Tag Archives: Geranium Lake Poems on Art and Art-Making by Leslie Schultz

April 21, 2024 A Preview of GERANIUM LAKE: POEMS ON ART AND ART-MAKING, Part VIII and Poem, “Zinc”

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The final section of Geranium Lake is titled “Roadside Attraction.” It contains poems about what might be termed outsider art, from haute coutre to the fiberglass statue of the Jolly Green Giant or the simple design of the oriole feeder above. Innovation, inspiration, and good design can be found all around us. I, for one, do regard these one-of-a-kind objects as art.

Zinc

	for Corrine


Years ago, my now-deceased neighbor
set out small zinc dishes, fitted
them into shallow depressions she routed out 
into the wood of her back-porch railing
before filling them with purple jelly.

She had made the jelly, too,
from fruit of the crabapple tree at the front
of her house. She was set on enticing
the orange wink and blur of northern orioles
to this feeder of her own design

again, that spring, when she’d called me to bring
my fitful camera. We waited, talking
softly in the green-shadowed garden.
None of the orioles came that afternoon,
but her own nature, the sweetness of intention,

pierces me now from behind my chance image, 
this still-glossy photograph: a churned
surface of red-violet jelly, like a sea storm
at sunset, and one delirious drunken wasp,
diving headlong, accepting the sublime dish.

Leslie Schultz
Corrine and Peanut

This concludes the preview to Geranium Lake. Later this summer, when the book is published, I will make an announcement here. Thank you for allowing me to share a first glimpse with you. It isn’t enclycopedic work on art–there are no poems in Geranium Lake inspired by film, fiction, dance, or drama, for instance–but I have enjoyed putting this collection together. Perhaps someday, in another book, I will have other poems that reflect and consider other forms of art and art-making. In any case, I shall keep my eyes open and my pencil ready!

Meanwhile, I hope you will see art in expected, and unexpected, places–today and everyday!

LESLIE

April 20, 2024 A Preview of GERANIUM LAKE: POEMS ON ART AND ART-MAKING, Part VII and Poem, “Sunday Postcard to the Past”

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(Photo: Free Stock by T. Royce Xan)

As many of you already know, I find postcards evocative, and often they are catalysts for my poems. (As I am, for the most part, a reluctant traveler, I find this interesting. I will say that most of the postcards I purchase are in museum shops, and most of the weekly postcards I have published here have been images from my own small orbit–go figure!)

Section VII of Geranium Lake is devoted to the art form of photography.

(Photo: Leslie Schultz)
Sunday Postcard to the Past



Sited by Giotto, best viewed from the east,
as sun rises over the green-rimmed bowl
of Florentine hills, you, bell tower, stand
alone in your old, sacred precinctneighborhood,
lofty as spent granary, looming on the prairie,
or a rusting factory chimney. Sonic silo, housing
seven named bells, we climbed your four hundred
steps sometime in the last gone century.

It was early. We were happy, younger,
open to every view. You, campanile,
dressed in spumoni marble appliqué
without, were rough-hewn within: gritty, dim,
stronger than centuries or human life.
I remember–at each stage, as we climbed–
looking down through your center: your timbers
black as iron with age, your bells silent.


Leslie Schultz

This poem was originally written for National Poetry Month, on Earth Day in 2018, and was published on Winona Media. HERE is the original post–published with other photographs I took on that trip.

P.S. I once attended a Minnesota Humanitis Commission gathering in which Kenneth S. Brecher was the keynote speaker. He described his unusual memoir, in which he uses postcards from his collection to recall pivotal moments from his life, called Too Sad to Sing: A Memoir with Postcards (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, NYC, 1988.) My own copy is either in hiding or on the lam, but I recall this work with great affection. I believe it is currently out-of-print, but if it crosses your path, it is worth a look.

April 17, 2024 A Preview of GERANIUM LAKE: POEMS ON ART AND ART-MAKING, Part IV, and Poem, “Ichthyography”

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Rare Sighting–Spring Scilla Fish

The poem below is the title poem of the fourth section of Geranium Lake. It was written for National Poetry Month in 2019. HERE is the post from way back then. The poems in this section are all, in one way or another, about the artistic priniciples and practice derived from the natural world, or, more accurately, the non-human natural world, since humans, too, are part of nature. (The amnesiac part, I often think–the tiny drop that thinks itself separate from the ocean.)

Aquarium
Ichthyography
  
 What would it be like, the writing
 of fish? Something shining, I think,
 a muscular, flowing
 calligraphy, 
 a Piscean script—
 accents of whirlpool
 and fin flip.
  
 Shimmering, 
 colorful circumlocutions
 used, like kennings, over and over, 
 and with lots of sudden twists
 and turns in the plot, breaks
 long as winter, slower to resolve
 than river fog rising.
  
 What would it be like 
 to write not with ink
 or light but with water?
 Describing each fresh syllable 
 with my whole body, then
 erasing it all as I go,
 every gesture a metaphor?
 
Leslie Schultz
Goldfish, Como Conservatory

May this be a day when every cloud shape and tree branch finds a way to speak to you! LESLIE

Aquarium Rainbows

April 15, 2024 A Preview of GERANIUM LAKE: POEMS ON ART AND ART-MAKING, Part II, and Poem, “The Eyes of the Dead: A Synesthesia”

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Black Rooster–Art in Bloom–Minneapolis Institute of Art 2018 (Photo: Leslie Schultz0

The second section of Geranium Lake is called “Black Kites.” The name comes from a poem written for National Poetry Month in 2018. This section holds poems that are a bit darker and starker, inspired by sculpture and painting, as well as some photographs, posters, and insignia used for documentary and sometimes propagandistic purposes. (You can see that poem, and a photo of the sculpture that inspired it HERE.)

Today’s poem was inspired by the dislocation that can come when some remnant from the distant past, even a past one did not oneself experience, evokes an intangible, unsettling, but powerful response. This kind of amorphous, multi-faceted summoning is part of what gives art its enduring value. The book of photographs (cover image above) that inspired the poem, full of the extreme contrasts found in Tsarist Russia, below can be found in the synopsis at Publisher’s Weekly.

The Eyes of the Dead: A Synesthesia
(inspired by Before the Revolution, St. Petersburg in Photographs)


I turn these pages rich with photographs:
women, men, children—like mournful giraffes;
long-suffering horses under heavy yokes;
carts and Romanov carriages, gilded spokes
and iron wheels; ramparts of bricks and stones
(some still standing); lofty hats; rigid bones
(beneath silk bodices—human and whale);
jumbles of crockery; one pint of ale.

I close the covers, lift the heavy tome.
Setting it on a shelf, I think the room
is quiet but then a faint perfume
of haunting eyes—pierced with the foreknown gloom
that this wide earth is temporary home—
knocks inside my brain, demands its own poem.

Leslie Schultz
Fruit (Photo: Leslie Schultz)

Wishing you a day of striking and informative contrasts along with startlingly new perceptions, LESLIE

April 14, 2024 A Preview of GERANIUM LAKE: POEMS ON ART AND ART-MAKING, Part I, and Poem, “I Wanted to Be a Painter”

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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

Wishing you a day of color and joy, LESLIE

Memorial Union, University of Wisconsin–Madison