Birds Four, Five, Six: Other People's Photos (Redux)

My initial Flickr experiment proved so worthwhile that I can't think of anything I'd rather do than explore more of the same. I have been mired in inertia for a week now, trying to come up with a shiny new bird, but the last one simply will not be denied a few feathered companions. And I do make the rules.

I am once again grateful for the amazing and generous photographers out there (each of whom has given me permission to use his or her photo)...

Photo by Dragonballyee	A man’s consciousness (generally) will rest upon the scarcity of skirt, estimate the taut geometry of thigh emerging and receding with each swaying stride. A woman may be most inclined to weigh the ass against her own – a pair of clefted cantaloupes see-sawing in imagined palms. And love, perhaps, (or hate) the bag (or shoes). A child will wonder mainly at the diamonds: burn to press his flesh against the rust-cool, gritty grid; to sear a moment’s memory; to wear (to write) the pattern as it walks away.
	Ramona had once imagined that years of marriage, the persistent, gentle sculpturing of everyday contact – hell, some sort of amygdalar survival trigger – would re-shape Richard’s extraordinary talent for picking the wrong time to do just about everything. Ha! Photo by Fonsico
Photo by Kandykorn	Stella knows this: A shopping cart conveys a world. A corner market is a star. Commence with the obvious cargo: bananas and oatmeal, Maalox and milk, waxed paper, pudding, and peas. But wheels matter most, wheels threading each day’s track, handle humming with the dissonant clack of sidewalk seams – a satellite signal reminding Stella’s body to move, maintain its orbit, seek bananas in a universe grown small.
Photo by CMRowell	She wore away one whisper at a time receding until skin unwrapped and sinew unlaced and bones unknit and everything everything gaped until unknowing enveloped a single sleeping seed whorled into a pomegranate planet.
Photo by DigiMom13	You are eight and your playground physics are these: cementing the fate of your palms and knees, you center your hips – a body at rest, push yourself off with solid-heeled thrust, build into a fury of pump-and-lean, kick at the sky in the blurred between, fueling the pendulum forward-and-back, expanding your arc until the chains go slack and your body flings free from its everyday scheme – opens wide to give wing to the flying dream.

Bird Three: Other People's Photos

I have been trawling the Flickr site recently and noticed, being the word-obsessive that I am, that a lot of pictures, though tagged, are left title/captionless... It got me thinking about how the title of an artwork can really influence how you interpret it, and also how the juxtaposition of words and images affects meaning.

A good reader/viewer always engages actively with a text, film, painting... participating in the making of meaning. Thus, it's insulting when a director, painter or storyteller gives the reader too much -- if you've no work to do, no effort of understanding to put forth, then there's no motivation to connect, no payoff... but if you are given too little, and can't find a way "in," a way to connect, that's no good either -- the artist has to seek the balance between... Scott McLeod beautifully explains this idea I am butchering in Understanding Comics (A book everyone with any imagination should read).

I have fairly well-developed reading/viewing muscles, as well as a tendency to imbue images, people, and objects with backstory. Such projection is a fundamental human trait. Brain researchers (I can't remember where I heard this -- I think maybe on an episode of NOVA) believe that the capacity for empathy is one of the most powerful human evolutionary traits. Maybe other people don't tend to extend it beyond humans and animals as much as I...

Anyway, back to Flickr, I stumbled on this picture, randomly, and was tickled by the caption. It made me like the photographer. It's sort of weird that the social web allows us to become routine, often invited, voyeurs into other people's lives, thoughts, creations. I know, and believe in the incredible potential of the real connections, extensions, creative leaps and communities that are made in this shared digital landscape, but I also believe that the sheer mathematics of it all means that we consume (view, read, listen, watch) way more than we (most of us, anyway) ever actively respond to.

Which leads me to my third bird... in which I poem-caption a few of Other People's Photos...

I began with a full-text search for "IMG" plus "kids" and then "IMG" plus "people." I have also gotten permission from each of the photographers to use their photos for this exercise (Thank you!).

