absolutely: first, that there is at least one professional out there who truly believes in what you’ve done; and, second, that the odds against actually winning are steep–Rocky Mountain steep. Himalayan-steep. (In poetry, for example, for the 2015 (the 39th anthology, and the one I have consulted) more than 4,000 poems were nominated but only 31 were prize winners. (A further 25 cited for Special Mention but not reprinted.)) My own poem made it only to the first level of nomination.
Both of these facts make each year’s Pushcart Prize announcement a very big deal to writers, celebrating as it does the incredible wealth of fine and inventive writing (poems, fiction, essays) that is published each year in the United States by small presses. Established in 1976 (the year I stumbled onto life-changing volumes of poetry by Howard Nemerov and Sylvia Plath in the Beloit Public Library,) the Pushcart Prize is the brainchild of a disillusioned Doubleday Editor, Bill Henderson. His enduring idea has been to identify each year some of the best work published by non-commercial presses in the previous year. Nominations come from a legion of editors (each journal is allowed a total of six across all genres) and from former Pushcart Prize recipients. The founding editors included such diverse sensibilities as Buckminster Fuller and Anais Nin. Nominations for 2017 closed on December 1, and the 2018 anthology is already available through Amazon or better yet, through your favorite Indie Book Store! Mine is Content Bookstore here in Northfield. Proceeds help to fund the next year’s project.
By creating an anthology of prize winners, as well as a non-profit structure to support it, Henderson continues to draw attention to vibrancy, diversity, and vigor of the good writing we all are doing. Part of the fun of each anthology is archival, for each includes a comprehensive list, alphabetized by last name, that includes the winning genre, title, and year. Last year, I spent months reading aloud all 500 of Amy Clampitt’s poems, and I like knowing that her work is represented by two poems, “The Reed Beds of the Hackensack” (VIII) and “Grassmere” (X). Similarly, Richard Wilbur, another poet whose work has influenced my own, is represented by “Hamlen Book” (VIII). One can’t help noticing who else is not here, truly fine poets Here is a summary, with some quotes from Henderson, published by Poets & Writers three years ago, titled “Pushcart Prize Turns Forty.”
Knowing full well the great leap required to move from “nominated” writer to “prize winning writer,” I am savoring this unexpected validation. In the past forty-two years, something like 250,000 pieces of writing have been nominated. According to my humble and statistically unsound calculations, tens of millions of other fine essays, poems, and stories were not. (I have my own list of work I would champion retrospectively if I could, and surely you have yours. Perhaps that could be the subject of a future post.) But…They were written. They were published. They were read. It is thrilling to realize that excellent work is all around us, waiting for us to discover it.
My nominated poem can be accessed through the post I did in June (which includes a link to the issue of The Orchards in which “To a Former Friend, Whose Affections Are Withdrawn” was published.)
