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.
Once upon a time…Julia’s visit to the studio of Fred Sommers…
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
(Photo by Karla Schultz)(Photo by Karla Schultz)(Photo by Karla Schultz)(Photo by Karla Schultz)(Photo by Karla Schultz)
Everyday, I am inspired by the art of my sister, Karla. This year, she agreed to select, from her thousands of flower images, some of her own favorites to share with us today, on her birthday. Thank you, Karla!
Wishing you long life and joy every day!
The Freshest Flowers
are those strongly rooted,
alive to sun and dew,
each one distinct
as a crystal of snow.
Look closely. Lean in.
Wonder at varied hues,
at pattern with infinite--
but not-quite--repetition.
Call this Nature
or call this Art:
a flower captures
the human heart.
Leslie Schultz
Daffodils and Scilla in Our Garden This Morning (Photo by Leslie Schultz)
Early this year, a poet friend kindly passed along a recent issue of a fine poetry journal, Rattle. My surprising-even-to-me rush of interest in the dactylic meter came on the heels of reading the conversation section, highlighting the ideas of poet Annie Finch. From the Rattle website:
“The conversation section explores the intersection of meter and magic with “Poetry Witch” Annie Finch. Annie’s mission is to restore our interest in all five meters, beyond the standard iambics, while reconnecting our spirits to the body and the earth. We talk about it all in a fascinating discussion about the deep history of poetry and humanity.”
Since reading this conversation, I have realized how iambic I am, for the most part. My own first name, LES-lie, is trochaic, the reverse of the I-amb in terms of accent (or “stress”). I tend to think of trochees as the photographic negatives of iambs. But those trilling three-foot meters, dactyls and anapests, rarely caught my attention. (An anapest consists of the same kind of reversal of the stress pattern of the dactyl.)
Now that they have I am seeing how it is difficult for me to actually use this metrical form, or even to find modern examples of it in action.
"Dactyl" means / "finger" in / Greek, and a / foot that was / made up of / one long
Syllable followed by two, like the joints in a finger was used for
Lines made of six, just like these, in the epics of Homer and Virgil,
Save that in English we substitute downbeats and upbeats for long-short.
*
In an an / apest up / beats start out/ in reverse
of the dactyl's persuasion but end up no worse.
(Yes, the anapest's name is dactylic--a curse?)
Paul Fussell‘s splendid magisterial treatise, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (Random House, 1965; 1979) begins with an enlightening essay on “The Nature of Meter.” In it, he opens with a quote from Ezra Pound, “Rhythm must have meaning,” and later asserts, “…triple meters (based on anapestic or dactylic feet) seem inevitably to have something vaguely joyous, comical, light, or superficial about them.”
Lines of anapests, while not exactly common or even considered contemporary, are less thin on the ground than lines built of dactyls. Think of limericks, or of that classic, “‘The Night Before Christmas,” by Clement Clarke Moore, or even of Edgar Allen Poe’s “Annabel Lee.”
I am sure there must be modern dactylic poems of which I am unaware. (If you know of any, please share them with me!) In my hunt for them, I have turned up one that I just love. It’s by Wendy Cope, a brilliant British poet whose first book, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, appeared in 1986. Her collection, Family Values, has a permanent place on my shelves. Cope is able consistently to craft poems that seem light but are never light-weight, rather the way an aerialist skips across a tightrope, making something very difficult appear easy to do. Cope uses a variety of metrical forms. Here is my favorite of hers in dactylic dimeter.
Emily Dickinson
Higgledy-piggledy
Emily Dickinson
Liked to use dashes
Instead of full stops.
Nowadays, faced with such
Idiosyncrasy,
Critics and editors
Send for the cops.
~ Wendy Cope
Wendy Cope (Photo by Stevie McGarrity Alderdice)
One of the things I love about this poem is how it made me notice that both “Emily” and “Dickinson” are perfect dactyls.
For now, my fingers have not managed to bring more than a single line or two of dactylic verse to the page. If I ever manage a whole poem, I shall share it here. I am hopeful that memorizing the opening to Longfellow’s “Evangeline” will work some kind of subterranean magic.
Meanwhile, waiting for the Muse, I mull…perhaps I can do something with the double trochees in “Pterodactyl”?
Yesterday, a friend’s question reminded me of the classic epic poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: “Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie.”
