Fred Schmalz is an artist and poet whose current writing focuses on textual response to encounters with music, visual art, and performance. He is the author of Action in the Orchards (Nightboat, 2019). In 2018, he was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic as poet-in-residence for the FluxConcert in its year-long Fluxus Festival. He lives in Chicago, where he makes art with Susy Bielak in the collaborative Balas & Wax.

Books by Fred Schmalz:

Other poems on the web by Fred Schmalz:
Two poems

Fred Schmalz's Website.

Fred Schmalz on Twitter.

About Action in the Orchards:

"Action in the Orchards asks what it means to be an artist. And the answer itself is in action: the action of attentiveness to the art that most engages us. The action of experiencing art not as a critic but as a maker. Through observation, through intimacy, and through embodiment, Fred Schmalz shapes a poetics of engagement, a poetics that rejects solipsism and isolationism, a poetics that seeks to 'trap the sky in its present state', a poetics of documentation and absorption, where care and cognizance are transformed by the pulsing rhythm of how pain enters, of how language makes life out of loss."
—Daniel Borzutzky

"What makes this book so affecting are its layers. Fred Schmalz has drawn a world in cross-section and to scale, so that we, as readers, can see (and feel) how experience is created. It isn't necessary to distinguish between elegy and ode here. Rather, feeling and thought are cast clearly enough to reveal their common bedrock: wonder. This wonder is often ekphrastic. Almost as often it rises out of common events in everyday life, the infra-ordinary. And it persists. Action in the Orchards courses through the natural history of metaphoric language, through the details of human emotion, and through time. The poet's steady attention to perception and to sound and to rhythm becomes a way of recording the history of mind and body, and then he engraves these 'little stars of the impossible' so that the transient is brought closer to permanence. This book is extraordinary."
—G.E. Patterson

"The orchards are plural; the action is thought. Museums are orchards; perception is action. Books are orchards; the action is memory. In the orchards of meeting friends for lunch, or biking in the rain, or moving from the Midwest to Europe and back again, the action is that of the language-body always just a little lost to awareness—even as awareness pierces vividly. 'Terminal' rhymes with 'luminous,' and a slapstick silence plays in the gaps between places, objects, gestures, tonalities: 'the same and not the same // each time permanent strange.'"
—Frances Richard