Leslie Ullman’s artistic career is surprising. Often praised for her attention to craft and for poems of mental alertness, you could call Ullman a poet’s poet, an artist who has flown under greater publicity but has achieved an acclaimed career and assumed a role as an impactful literary citizen.
The poet and artist is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is a Professor Emerita at the University of Texas-El Paso, where she spent 27 years teaching and founded the Bilingual MFA Program. Ullman also continues to teach as a faculty member at Vermont College of Fine Arts, an institution she has been affiliated with since 1981.
I want to point back to Ullman’s biography because to review her latest book, Unruly Tree, one also has to start with historical context. Unruly Tree was released in the summer 2024. The book slipped past my radar when it was released and I’m glad Ullman’s work eventually crossed my path. Unruly Tree is a collection rooted in interactive exercises working directly with the musician Brian Eno and with Peter Schmidt’s 1975 project, “Oblique Strategies.” The preface explains how each card in “Oblique Strategies” contains a method to help artists overcome creative blocks and develop lateral thinking. The poet was introduced to the sequence of prompts and decided to use all 110 of them as titles for the poems in the collection. Ullman outlines that the process took four years and led to a profound period of creative exploration, where she broke new ground with language, music, and visual arts, ultimately developing new approaches to her work across these different mediums.
Unruly Tree has an inviting and instructive tone at times, like being welcomed directly inside the poet’s mind. Poems thrive and riff on the prompts, and because the “Oblique Strategies” were meant to inspire, it’s a rich environment for an accomplished poet to dig in with vision. In the poem from the strategy that declares, “A line has two sides.” Ullman hones in on the poetic line, perception and meaning:
If you let your eyes soften and even
cross a little as you stare at that line.
Soon you find yourself seeing from a soft
third eye, one you didn’t know
was there, and the line’s two sides blur
to three.
As some of the Oblique Strategies are phrased as questions, Ullman uses a direct response, adding an immediacy to the poems. Here in “Are there sections? Consider transitions”:
Consider an absence—space
between dots, no-man’s land dividing
claimed turf, mundane event left
off the page, break in dialogue, intake
of breath, pause before decision—
as volte. A presence. Where something quiet
happens or holds up or is preparation
for the next demand. Not a completion.
In commenting on the collection, Ullman noted that she is treating the blank page as a musical score and that she came to experience language as a more malleable and rhythmic medium. This musicality is evident throughout Unruly Tree in the sinuous, slalom-like lineation and flexible rhythms in such poems as, “Turn it Upside Down” and “You are an engineer,” where metaphor and poetry itself are explored in reference to their sonic relationship with air. There’s a kinetic quality to the poems, and for as much as the collection explores, there’s a focus removed from abstraction.
In “Make an exhaustive list of everything you might do and do the last thing on the list,” the poet applies an Ars Poetica where she arrives at restraint:
Extend the metaphor.
Take something out.
Add something
out of the blue—a clear
winter sky, a heron levitating
from thready reeds…. Banish
all similes but one.
Unruly Tree is a collection with accessible and elegantly focused writing, offering a reminder of the importance of seeking out creative inspiration and trusting the process. Ullman shuffles the deck – exploring the interrelationship between the two – and comes out with a juxtaposing combination of energetic and meditative poems.
In the poem/strategy entitled, “Is it finished?” Ullman asks, “Did the work set you into yourself?/Free you?“ with Unruly Tree the poet continues to offer us her own creativity as the answer.
Kathleen Bednarek is a writer living in Pennsylvania. She is a current MFA student and has a MA in Poetry from Wilkes University.