Tag Archives: Leslie Schultz photography

April 12, 2017 Poem “Embellishment”

Posted on by

NaPoWriMo 2017 April 12

Embellishment
(A Condensed Autobiography)

I first encountered coffee
in my mother’s kitchen,
thought its scent delicious
but its taste rank, odious.

It was in college that I began
savoring it, requiring it.
I learned the beguilements
of dark roast in Louisiana.
(Ah! Graduate school! Where I studied
the intensity of Community Coffee,
crystals dark as embers
igniting every morning!)

When did I first stumble upon whole beans?
Yes, in Minnesota, as a writer, grinding
out words, with serious dollars
and deadlines swirling my brain.

These points of my caffeine dream
I recall clearly. But when did coffee
reach beyond sugar and cream?
Become latté? Transform from
the quotidian nightmare
of T.S. Eliot into something
more Venetian, more sublime,
and now presented with ephemeral,
foaming, graphic appeal—all
just a short stroll
from my house in Northfield?

Leslie Schultz

Coffee with Myrna, Brick Ovens

Wishing you a good morning and a satisfying-to-the-last-drop day!

LESLIE

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

April 11, 2017 Poem: “At the Theater: A Dream of Stars”

Posted on by

NaPoWriMo 2017 April 11

 

At the Theater: A Dream of Stars

I settle in the theater, in a seat on the aisle,
with a clear view to the stage.
Then a woman claims the seat just in front
of me. Well, now I can’t see! She must be seven feet tall
with good posture. She is wider than a doorway,
her hair dense with leaping curls. The only thing
missing is the straw hat with a feather or flower.

Somehow, I know she is wearing wrist-length, white
gloves.And polka dots. She listens intently, never whispering
to her companion, who is, maybe, the little man shot
from the cannon in another show. I crane my neck,
first one side, then the other, glimpsing the movie
in fragments. She has every right to be who she is
and where she is, but why am I here, so blinded? Then

I know: we are in a cave, both staring at Plato’s flickering
fire, she the movable wall between me and the cool
illusory flame. We are shadow puppets at rest. She
is the band of silhouette circling the planetarium’s
domed screen. I have only to look up or down or
elsewhere— into the roiling heart of me?—
and peer through the dark lens of poetry.

Leslie Schultz

Wishing you a day when new planets swim into your ken!  Leslie


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

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

Posted on by

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”

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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