Poster Image
$20
Item#: 2007SYR11
Purchase Details
11x17-inches, printed on heavy weight (100-pound) Hammermill cover paper. We package each print with a piece of chipboard in a clear plastic sleeve.
You also receive…
An information page with photos of the artist and poet, and hand-written comments from each.
Medium- and large-format posters are available by custom order. Contact us for details.
Poem Inspiration Location
Two Schiller Park Bards
poster information
Description
Two Schiller Park bards
oversee the city below:
poem in motion
The inspiration for my haiku was the memory of the August 1949 commemoration of Goethe's 200th birthday held at Schiller Park. I attended with my father, Frederic Kramer, a professor of German at Syracuse University. In German, he addressed the gathering around the monument to both Goethe and Schiller.
Though we lived near the University, we had many friends among the German-American community on the North Side. That day, I was proud to celebrate with them and to hear my father's address, a tribute to the two poets and to our history.
A lot of my illustration work deals with history—in this case, history of this park, and what it means to the city. I think the allure of history comes from wanting something you can't have. When I was growing up, finding musical and artistic influence, I was fascinated by people and places of the '60s and '70s, and not so much by things of today, because I'm constantly bombarded by images and sounds of those things.
For the poster, I didn't want to do a photo-realistic painting of the monument. I've been trying to work more conceptually. So I imagined the two poets in a writing room, actually doing work. And since the haiku mentions them overseeing the city, I made a fake town on the desk. Visually, as I was illustrating it, the scene seemed like a game of chess.