Don Schaeffer: Review of the Poetry and Art by Alex Nodopaka, BA, MFA

Don Schaeffer's pamphlet entitled Self Portrait at 200X is a collection of poems and artworks from an up-close personal perspective. I mean 200 hundred times closer than one would wish to see their nose hair or other intimate surfaces of their bodies. Yet that is exactly what the author has done to illustrate his chapbook of poems.


It is the extreme close-ups of private places on his body that he uses to illustrate his booklet of poems and also from a most original perspective. The artist's phenomenology-inclined mind offers a magnified reality from an atypical perspective of art and poetry content.


The poems consist mostly of philosophical points of view presenting a unique perspective from a phenomenologist's mind. Don Schaeffer illustrates the chapbook with his poems and art demonstrating his artistic competence in both.


His artwork has a signature of its own that he perfected using a most contemporary of painting devices, an digital tablet. He simplified the style in terms of detail by drawing with a state of the art brush. One can only imagine that from tablet to mural-size his work should attract the stare of any bypasser. The artist is truly a child of his time.

What bard would write in detail a philosophical poem about taking a shower and describing the process meticulously down to the sliver of soap is a tour de phenomenology. The subsequent inferences are drawn from his poem “Preparation for a Memory.”

Preparation for a Memory

I bring to the shower a fresh
bar of Ivory today,
along with my towel.
We always keep our
bathtowels separate. The
old bar has eroded
to a sliver. I always
enjoy something new.
.
I am grateful that she
remembered to release the
shower lever when she left
so I am not greeted
with a surprise dousing.
The water is nicely warmed.
.
I wash my belly first,
the center of my body and
under my breast where I have a
benign cyst (as my old doctor called it).

I wash my arms, saturating my hands in the soap,
under my arms. Then under my belly then
down my legs. My legs still feel tight and
strong. I am glad for that.
I leave my feet for washing with gel, later,
because I can't reach them in the tub.
.
I wash my neck, passing my hands around it,
then graduate to my mouth and my nose.
Around my ears, I take special pains because
I once found a whitehead behind one.
I wriggle my finger in each ear
hoping to catch a residue of wax.
Then I scrub my scalp. I use the soap
not having enough hair to bother with shampoo.


Alex Nodopaka, BA, MFA, conceived in Ukraine & first exhibitionist show in 1940 Russia. Finger-painted in Austria, 1946 doodled & sketched since. Studied tongue-in-cheek at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Casablanca, Morocco, 1958. Since 1959 lives in the USA where he is a full time artist, art instructor, art judge, self-appointed art critic and pretends to write poetry.