Tag Archives: Leslie Schultz photography

Postscript: Poet-Artist Collaboration XVI–A Celebration of National Poetry Month!

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Tim and I traveled to Zumbrota, MN last Saturday evening for this year’s salute to National Poetry Month at the Crossings at Carnegie. Each year, a group of poets and artists are paired up through a juried process, and then they come together to meet; introduce and read the poems; and view and enjoy the resulting visual art inspired by the poems.

After fifteen previous such celebrations, Marie Marvin and her staff have this event down to a fine artistic science. Beginning with a potluck reception at Crossings gallery & shop, moving to the nearby State Theater (operated by the Zumbrota Area Arts Council) for readings by poets and comments by visual artists, and then back to Crossings for lively conversation and closer looks at the art pieces, this event has something for everyone. And it gets better every year!

This year, among the twenty-three pairs of literary and visual artists, Tim and I were pleased to see poets Christine Kallman (a Northfield neighbor, playwright, and Sidewalk Poet) and her daughter; to see poet Ken McCullough and his wife, playwright Lynn Nankivil,  friends from  Winona; and to meet new people including a multi-talented artist from Red Wing, Art Kenyon, and his wife, Kathleen. Art created a painting inspired by my poem, “Nomad’s Daughter” (originally published in Third Wednesday.) His comments, and our conversation afterwards, helped me to understand my poem better. I love what he did with the poem, taking it into a dimension I could never have imagined. Below are some photos of the evening, to give you a flavor of it.

I was excited to find the painting inspired by poem.

Tim and I snagged good seats for the main program.

I get to meet “my” artist, Art Kenyon. Having thought about one poem in depth this spring, he decides to take home my book, Still Life with Poppies: Elegies.

Below, impresario Marie Marvin, and I channel the energies of Broadway’s classic, Cats–especially appropriate since the musical is based upon T.S. Eliot’s poems in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Marie models one of the evening’s wearable artworks, a polar fleece hat and mittens combo designed by Lana Sjoberg and inspired by Mim Kagol’s poem, “Cat in the Garden,” while I wish I could really sing!

It was an unforgettable evening that still has us clicking our heels!

April 6, 2017 Poem: “A Bowl of Blackberries”

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NaPoWriMo 2017 April 6

A Bowl of Blackberries

Like its very distant cousin, the crisply alabaster lotus,
the blackberry sinks roots deep in moist sand and mud;
but instead of a long, pure, central shaft rising
to support a single porcelain-white bowl filled with calm light,
the blackberry unspools its prickling brambles laterally—
meters and meters of looping, minute red thorns
spun headlong on tough, green cables resistant to pruning, each burning
with a myriad of fruit. Some I now see resting here:
a heap of honeyed coals, and each one alive with embers,
clusters of summer fire, alight with understory
of blood-purpled cordial, precious as caviar or eyesight or
fireflies; like justice outpacing mercy, each delivering
its complex cluster of sweet but stinging juice
with the prophetic bitter wood of seed.

Leslie Schultz

This poem started from looking more closely at things I see every day in my dining room and kitchen. I went to bed last night and awoke dreaming of blackberries, lotuses, and light.

Hope your day is full of sweet surprises!

LESLIE

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

Sign of Early Spring

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Every year, we wait for it. The tiny Siberian wildflower known to us as scilla, announces spring as nothing else does. I had never heard of it before moving to Northfield, but now it is one of my very favorites.

In a few weeks, the whole town will be awash with these intense blue blooms. For several weeks now, I have been watching the hearty green spears begin to poke out of the ground and take snow squalls in their stride. Today–when the sky was an iron-fisted grey, not allowing a single golden ray or a glimpse of blue to slip through the clouds–the muddy ground yielded this exciting vanguard of spring. Very cheering!

Leslie

 

April 27, 2017 Poem in Your Pocket Day & Poem: “Portable”

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Portable
for Sandy Petrek

A taste for home
pierces the tongue
early, is easy
to carry
across oceans,
or a whole lifetime.

You’ve been
teaching me
the anchoring tang
of the fresh-caught
raspberry, still dewy,
sun-and-wind
ripened, just outside
your door;

how to reach
through a forest
of obstacles—
tough green canes,
thorns, tears—
to lift a brief
sweetness to the lips,
and to let it linger.

Leslie Schultz

All over the country, today is POEM IN YOUR POCKET DAY.

(A few years ago, my friend, Sandy Petrek and I spearheaded an effort to bring this celebration to Northfield. Look for the red boxes downtown and elsewhere, or tuck a favorite poem fro home into your pocket–read it to someone else or just to yourself, and consider passing it along before the day is done.)    LESLIE

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

April 28, 2017 Poem “Death”

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Death

I hate you and the horse you rode in on.
I hate your black hat, your black boots, your cloak
darker than oblivion. Carrion
memories attend you, and I hate them—oak-

galled ink scribblings in the margins of your
book. I hate the pain you cut with a steel
quill across the faces I love, how you roar
in bone-silence, deeper and more surreal

than the bedrock ticking of clocks or time
itself. I hate how you invade this form
of love, this sonnet, twisting its pretzeled rhyme
to your own echoless ends: unsound, infirm.

I shall stare you down. I shall take the reins.
Pale horse, your rider walks away in chains.

Leslie Schultz

The photograph of the white swirl on the water was taken at the glacial pothole park at Taylor’s Falls on the St. Croix River, a bit north of here. The other photographs were taken in Savannah, Georgia.

LESLIE

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