Tag Archives: Leslie Schultz photography and poetry

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 18, 2024 A Preview of GERANIUM LAKE: POEMS ON ART AND ART-MAKING, Part V and Excerpts from Poem “Lady Tashat’s Mystery”

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Minneapolis Museum of Art–Art in Bloom–Spring 2014 (Photo: Leslie Schultz)

The fifth section of Geranium Lake is filled with a long, nine-part poem that took me more than twenty years to complete. “Lady Tashat’s Mystery” began as a response to exploring the permanent collections of the Minneapolis Museum of Art. It evolved into an inquiry about what we, individually and collectively, chose to preserve and display, what effects that has, what it says about us. Museums–temples to the Muses–are very important to me. During the pandemic, I missed their closure more than the closure of restaurants or other public spaces. I find museums lively and stimulating. At the same time, whenever I am in a museum, I am keenly aware of the presences of those long dead, and, in a way, of how culture depends upon conversations with those long departed, upon questions of why the dead did as they did and made what they made–and what we continue to make of it all.

This particular “exhibit” raised more questions than I can answer, even after I spoke with a curator and did as much reseach as a lay person could do. Though I continue to wonder and ponder, I think now that there is no answer or, rather, the answer is simply the mystery of existence.

Below are the first two sections of the poem, and a glimpse of part of my amassed background information.

 
Lady Tashat’s Mystery

	for Leo Luke Marcello

	
That which is hidden might be preserved.  
One day it will come to light. 


I. Reading the Bones

Under the desert sand,
Under the rock.
Behind the false door,
Behind the true.

Beneath two heavy lids
And two painted smiles,
Beneath the linen tapes
Stiff with unguent.

I am revealed.
I can tell no more.

But if my riddle begins to tap
Like an ibis bill
Inside your head,
Then you already have the map,
And I, though chill,
Am not utterly dead.


II. The Museum-Goer

The snows of Minneapolis are white as marble dust
and cut the nostrils like fragments of bad dreams.  
The Institute, too, is white:
stone, a slippery mountain, behind the delicate tepees
pitched on a frozen lawn.  Inside, treasures of 
six continents lie in cold cases, on view.

I have been here before
to see the quilts of dead women
and the brushed smoke and sunlight of dead men.
Each time, I circle the Poet's Mountain
hewn from a single piece of bluish jade.

To one who looks closely, it is possible to see
drunken men winding up the side of a glassy mountain,
tottering unaware near precipices, over slender bridges, 
their thin beards quavering with excitement.  They are part
of a world as fragile and polished as the road they tread.

From a distance the mountain 
looks like a heavy cloud or a dragon's blue egg.  Do you
suppose the poets know this? 
Do they think that if they get their words
just right the mountain might split open
with a clap of thunder?  

If so, would this be praise?

May this be a day when you, too, enjoy grappliing with an unanswerable question! LESLIE

Reseach into the mystery of Lady Tashat (Photo: Leslie Schultz)
Lady Tashat Cartonnage (Photo: Leslie Schultz)

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