Tag Archives: The Orchards Poetry Journal

My Poem, “The Beauty of Emptiness,” is in the Winter 2023 Issue of THE ORCHARDS POETRY JOURNAL

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The Winter 2023 issue of The Orchards Poetry Journal has just been published online. The winter issue always arrives just when one wants to curl up under a lap robe with a cup of hot tea and read the grey afternoon away. (Here in Minnesota as I write, we are still waiting for snow, making do with rain, so this entrancing cover is, in more than one way, a promise of things to come.)

Because this issue was just posted yesterday, I have not read it from end to end yet–that would just be plain greedy! What I have looked at so far online makes me anticipate even more being able to read the paper copy coming in the early days of the new year.

Perusing the table of contents, I was struck by the title,”Lake of the Isles, March 2017.” Surely this must refer to the place I know very well in Minneapolis! It does. The poet, Paula Reed Nancarrow, is a Minnesota poet, as I discovered. After reading her eloquent elegy, a masterful villanelle filled with the lights and shadows of the season, I subscribed to her blog.

Another title that jumped out at me was “Yachats,” a poem by Jennifer Stewart. The title caught me because it was a new word to me but it whisked me back to the world of my girlhood on the Oregon coast. (“Yachats,” I discovered, is the name of a small coastal town whose name means “dark waters at the foot of the mountain” in the Siletz language.) This free verse poem was powerfully evocative of both place and the language that fixes it in consciousness. I could smell the salty fogs and feel the smooth undulations of driftwood. I also learned that she reviews her favorite Asian movies at youtube.com@dramajen.

Hoarfrost in Sun (Leslie Schultz, 2016)

I am also pleased to see a lovely poem from friend Sally Nacker, entitled, “Geese,” on page 38!

You can read the issue online or down load a PDF copy for free; finely printed and bound paper copies are available for $17.00 a copy at the Kelsay Books webite. (My own poem appears on page 104.) It always feels like a real achievement to be published in the pages of this journal. Reflecting back, I am pleased that the title poem for my first collection of poetry, “Still Life with Poppies,” appeared in The Orchards inaugural edition in August 2016. In the seven years since, though I can hardly believe it, they have accepted 19 poems (and rejected scores of others, of course!) Even more important, this journal has introduced me to the art and craft of dozens of poets I respect.

Happy Reading! Happy Holidays! Stay Warm!

Icy Web, Icy Eave (Leslie Schultz 2016)

The Orchards Poetry Journal Publishes My Poems “Tiny Troubadour” and “Dogwoods”

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It is always an occasion when The Orchards Poetry Journal publishes a new issue. This issue is something even more special to many of us, since it features the poetry of the late Kim Bridgford. I think it is no exaggeration to say that everyone who knew Kim feels bereft since her death last spring. I certainly do. After meeting her just once, at the AWP Conference in 2015 in Minneapolis, I became inspired by her work as a poet, scholar, and editor, and by her natural, generous, open-hearted way of moving through the world as a full human being. I will be forever grateful for her encouragement of my own work (by accepting a number of poems for her journal, Mezzo Cammin, and for contributing blurbs for my first two collections) and for the inspiration of her own work. (My own particular favorite of her collections is called Hitchcock’s Coffin: Sonnets About Classic Films, but all her work is deft, deep, and indelible.)

This issue of The Orchards contains a beautiful photograph of Kim, a summary of Kim’s many accomplishments and a moving note by her son, Nicki Duvall. Most importantly, it provides a taste of her astonishing work as a poet. I will be reading and rereading all of these for a long time.

This issue also contains a lovely poem, “Saying Goodbye,” from Sally Nacker (whose work is familiar to long-time readers of Winona Media, and who first introduced me to Kim Bridgford), and two of my own poems from the last year or so, “Tiny Troubadour” and “Dogwoods.” I wrote the first, a sonnet, last year after a bachelor wren in our garden during the nesting season of 2019 touched my heart, and I wanted to show it to Kim but that was not to be, so it is dedicated to her. (This wren returned to our garden this past summer of 2020, attracted a mate, and raised two broods.) “Dogwoods” is for my friend, Judy, inspired by her and her love of the natural world–garden, prairie, and woods.

You can read this issue online HERE, and order your own paper copy HERE.

Happy reading! Wishing you a peaceful and artistic winter season!

LESLIE

News Flash! The Orchards Poetry Journal Publishes “Happy Hour” in the Winter 2019 Issue

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It’s here! If you, like me, need a bit of comfort and joy as the mercury plummets and the days grow darker yet, take heart: The Orchards Poetry Journal (Winter 2019 issue) is now available and is more gorgeous than ever.

My own small poem (just six lines) is a tiny sliver of biography, an ode to the comfort and joy of an evening at home. Similarly, my longtime friend, Sally Nacker, has a poem in the issue that offers a quiet and quietly content view of the years to come, titled “Old Age.” (It was Sally who sent me the bouquet last March, centered in the photo below.)