CAN-dle-light
Longfellow is a poet of great accomplishment. His works, once wildly popular, enabled him to support his large family. Though rarely read today, his poetic achievements still reverberate, nonetheless, in popular culture. Robbie Robertson of The Band wrote and recorded two songs inspired by “Evangeline.” Sung by Emmylou Harris, with The Band, in The Last Waltz, “Evangeline,” recounts the basic plot of Longfellow’s poem in summary form. Another song, The Band’s “Acadian Driftwood,” expands the poetic license originally taken by Longfellow in expounding upon the history of how the Acadian people were forceably driven (between 1755-63) from Nova Scotia, during “Le Grand Derangement.” Years later, some of these refugees arrived in the countryside of what is now Louisiana. Here, the French-speaking, Catholic Acadians created the distinctive Cajun culture. (A tour of Louisiana yields many instances of Evangeline as a place name–from a whole parish to a dormitory on the LSU campus. In a few places, sculptures of Evangeline can be found.)
(In Minnesota, where Longfellow set the action of a subsequent epic, rendered in another rare-in-English form, trochaic trimeter, “The Song of Hiwatha,” we have a replica of Longfellow’s house, built in the early 1900s by an admirer, Robert “Fish” Jones. It stands in Minneapolis, near the top of Minnehaha Falls. I have never managed to visit–it is often closed–but perhaps this summer I shall be successful. If not, I can hike down and look up to see the slender but stunning cascade.)
CUM-u-lus
My own mind is filled with iambs, that two-part poetic “foot” so common in English, said to mimic the heartbeat: da-DUM. I love it. Still, I am curious about what I might learn from studying the dactylic form, the three-part poetic “foot” more common in Greek and Latin than in English. (As many of you know, the name of this meter comes from the Greek word for “finger.”) It goes DUM-da-da (or as I think of it, recalling Ballroom Dance lessons, “Long-short-short.” This is the structure of a human finger, considered from the palm to fingertip.
In recent months, I have making lists of words and phrases that hold this dactylic arrangement of stresses. (See photo captions above.) Yesterday, I committed to memorizing the Prelude–the first 19 lines–of “Evangeline” and to reading over the next few weeks or months–yes, aloud!–all five archaic-sounding Cantos of the poem. I don’t know whether I shall ever be able to write a stanza in dactylic hexameters (lines that contain six more-or-less dactylic feet) but I know I will have a lot of fun trying.
Who knows? I might even move on to “The Song of Hiawatha” and the challenge of trochaic trimeter!
Tomorrow, a bit more on the modern use of dactylic meter.
A big thank-you to Tyler Gardner of the Northfield Public Library for constructing this banner, and to Raymonde Noer for my author photo!
One of the best things about having other poets as friends is that when they publish books filled with thoughtful, insightful, musical poems you can be delighted for them. I met Scott Lowery many years ago in his then-home city of Winona. It was the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Competition that brought us together. We both have had winning entries. Scott’s work–whether in traditional forms, like sonnets, or in more organic shapes–is truly stand-out. I am delighted that he arranged for a reading to showcase Mutual Life (Finishing Line Press, 2023) here in Northfield so that you can meet him, too.
Scott’s work is topical yet timeless. Each of the twenty-three poems in his new collection shimmers with specific observation and language that manages to be at once flinty, spare, and distilled, yet also lush, filled with melody, and extravagantly memorable. Taken together, these poems ponder how humans struggle through turbulent times, awash with keen (but often unarticulated) hungers for individual relevance and connection. This collection invites us to broaden our humanity, to look up and out, as well as deep within.
In addition to a selection of poems from Mutual Life, Scott will also share some of the poems in his award-winning collection, Empty-Handed, originally published in 2013 and recently reissued by its publisher, Northfield’s own Red Dragonfly Press. In fact, Scott’s idea is to make the event a little more “Northfield.” Scott and I realized that our work shares some key themes, including hometown life, a Minnesota sense of place, inspiration from the art of others, climate anxieity, and the lessons gained from family. When he asked me to share the podium for this event, we saw an opportunity for a reading in which our poems might have a kind of conversation with each other. It will be an experiment for us, and it is one I am looking forward to!
I hope that you can join us on Tuesday, May 7 to meet Scott and hear him read his wonderful poems. LESLIE
