The biggest poetry news on my own horizon is the publication of my fourth full-length collection of poems. It is called Geranium Lake: Poems on Art and Art-Making. It is scheduled to come out mid-to-late summer, and is being published by the Aldrich Press imprimateur of Kelsay Books. Many of the poems in the collection were written over the past eight years in response to the April Poem-a-Day challenge. The title, and the title poem, were inspired by the pigment, geranium lake, which was used often by Van Gogh and other Impressionist painters.

The collection is divided into eight sections. For me, ekphrastic poetry is a very big tent, indeed, covering poems inspired by and/or describing any art-form, high or low, insider or outsider, and even the way nature exhibits artistic and design principles. Over the next eight days, I will give a one-poem glimpse into each section, and offer a little background on that poem.

The first section is called “Color Wheel” and in centered on poems about painting–both particular paintings and the act of making pictures by brushing paint onto canvas. “I Wanted to Be a Painter” was written on my second stay at the “Art Loft” apartment over the Lanesboro Arts shop on Parkway Avenue in the bluff country river town of Lanesboro, Minnesota. It was first published in ONE ART: a journal of poetry.

I Wanted to Be a Painter


And I still do.
I picture lying down
to soak up malachite
and vermillion
through my pink skin,
rubbing my face with wild 
persimmon and aubergine,
then washing myself clean
with icy aquamarine.

I’ve tried. It’s true.
See from these twisted,
empty tubes just what
I cannot do.

So I retreat now into
bone-pale paper-birch strips,
add marks in reed-strokes
of midnight tone,
all hushed, mute, 
stark—
each line one sharp-edged
Scandinavian hue.


Leslie Schultz

Wishing you a day of color and joy, LESLIE