Each day, the dawn reconstitutes our world.
Navy blue shades into lilac and gold,
reversing evening lights, and we are hurled
out of dreams, into stories yet untold.
What weather ticks against the window pane
or streams in as urgently as birdsong?
What internal turbulence might remain
from a conversation yesterday, strong
enough to shape, in answer, an insight,
or push us toward a bedrock truth at last?
Often stumbling, night-blind, we move toward light
each day we live, however overcast.
Dawn brings a form of storm as yet unwrit,
blowing in to see what we’ll make of it.
Leslie Schultz
Today’s poem is an attempt at a Shakespearean sonnet. HAPPY SHAKESPEARE’S BIRTHDAY!
I knew my destiny when I first experienced Yosemite. Ansel Adams (February 20, 1902 to April 22, 1984)
He could see and was able to convey,
This keen devotee of Yosemite.
We need to hear what he needed to say.
As a boy, he was too sick to play,
So he studied each musical key.
He could see and was able to convey.
His father’s house, overlooking the bay
Of San Francisco, framed city and sea.
We need to hear what he needed to say.
At fourteen, with family, on holiday,
He first glimpsed his artistic destiny.
He could see and was able to convey.
Later, dazzled by Sierra Madre,
He fell headlong into photography.
We need to hear what he needed to say.
Using black, white, and tones of grey,
He reveals our land’s innate symphony.
He could see and was able to convey.
And we need to hear what he needed to say.
Leslie Schultz
I am grateful for a book given to me by my talented photographer sister, Karla, some years back. Ansel Adams by Barry Pritzker (1991) combines gracefully written biographical and critical essays on Adams’ life and work with a sample of his thrilling, heart-felt, technically masterful black-and-white images of the American landscape. It was from this book that I learned of Adams’ youthful ill-health, his early plan to be a concert pianist, his father’s gift of a Kodak Box Brownie camera. I also learned that it was another book–given to him by his Aunt Mary to cheer his sick-bed–In the Heart of the Sierras by J.M. Hutchings, a book of keen descriptions and illustrations–that caused him to urge that the next family vacation be to see this national park. On that family vacation, his life changed forever, and so, I think, did our collective idea of the land in which we live. Over his life-time, according to Priztker, Adams “personally produced more than 40,000 negatives, signed 10,000 fine prints, exhibited in more than 500 exhibitions, and sold over 1 million copies of his books.” He was also a fierce eco-warrior, keen to move us all protect our heritage of natural beauty and to experience it directly and often.
Here is an excerpt from Pritzker’s introduction: “At the age of fourteen, on vacation with his family at Yosemite National Park, he experienced the Sierra Nevada mountains for the first time. He instantly fell in love with their majesty and sheer physical beauty, and returned there at least once every year of his life.”
Is it a coincidence that Adams died on Earth Day, 1984? Perhaps. Still, I think it is fitting to celebrate this great-hearted warrior-artist for the inspiration he continues to offer.
Here is a short and insightful documentary look at Adams and his work that demonstrates how he uses tones from light to dark and encourages us all to look at photographs and the world around us with greater precision.
Bustles and spatterdashes had their day.
Top hats and cutaways have gone away.
Now, it’s only well-dressed cartoon cats who
pull golden pocket watches into view.
What pricey items now inciting passion
will soon draw scorn as artifacts of fashion?
Leslie Schultz
I am a regular reader of Vogue, and I take a lively (if arms-length) interest in all kinds of trends in wearable, readable, architectural, curricular, culinary, and other consumable fashion. (Makes me wonder, incidentally, what Ozymandias was wearing on his long-enduring legs and shattered visage–spats and cool shades, perhaps, to combat the desert dust and glare?)
Here are two of my favorite samples of how fashion is continually updated through the lens of a quirky and catchy song, “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” written by Irving Berlin in 1927. (Interestingly, this was the year after Britain’s King George V deleted spatterdashes from his public dress and caused a mass exodus away from spatterdash-wearing. Apparently the gathered crowded littered the bushes with their own spats before their king had done speaking!)
The first video example is from the Jeeves and Wooster series filmed in the early 1990s but set in the late 1920s when the Irving Berlin song was newly published as sheet music. The second, incorporating the modern trends of flash mobs and athletic shoes, might be my favorite version. (I was interested to see, in seeking out this video clip, that there are numerous others now that take advantage of this elderly but ever-new song’s bouncy lyrics to combine it with group dance, including one charming one set at Heathrow Airport. To date, at least to my knowledge, no flash mob version of this song has been filmed in Rice County, Minnesota!)
