Category Archives: Poems & Stories

April 21, 2017 Poem: “A Question of Style”

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A Question of Style

Bustles and spatterdashes had their day.
Top hats and cutaways have gone away.
Now, it’s only well-dressed cartoon cats who
pull golden pocket watches into view.
What pricey items now inciting passion
will soon draw scorn as artifacts of fashion?

Leslie Schultz

I am a regular reader of Vogue, and I take a lively (if arms-length) interest in all kinds of trends in wearable, readable, architectural, curricular, culinary, and other consumable fashion. (Makes me wonder, incidentally, what Ozymandias was wearing on his long-enduring legs and shattered visage–spats and cool shades, perhaps, to combat the desert dust and glare?)

Here are two of my favorite samples of how fashion is continually updated through the lens of a quirky and catchy song, “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” written by Irving Berlin in 1927. (Interestingly, this was the year after Britain’s King George V deleted spatterdashes from his public dress and caused a mass exodus away from spatterdash-wearing. Apparently the gathered crowded littered the bushes with their own spats before their king had done speaking!)

The first video example is from the Jeeves and Wooster series filmed in the early 1990s but set in the late 1920s when the Irving Berlin song was newly published as sheet music. The second, incorporating the modern trends of flash mobs and athletic shoes, might be my favorite version. (I was interested to see, in seeking out this video clip, that there are numerous others now that take advantage of this elderly but ever-new song’s bouncy lyrics to combine it with group dance, including one charming one set at Heathrow Airport. To date, at least to my knowledge, no flash mob version of this song has been filmed in Rice County, Minnesota!)

Gary Cooper–mentioned in the lyrics as a nonpareil of fashion despite his enduring film legacy as a ruggedly dressed cowboy–was born in 1901, the same birth year ascribed to fictional Bertie Wooster, P.G. Wodehouse’s immortal young man of fashion, above.

My favorite statement in this modern update? It’s a toss-up: Either the opening dancer’s basic black ensemble or the bride’s classic bouquet!

Wishing you a light-hearted look at your world today……LESLIE

P.S.  For more on the silly side…

This morning’s post made me reach, as I so often do, for Stephen Fry’s  peerless book on prosody, The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within. I was amused to see that his perfectly realized Jeeves is, like Fry, a master of rhythm and rhyme. Fry’s book is filled with lucid and succinct summaries of elements of poetic form presented with Fry’s devastating wit.  (The occasional screamingly funny but x-rated quips make it unsuitable for the under-sixteen set, in my opinion, except in excerpted form.) If you are of voting age and curious about the ins and outs of iambs, or want to distinguish meter from rhythm, or crave an algorithm describing the sestina–this is the go-to book.

and, in case you hadn’t heard yet…

one of my favorite online publications, Light Poetry Magazine, just instituted a Poem of the Week feature that offers a humorous view of the past week’s current events. Coincidentally, the cover image for the current issue features a top hat!

Check out other participants at the NaPoWriMo Challenge 2017 home site!

April 20, 2017 Poem “Ali Baba: A Vinyl Memory”

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Ali Baba: A Vinyl Memory
for Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

I can still see that disk of ebony
incised with a spiral journey
ridden by one tiny diamond’s point
from its rim right to its very heart.

It was an old vinyl LP,
pressed when I was two or three,
and a perennial favorite.
Its highly-colored cardboard sleeve

showed Ali Baba, spying, in a tree
overhearing a magic password,
“Open Sesame,”
that caused the mountain-side to split

open so Ali Baba could steal
inside, after the thunderous thieves.
Most of all, I recall
how this deep cave was lit

by the light of jewels
hanging from trees,
a vision summoned
by a lone violin—

Scheherazade—unearthly beauty
pouring into a child’s ears
and glowing there, still,
after all these years.

Leslie Schultz

When I was very young, my mother would often play albums with stories on them in the afternoon. I still often think about four, in particular, wishing I could hear them again. Three of them were from this series: Tale Spinners for Children. A few days ago, I began thinking so strongly of the music from this one. The first four lines of this poem came. I waited until today for the rest of the poem to come clear and to share it here.

Image result for Tale Spinners Ali Baba

To hear an audio clip of the violin solo, just scroll down to the second one.

Which oft-heard (told, read, recorded) stories most impressed themselves upon you? I would love to hear if you’d care to share. (The other favorites in the recorded realm for me were “Beauty and the Beast” & “Aladdin and the Magic Lamp” in the Tale Spinners series, and a collection of folktales told by Beryl Berney called “All Join Hands Around the World.” I still think very often of the Japanese story she told of how there is a rabbit in the moon.)

Until tomorrow!  LESLIE

Check out other participants at the NaPoWriMo Challenge 2017 home site!

April 19, 2017 Poem: “Portrait of a Street Musician”

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 Portrait of a Street Musician
(Paris, March 22, 2009)

I asked an expert,
later, what instrument
this musician played.

“I’ve never seen the like,”
he shrugged. “I think
it must be homemade.”

Jet-lagged, I stood
in grey Paris
among the fruit stands.

I was holding unfamiliar
coins and my camera
in my hands

when I heard a faint
strain, a light air,
a thin ribbon of sound

that I followed,
to this spot, where
it wound and unwound.

I cannot recall
the names of the notes,
their order,

just that I lifted
my lens, questioning
across the border

between us. He
nodded, clenched his jaw.
The camera whirred—

a tiny percussive sound,
like a twig snapped by
the weight of a bird—

and, as my young
daughter danced
over, how sun burned

on those coins we
offered; how he
smiled in return.

Leslie Schultz

The idea for this poem came when I was looking this morning at a catalog for the Milwaulkee Art Institute. I opened the volume at random and read, under a reproduction of his Fauve painting titled “The Wheat Field” (circa 1906), of a French painter, Maurice Vlaminck, who “was a self-taught artist who began painting purely for pleasure, while supporting himself financially by playing the violin.” That sentence made me remember this moment eight years ago–the grey light and the grey stone of the French market on a Sunday in Paris. All these years later, and I hope his playing brings him joy as well as coins. When I look at the craftsmanship of his unnameable stringed instrument, I think it must.

LESLIE

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April 18, 2017 Poem: “City Rain” (After “Spring Showers” by Alfred Stieglitz, Circa 1900)

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City Rain
after “Spring Showers,” circa 1900, by Alfred Stieglitz

These delicate mists
soften almost everything—
stones, concretes, bricks.

The old woman
in a black hat
bends
toward pavement;
the pavement shines
like the surface
of a lake, a lake ringed
by buildings
shimmering like hills.

Everything
seems to dissolve~
except this singular
sapling,
its slender trunk
rocketing
out from
a circle
of black iron,
firing
dark clouds,
explosions
of new buds,
fresh-inked on
this silver sky.

Leslie Schultz

It is raining here today, and I thought I would try a double imitation. Here is a poem inspired by a lovely New York image from more than a hundred years ago with, I think, the distinctive look of a Japanese brush painting. To see a digital image of one print of this evocative photographic capture by Alfred Stieglitz in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, click HERE.

Meanwhile, my more prosaic–and sun-drenched–black and white image, taken a couple of blocks from my house, is below.

Hoping your day holds joy in all weathers-–Leslie

Check out other participants at the NaPoWriMo Challenge 2017 home site!

Check out other participants at the NaPoWriMo Challenge 2017 home site!