As usual, this issue is packed full of skillful and startling poems in a range of forms and moods. If my count is accurate, there are thirty-nine poems by thirty-one poets.

Right up front are four poems by Jean Kreiling, including her winning entry to the Kelsay Books Metrical Writing Contest (“Elegy: One Year in Plymouth”–an elegy from a daughter to her mother celebrating their last year together on the Atlantic coast in language fresh and keen as salt breeze.) The other poems that placed in the contest are included–all very accomplished. I was especially taken with “The Last Dandelion” by Aline Soules and “Pileated Woodpecker” by Barbara Loots.

There are so many other poems I enjoyed (and plan to reread) that if I were to list them all I would be replicating the table of contents. Despite that, I will mention two by Robin Helweg-Larson (“Winter Night Roads” and “Smoke on the Wind”) and two with different but complimentary inspirations from rivers (“My River” by Ace Boggess and “Aware of My Beauty” by Wendy Patrice Williams). Finally, a six-line gem by Neil Kennedy called “When Juliet” wows me–inspired by a famous scene from Shakespeare and calling to my mind Robert Herrick’s “Upon Julia’s Clothes,” these few lines turn all that tradition into something fresh, new, and dazzling.

If you need a moment of insight to light up the blue shadows of some long winter’s night, do dip into this issue of The Orchards Poetry Journal.

Season’s Greetings, and happy reading!

LESLIE

News Flash! THE ORCHARDS Publishes My Poem, “Antique Absinthe Glasses, Inverted, on a Window Ledge”

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The seasonal treat of The Orchards Poetry Journal is here! It is always such a pleasure to savor the thoughtful, inventive, lyrical work of the poets included. In this issue, I am especially happy to be published alongside two poems by my friend, Sally Nacker.

Below are the very glasses that inspired the poem. They were made in France, as is the newly available version of the legendary libation they were designed to hold (scroll down to see the inventive packaging.)

Hoping you will enjoy the intoxicating variety of the holiday weeks ahead, as well as the distilled language in the poems in this issue of one of my favorite journals!

LESLIE

THE ORCHARDS POETRY JOURNAL Has Published Its June 2018 Issue: My Poems, “Watercolor” and “Medusa,” Are Included

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The June issue of the semi-annual online publication, The Orchards Poetry Journal, has just been published.  It is a work of beauty and heart. I am so pleased to have my own work included, and I am enjoying the work of other poets, most of them previously unknown to me.

When I was in college, I had the starring role in a short student film about a poet–an introvert!–who had to escape from daily stresses to the quiet of a park at sunset. The title? “The Little Tippler” (for E.D.) That was the same year I first encountered the poems of Emily Dickinson which have influenced me ever since. Given that, I was impressed by the technically adept and humorous riff on Emily Dickinson’s original poem (“I taste a liquor never brewed” #214) in this issue of The Orchards, called “Getting High with Emily Dickinson” by Chris Carrol. (Click HERE to find the text of the original poem by Dickinson as printed by the enclyopedic site www.poets.org hosted by the American Academy of Poets–sponsor of National Poetry Month and inventor of Poem-in-Your-Pocket Day. Please note, as with many of Dickinson’s poems, variants abound. The version I memorized years ago had a different third line: “Not all the Vats along the Rhine”!)

Other favorites of mine in this issue include Susan McLean’s devastating villanelle “What You Need to Know;” Ted Charnley’s trenchant “Lady MacBeth in the 21st Century;” and Katherine Barrett Swift’s wry homage to John Donne in “Busy Old Fool.”

Of my own poems, “Watercolor” came to be written when friend and poet Sally Nacker and I engaged in an exercise drawn from a book called The Crafty Poet, by Diane Lockward, the poet laureate of the New Jersey town of West Caldwell. Her monthly blog is well worth investigating (I have subscribed for some years) on her website.

“Medusa,” my sonnet, is dedicated to the poet and former US Poet Laureate Louise Bogan (1897-1970). I first encountered Bogan’s work in high school by chance, on the shelves of the Appleton Public Library, through her final collection, The Blue Esturaries. (I remember, vividly, looking up the word “estuaries.”) For thirty-eight years, Bogan also reviewed poetry for The New Yorker. In my opinion, she is too little read today.

Unlike Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, also high school discoveries for me, Bogan was a very private person on the page–cool, cerebral, a master of technique, too. Her form of emotional intensity comes not from the confessional mode but from restraint and precision of diction and musicality–more Bach than Beethoven. Both Plath and Bogan employed the mythology of Medusa in their own distinct ways. Many years after encountering their poems, I wrote my own poem.

Hoping you enjoy this issue of The Orchards Poetry Review! Let me know which poems arrest your attention!