Archives for April 2010

I’m sitting at my desk with three postcard pictures of authors whose work I’ve never tired of reading, authors who in poetry and prose continue to inspire me. Though I’ve read them many times, I keep finding something new at every turn.

Wallace Stevens is sitting at his desk (where else) in his suit (what else) and behind him is a large window through which one can just about make out the face of a snow-covered building directly across from his. Stevens looks to be spotting something just above the left shoulder of the photographer. His right hand is in the middle of pointing in that direction, while the left hand is neatly positioned on the desk in front of him as if he were in school awaiting the teacher’s signal to pick up his pen and begin to write. Perhaps he really is not as uncomfortable as he looks; it’s a black and white photograph, and the aging of the negative has left this image with grainy streaks. Stevens looks like he’s tried to get out of having this picture taken, and probably is already thinking of where else he could possibly be. Like a lot of his poetry, he seems caught in the middle of something that can’t be resolved. All the evidence he might need is right there for him – and he knows it – but he can’t quite seem to discover what it is he wants to find.

In the next postcard Robert Pirsig, who wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, is caught, mid-stride, walking along the pavement in what looks to be a city setting in a snowstorm. He has no hat on his head, tough his hands are buried deep into the pockets of a heavy, tweed overcoat. There’s not another soul on the street, though in the far background an old Chevy is parked, accumulating a deep covering of snow. It’s another black and white photo. The white of the snow on the ground leaves no markings or outlines, so it makes it seem like Pirsig is floating there, covered from head to toe in the blurred spotting of the snowflakes. He looks like he wants to ask a question, several in fact, which isn’t surprising at all. But he looks like a man comfortable with not knowing, sensing perhaps that the answers are there for him to come upon. He has only to turn the corner to find what he is looking for. You can sort of tell these things . . . just by looking.

Robert Lowell is barely in the next postcard, which is the only one in colour. Positioned far to the left in the photograph, he looks to be just entering or perhaps even backing away from the frame. His eyes are fixed on the other side of a room that is bare except for dozens of photographs filling the walls. In fact, this seems to be more about the images he sees than anything else. In some of the photos months of sunlight has almost completely bleached their colours, and all that can be seen is a telltale hand or arm emerging from a pale background of white and gray particles. In many can be seen the figure of a woman standing in front of what looks to be a garden fence. She is far from graceful, even standing still, and the poses she has struck accentuate this fact. Long, thin arms bow out from her body, waving or reaching toward something out of camera range. In others there is the barest hint of facial detail, with only the broad sloping curve of her nose actually appearing. She looks as if she were in a snowstorm, her cotton short sleeve dress and bare feet materializing out of the snowy grain. It’s clear from the array of pictures that she has been unwell. Newer ones are not faded as badly, but in them it’s obvious that some illness has reduced her to the point that her bones are showing through a thinning film of yellow skin. It’s the same round-faced woman again and again in the photos, and even the same smile is repeated, though her diminishing shape becomes more and more difficult to recognize. The pressure of the illness inside her shows to an exaggerated degree on her face, but the uncanny effect is one of increasing both the intensity and depth of her stare. Lowell, unmoving, nearly out of the picture, looks about to begin something from which he will never escape.

Photography is the nonfiction of the visual arts, something of a cousin in the art world to the fraternal twins of realism and abstraction. Digital photography will completely transform and reframe this relationship. What we are witnessing today is the birth of an entirely new art form, one already challenging our understanding of reality and the form it presents to our senses.

The metaphysics of how art and philosophy can best apprehend the “real world” has been with us since well before the dueling philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. But go back far enough, and any fine differences between a thing and its image become less apparent, part of a sacred or mysterious connection in which the image fully partakes in the reality of the thing portrayed.

This is how photography should be understood and appreciated. Susan Sontag best describes it in On Photography: “What defines the originality of photography is that . . . it revives . . . something like the primitive status of images . . . No one takes an easel painting to be in any sense co-substantial with its subject; it only represents or refers. But a photograph is not only like its subject . . . It is part of, an extension of that subject; and a potent means of acquiring it, of gaining control over it.”

With photography, its imagery gives every appearance of things literally existing in more than one place at a single time. Both the mystery and duality of that appearance are at the heart of photography’s newest transformation as it transfers over to its new world of digital imaging and image editing software. In many ways the art of photography is at the same position (or re-positioning) that nonfiction is in current critical essays and theories – see my previous two entries on “The New Future of Nonfiction” and “Further Adventures in Nonfiction”.

Digital Photography takes us several steps beyond simple, static notions of original and copy; what starts out as a photo of vegetation (as in the image attached to this entry) can quickly change into a haphazard collage, a digital painting, which in turn becomes the simulacrum head of a fish. The growing fluid nature of this digital art, like that of nonfiction writing, draws upon myriad sources and tools, transforming one thing into another, juxtaposing others, yet retaining always something of its original core. The layers pile up, fragment, accumulate, bend form and genre in a way that its comprehension is both familiar and elusive.

It’s clear that digital photography and image editing software are rapidly expanding the borders and the potential for a whole new form of art. We become a part of what we know through the capture and manipulation of what we see. This digital world becomes an art of visual metaphor, balance and motion, controversy, and eloquence.

In the 1970s, I had the good fortune of taking a course in modern poetry from Marshall McLuhan. For the first three months we all waited patiently, but he never even looked at a poem. Instead, we learned about Ciceronian rhetoric, in particular its five parts: inventio, dispositio, elecutio, memoria, and action.

We were baffled. What did this have to do with modern poetry? By December we launched into our first poem (Yeats) and quickly realized rhetoric was the underlying organizing principle for many of the classically trained writers of the period. But we also began to see it extended its influence well beyond the merely modern. As a non-linear organizing principle, rhetoric can be found at the very root of how our language forms itself, as well as its role in the art of persuasion; it is a shaping, organic structure that drives forward both form and content. For those who care to look closely, it is the primary organizing principle behind my poetry book, Taking Shape.

In a previous entry (Why a Poem Knows What it Doesn’t Know – Thinking Through to the End), I also compared the growth and evolving shape of a poem to a flock of birds “constantly adjusting to unseen reasons for movement, this way or that. Possessing the illusion of collective wisdom, the flock really is responding to new and subtle directions communicated from the outer edges of the group.” Describing this process, scientists believe the behavior is “not a property of any individual bird, but rather emerges as a property of the group itself. There is no leader, no overall control; instead the flock’s movements are determined by the moment-by-moment decisions of individual birds, following simple rules in response to interactions with their neighbors in the flock.”

Spurred on by the addition of new words or phrases, the creative direction, diction and syntax of a poem emerge as much from the often unintended interaction of the words as from the more formal and structured planning of the poet. In this sense there is a kind of spontaneous and parallel response in which ideas and actions from multiple origins integrate into the context of the poem. Like the flock itself, the shape and direction of the poem take cues from constantly changing sources. The creation of the poem is both centralized in the poet, as with rhetoric, and decentralized in the emerging interaction of words within the poem; in this sense the poem can be seen as part planned, and part self-organizing. This self-organizing principle, also known as emergent behavior, is at the heart of my next book of poetry, Birds Flock Fish School.