A Poem in Progress: #12– April 12, 2016

 

Twelve

Kelmscott Manor, Attics
(platinum print, Frederick H. Evans, 1896)

So these inverted rafters and ghostly glow,
these soft-lit rough-hewn beams like
internal buttresses, and this empty space
with it twin invitations leading out—
on the left, the five white stairs ascending
to a blackened door; on the right, sunlight
over five shadowed steps inviting you in—
this is the enchanted land of echo and dust motes
that sheltered, like a silent Orphic chorus,
the fervent, fertile brain of William Morris.

Leslie Schultz

On our recent trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I bought a copy of their beautifully produced Handbook detailing highlights of their collections. This morning, I was idly leafing through it and became mesmerized by the photograph that inspired this poem. And I learned that this photograph, one of the very first of the museum’s now extensive holdings in photography, was the thin end of the wedge in winning “art” status for photography in Philadelphia.

gm_04609501-web

Even more intriguing, Arts and Crafts Movement luminary William Morris (painter, poet, textile designer, philosopher, socialist, publisher, an early establisher of the modern fantasy genre) rather disliked photography. Yet, he invited this photographer, Frederick H. Evans, to photograph his home and the home base for his publishing arm, Kelmscott Press. I have long been attracted to his personal motto: “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” William Morris (1834-1986) I have yet to live up to it. This photograph makes me wonder what my limestone basement, now brimming with this and that, would look like empty.

Kelmscott_Manor_News_from_Nowhere

(Images from Morris and Evans in the public domain.)

Until tomorrow!

Leslie

A Poem in Progress: #11–April 11, 2016

Number 11

Uncaging the Bas

It’s a grey-again Sunday
after mere hours of honeyed sun,
two weeks of rain and wind,
three sudden squalls of snow.

Donning my long, grey coat,
taking up my shears,
I see what is emerging
and wish to help it grow.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
known at home as “Ba”,
had to escape her girlhood
in foggy London,

where she slept like
Sleeping Beauty,
to flower fully
in sun-kissed Italy.

You, tiny daffodils,
you bring her name each year
up from the winter snow,
and I must cut away

these dead stalks holding you
down, help you proclaim
openly, openly
your fragments of sun.

Leslie Schultz

Yesterday was the first day I have been able to be out in the garden. It has been very cool here, though the grass is green and the scilla are ahead of schedule. I could see that the little daffodils are almost ready to bloom but they were overshadowed by the dried walnut leaves and the stalks of last season’s cone flowers. So I spent a few moments uncovering them–and I am hoping hard they don’t get hit by new snow.

Ba One

Ba Two

If all goes well, they will bloom exuberantly, as in past years!

Ba Daffodil Six

Until tomorrow!

Leslie

Poem in Process: #10–April 10, 2016

Number 10

Where I Live

My grandmother had a silver teapot.
It grew black inside and out,
So she had it dipped in a bubbling vat
Of chrome, from base to spout.

It never needed polish then
Or any special tender care,
And she could spend a lot more time
Combing and combing her brittling hair.

One cannot tend to everything.
I know I have to pick and choose
Among the things with shine I love
And those I’ll really use.

But magpie words! Those ones I hoard,
The ones I find and love the best,
I’ll use their gleam and chainmail strength
To weave a place to live: this nest.

Leslie Schultz

This kind of poetic structure, the simple ABCB quatrain, is the first form I used when I started writing poetry at age eight, although I believe that the first form I encountered was the couplet. Remember this?

“In an old house in Paris, that was covered in vines,
Lived twelve little girls in two straight lines.”

They are, of course, the immortal opening lines to Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans, 1939. I probably feel about them the way ancient Greeks felt about Homer’s opening lines in the Iliad. Instantly, their incantatory quality summons me to a different place, a hyper-real place of story, a realm where the littlest person is fearless, kind, strong, and brave.

Today I am thinking of the of how my life is built of words as much as out of material substances like molecules of air or water or food. I am also watching the intent activity of birds in our back garden–robins, wrens, crows, and swallows–as they seek material to build their nests, singing or scolding or advising the entire time.

Some words I am enchanted with at the moment, for no particular reason:
Scabbard
Starboard
Vellum
Pleached
Hornbeam
Vertiginous
Sump

I would enjoy knowing if you have any current favorite words at the moment–and, if so, do you simply savor them or do you find them useful?

Until tomorrow!

Leslie

A Poem in Process: #9–April 9, 2016

Number 9

Solace, But…
(In Memoriam David Hugh Porter)

It’s not everyone’s  cup of tea,
The elegy—
Part dirge, part sea chantey—
Poetry
With music of melancholy,
Soul’s threnody.

Leslie Schultz

At the outset of this thirty-day embarkation, I promised to post “the catch of the day.” Now, on the ninth day of this National Poetry Writing Month Challenge, as David Porter himself, knowing poems are sometimes called “complaints,” might have said,” Here the kvetch of the day”.

Nine is a number that symbolizes completion, and I am dedicating this post to the most complete life I have witnessed. David died suddenly, in medias res, on March 26. I spent yesterday afternoon rereading his obituary, “Death of a Renaissance Man” and then watching his memorial service in real time, streamed from Skidmore College where he was president emeritus. For those of you who did not cross paths with him in life, both the obituary and the video clip of the memorial service will help you make his acquaintance.

When I mutual friend emailed me news of his passing a week ago, I was taken by surprise, not only by the news, but by how bereft I felt. I worked with David and his second wife, Helen, for only a bit over a year, when I was a new hire in the Carleton College Development Office. Then he was a professor of Classics and Music (a rare double appointment) and had just been made Carleton’s interim president during the search for Robert Edwards replacement and Helen was in charge of the president’s office. New to my job, which took me regularly to them for guidance or signatures, I came to treasure Helen’s calm and experience (and eagle eye for textual error and self-deprecating humor) as well as David’s infectious zest for life in all its dazzle, puzzle, beauty. His twin capacity for happiness and hard work impressed themselves deeply upon me.

After that year, I never crossed paths with David or Helen again in person, but I treasured their annual Christmas letter filled with family news, updates on professional and artist projects, and the verbal gracefulness punctuated by puns.

Isn’t it amazing? I know I was changed–forever and for the better–by a little time in this rare person’s presence. I got a little glimpse of what a human being is capable of becoming–the fun of that enlargement and greatness of spirit. And in the aerial photograph of those touched by his life–a cast of thousands and thousands, surely–I am a tiny dot on the very margin, possibly outside the frame.

David Porter embodies for me the spirit of the liberal arts, the way in which as the individual is enriched through striving, learning, insight, and understanding, so too, at the same moment, the world is a richer place.

Thank you, David, for your gift of being fully, utterly yourself and for generously sharing yourself with everyone you met, including me.

Leslie

Poem in Progress: April 8, 2016

Number 8

Janus

You know how it is. You see an image,
maybe two saguaro catci leaning
toward each other, friendly, framing
a low orange sun. Automatically
you think “here is the southwest” because of
Arizona, state of the arid zone,
because the sun sinks just past it, nightly,
past the Golden Gate, into the sea.
Yet, can we ever be sure of what we see?
The sun could easily be just rising,
an objective camera pointing east.
All we can know, certainly,
is that truth travels like the sun
and so, it seems, do we.

Leslie Schultz

(This poem is inspired by a book called The Sky Islands of Southeast Arizona by Kate Crowley and Mike Link (Voyaguer Press; Stillwater, MN; 1989)