Gary Cooper–mentioned in the lyrics as a nonpareil of fashion despite his enduring film legacy as a ruggedly dressed cowboy–was born in 1901, the same birth year ascribed to fictional Bertie Wooster, P.G. Wodehouse’s immortal young man of fashion, above.
My favorite statement in this modern update? It’s a toss-up: Either the opening dancer’s basic black ensemble or the bride’s classic bouquet!
Wishing you a light-hearted look at your world today……LESLIE
P.S. For more on the silly side…
This morning’s post made me reach, as I so often do, for Stephen Fry’s peerless book on prosody, The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within. I was amused to see that his perfectly realized Jeeves is, like Fry, a master of rhythm and rhyme. Fry’s book is filled with lucid and succinct summaries of elements of poetic form presented with Fry’s devastating wit. (The occasional screamingly funny but x-rated quips make it unsuitable for the under-sixteen set, in my opinion, except in excerpted form.) If you are of voting age and curious about the ins and outs of iambs, or want to distinguish meter from rhythm, or crave an algorithm describing the sestina–this is the go-to book.
and, in case you hadn’t heard yet…
one of my favorite online publications, Light Poetry Magazine, just instituted a Poem of the Week feature that offers a humorous view of the past week’s current events. Coincidentally, the cover image for the current issue features a top hat!
Ali Baba: A Vinyl Memory for Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
I can still see that disk of ebony
incised with a spiral journey
ridden by one tiny diamond’s point
from its rim right to its very heart.
It was an old vinyl LP,
pressed when I was two or three,
and a perennial favorite.
Its highly-colored cardboard sleeve
showed Ali Baba, spying, in a tree
overhearing a magic password,
“Open Sesame,”
that caused the mountain-side to split
open so Ali Baba could steal
inside, after the thunderous thieves.
Most of all, I recall
how this deep cave was lit
by the light of jewels
hanging from trees,
a vision summoned
by a lone violin—
Scheherazade—unearthly beauty
pouring into a child’s ears
and glowing there, still,
after all these years.
Leslie Schultz
When I was very young, my mother would often play albums with stories on them in the afternoon. I still often think about four, in particular, wishing I could hear them again. Three of them were from this series: Tale Spinners for Children. A few days ago, I began thinking so strongly of the music from this one. The first four lines of this poem came. I waited until today for the rest of the poem to come clear and to share it here.
To hear an audio clip of the violin solo, just scroll down to the second one.
Which oft-heard (told, read, recorded) stories most impressed themselves upon you? I would love to hear if you’d care to share. (The other favorites in the recorded realm for me were “Beauty and the Beast” & “Aladdin and the Magic Lamp” in the Tale Spinners series, and a collection of folktales told by Beryl Berney called “All Join Hands Around the World.” I still think very often of the Japanese story she told of how there is a rabbit in the moon.)
Portrait of a Street Musician (Paris, March 22, 2009)
I asked an expert,
later, what instrument
this musician played.
“I’ve never seen the like,”
he shrugged. “I think
it must be homemade.”
Jet-lagged, I stood
in grey Paris
among the fruit stands.
I was holding unfamiliar
coins and my camera
in my hands
when I heard a faint
strain, a light air,
a thin ribbon of sound
that I followed,
to this spot, where
it wound and unwound.
I cannot recall
the names of the notes,
their order,
just that I lifted
my lens, questioning
across the border
between us. He
nodded, clenched his jaw.
The camera whirred—
a tiny percussive sound,
like a twig snapped by
the weight of a bird—
and, as my young
daughter danced
over, how sun burned
on those coins we
offered; how he
smiled in return.
Leslie Schultz
The idea for this poem came when I was looking this morning at a catalog for the Milwaulkee Art Institute. I opened the volume at random and read, under a reproduction of his Fauve painting titled “The Wheat Field” (circa 1906), of a French painter, Maurice Vlaminck, who “was a self-taught artist who began painting purely for pleasure, while supporting himself financially by playing the violin.” That sentence made me remember this moment eight years ago–the grey light and the grey stone of the French market on a Sunday in Paris. All these years later, and I hope his playing brings him joy as well as coins. When I look at the craftsmanship of his unnameable stringed instrument, I think it must.
