Tag Archives: Leslie Schultz Poetry

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 10, 2017 Poem: “Music So Loud We Can’t Hear”

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NaPoWriMo 2017 April 10

Music So Loud We Can’t Hear
for Luke
(Joe Bonamassa Concert, March 18, 2017)

It’s as if all the thunder
and bison hooves
pounding over the Great Plains
for centuries,
the spiral winds turning
skies green, and
all the demon freight trains
who shriek across burnt horizons
have gathered here,
in Minneapolis, on stage
at the Orpheum Theater.

Thanks to Benjamin Franklin—
his kite and key and legacy
of innovation at G.E.—we
are temporarily deafened,
our ears sheared free
of their function, and
hearing itself driven deep
into our chests, nearing
the knocking of our own hearts
and even deeper, toward
the lost hell of Orpheus
himself, into the mineral
music of our very bones.

Now we’re tuned to a new key,
flung beyond anticipation
into agitated deep seas:
those inky blues of desperation.

Leslie Schultz

As you will know if you saw my post of March 20 this year, the Joe Bonamassa concert was a high water mark for me. I am still thinking about it, “hearing my memory” of it, and playing the CD I purchased that evening.

Here’s to those sharp peaks, moments of not-so-easy but profound listening!

LESLIE

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

April 9, 2017 Poem “Nine Rooms”

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NaPoWriMo 2017 April 9

Nine Rooms
            A Spiral Journey Around Our House as a Bagua

Enter through the central eastern front door. Notice here,
in this place of career, a mirror and, opposite, Spring Creek, framed
in ink-black and ever-flowing, with one black stepping stone just out of reach.

Step right, into the space of opening insight, where I write
seated on denim blue, inspired by photographs of swimming pools,
ancient azure carpet, the cerulean sky through high windows.

Next, a still-greening family tree, shelves overflowing with history,
family mystery, and poetry. Here live the documents, ancestor-images,
old letters and departed people’s diaries.

Furthest west, evidence of a rich life. A trio of purple stones,
the global window of the televised tribal life, windows into
a garden filled with the purpling clouds of evening.

Adjacent, that red compass point, anchors inner and outer worlds–a tall vase
in the garden stands in all weathers, on red bricks laid by us. Fame & name.
Inside, a huge glass cherry, lipstick-bright, on its own pedestal: fruit of career.

Balancing lone insight, pink with potential, the rosy dreams
only life with a partner can provide. Also the essential necessities—
from cook books to record books, umbrellas and washtubs—that make dreams real.

Fragrance of oranges in the kitchen. Orange of stove flame
and curried pumpkin. A busy room with four doorways.
Children’s art on the refrigerator. All the best comforts of home.

Travel on toward the dining table and our home school room.
We gather here together, friends. Thank you for your wisdom
and good will, the teachings you share, and every earned white hair.

Arrive here, in the center, the balance wheel of radiant health
governing all else. Here find the polished broomstick,
glowing lotus scroll, and fine pocket watch bathed in golden light.

And from this inward resting place, a flight
of stairs, curving up toward a pearly moon,
the next level of lively adventure.

Leslie Schultz

I have been inspired by the concentrated wisdom of the Feng Shui bagua for many years. I have read a lot and played around with the ideas surrounding “the Chinese Art of Placement.” As a quilter, the bagua reads not only as a compass for balanced life but as a classic nine-patch quilt square.

This is a collage I made in 2010 in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Northfield Arts Guild, part of a fundraiser for the NAG in which visual art was made, donated, displayed in local businesses, and then auctioned off.  My piece–a photography version of a quilt– was displayed for a time at Bierman’s Furniture Store on Division Street. I later made a true cloth quilt version to hang in my kitchen using the same fabrics. (Discerning readers will also note that the favicon for Winona Media is inspired by this piece. It was designed for me by a young artist, Teagan Cole.)

Here is a vintage photo of me with my softer, quilted version of the piece:

Thanks for hanging in there this month! Hope to see you tomorrow. Meanwhile, happy reading! Happy writing! Happy life!

L E  S
L  I   E
@@@

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

April 8, 2017 Poem “Barcelona”

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NaPoWriMo 2017 April 8

Barcelona
 
I dream, from time to time, of Barcelona.
When the lakes are frozen and the engines won’t turn over,
when no letters from friends inhabit the mailbox
and my own words stick in my teeth,
when I can’t sleep or I sleep too much,
then I summon visions of Barcelona.

I know people who’ve been to Barcelona.
They leave the prairie towns of Minnesota,
fly into the dawn, then land at golden evening
on an azure shore of the Mediterranean,
ready to dine on octopus and saffron.
Sometimes they bring me back a small, bright trinket.

I have never been to enchanting Barcelona,
nor seen clay mushrooms soar cathedral-wise
(inspired ambition eternally unfinished);
I cannot pronounce my name in Catalan.
But I can imagine walking those sun-baked streets,
glazed mosaics glinting with shattered logic,

realigning scattered pieces in new pictures,
reminding broken hearts of future beauty.
It is good to have a place I will never go,
like Oz but better, a thriving foreign city,
where real life unfolds serene without me.
Sé que encanta Barcelona. Barcelona me encantó.

Leslie Schultz

(Image of Barcelonain mosaic from photo in the public domain)

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

April 7, 2017 Poem: “At Home, after April the First”

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NaPoWriMo 2017 April 7

At Home after April the First
(for My Great-grandmother, Katherine Hinman Williamson Schultz)
 
I remember 521 Broad Street,
that solid, brown, two-story house you built
with Emil, local pharmacist. Bridegroom
and bride, yet already quite adult,
were you—zaftig Edwardian thirty-
something—carried over the new threshold
into the hallway and polished music room?

Here is an invitation, on thick cream stock,
to your wedding. It floated for years around
that snug-built but lofty house on the bank
of the Menasha River, was somehow washed
here, to me, in the next century. And
another card announcing when town folk
could call. To announce your new rank

as a married woman, your calling card:
this one, the smallest, in thin gothic script.
A triplet of transformation. You grew
fifty years older there, went from plump to lank,
always loving (if not Emil) then a good joke,
a witty gesture or phrase turned neat,
even, Kate, when the joke was on you.

Leslie Schultz

Some years ago, I wrote a long post about this great-grandmother–part of a series of four–and there is a poem in my collection about the house she built that mentions her piano and her son and daughter-in-law. This morning, I realized, it was high time that she had her own poem.

Leslie

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