	Cyrus was a nomad in his bones; Our need to hold him could not hold him still. We used to joke that he was born wearing wheels -- called him our "hummingbird boy," (or, "Sharkbaby," during ornery times); We gave him what we could for the journey; set him loose because there was no other way. Photo by Volkswitt
Photo by Pink Sherbet	At five, you never named your aches, but felt. Now silent, now with wailing, flailing, wrenching, spouting forth, unconscious swell – a spell too vast to be contained – you rained, would not be reined, remained submerged where loss collected, rant and tantrum intersected, made a mess, lived your distress with five's great knowing, wove your being through its core and wore it threadbare, felt it more. At five, you breathed it fresh – oh, surely, purely, how you held on tight and wept, then, dreamless, slept.
	I am never myself. I have a hundred selves. When you see me, notice the aching curve of eyelid, nostril, lip and chin, jawline and neckline, slipaway braid. Linger at my shoulder and apprehend this: I curve toward a self I have yet to invent. Photo by Ex.Libris
Photo by Gus is a Great Name	These tragic feet, these sugared doughnuts, these tender filthy piggies, these criss-crossed cuddlers, these mute messengers, these expectant soles, these compass needles, these leathered prayers, these hopeful feet.

Bird Two: So Much Depends

To me, William Carlos Williams' spare, single-sentence poem The Red Wheelbarrow has a wonderful concreteness and simplicity that perfectly conveys the beauty and significance of utility, the dignity of the ordinary. It also represents a stellar example of the kind of "word-picture" writing teachers try to tell us that poetry should be. Upon reading it, you conjure a vivid, immediate, immutable image. A contemporary poet who similarly celebrates everyday things with an amazingly apt concision (though not as spare as Williams' wheelbarrow) is Valerie Worth. I love her collections of Small Poems, even though they are for children (or maybe because they are for children). I love sharing them with children, too. My favorite is Zinnias -- which celebrates the flowers' resolute strength, concluding "I know/ Someone like zinnias; I wish/ I were like zinnias." I do wish I were like zinnias -- at least sometimes.

Williams and his wheelbarrow also remind me of the final lines in another favorite poem, Naomi Shihab Nye's Famous:

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,

or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,

but because it never forgot what it could do.

So, here's Bird Two... a single-sentence homage to an ordinary thing....

Church Key

Whether christened
in nod to brewer-monks
shuffling down into
the lager cellar,

named for heavy-headed likeness
to noble hunks of iron
fitted into pious locks
within towering oaken doors,

or labeled as irreverent wink towards
a different sort of worship...
I rejoice in its releasing
of my beer.

(I love, love church key -- the concept, the phrase and the object. The connotation and denotation make such a lovely, resonant clash.)

Bird One: Lessons in Who-Made-Who

My week's deadline (Saturday@Midnight) is fast approaching and I thought for a good while I'd fail before even beginning. So, I threw myself a bit of a softball -- couldn't face the dreaded "blank page" -- needed those training wheels to take the first step... Mixed metaphors aside... I feel good to have followed through.

My personal rules for a "ransom note" poem such as this are that all of the words must come from a single, citable source, and that all words must be "whole" words (as opposed to a letter sequence, or mashed-together syllables snipped from inside larger words), with the exception of articles and tiny prepositions (e.g. a, an, to) needed for coherence. I also believe in the importance of a visually balanced layout.

The impetus for this project came from Learning to Love You More -- a site I suspect I will revisit many times during this project. A cut-and-paste poem is not one of the assignments, but I thought of it while looking at Assignment #44: Make a "LYTLM Assignment," in which someone suggested a kind of "30-minute paint/collage free-for-all."

The magazine from which this poem sprung was ReadyMade, April/May 2006. It was somewhat challenging to compose, because the title and caption text was pretty limited in terms of scope and style. The text that emerged seems to be something of an homage to the momentum/change I am trying to instill.

So, it's a start... I hope a kindred spirit, or a reader or two will pass this way sometime...

(Click the image to view a larger version of the poem).